Word: acted
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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What makes the HDC production a failure is that it has not succeeded even partially in overcoming the faults of the play without adding contrasting flaws. Director Ted Allegretti evidently decided to attack the deadliness of the situation and language in the first act with nothing more nor less than speed. Racing through their lines as if the second act had to go on the air at 9 o'clock, the cast smashes the two opening scenes into a paroxysmal mishmash of words. Later other devices are used to try to break the monotony and color the action; incongruous comedy...
William West, playing the lead role of Dr. Stockmann, is to a large degree responsible for the crumbling of the play into atomized hysteria. Through the first two acts he dashed headlong through his lines, cut in on his cues before lines were finished, and strutted about, the stage with his head slightly bowed and his hands shifting at irregular intervals from his coat lapels to unpleasant gestures. In the final act West slowed down enough to give some meaning to his lines, but he never managed to get across the admittedly poorly presented ideas of Stockmann. Jack Hodges, playing...
...third the Met's) and a free hand. Says he: "Where there is no money, there is no interference from pocketbooks. The only thing that can save us is ideas." At his first performance (Tosca), the guns of the firing squad failed to fire in the last act, and the hero had to drop dead without a bang. In Carmen, the audience was convulsed by a soldier trying to put his saber into its scabbard the wrong way. But by the time the curtain had gone down on Martha, critics cheered...
Poet Jeffers made his translation, "getting freer as it went," of Euripides' drama about five years ago at the urging of Actress Anderson and especially for her. He dedicated his work to her, though he had seen her act only once-in a California presentation of his Greekish Tower Beyond Tragedy. The whacking Broadway success of Medea has made up to Jeffers the recent Broadway failure of a dramatization of his poem, Dear Judas (TIME, Oct. 20). The 60-year-old poet thinks now that he might even try writing an original play "if I knew what to write...
...Birlings look like a pack of Victorian villains, Playwright Priestley suddenly begins to backtrack. Perhaps, he suggests, the young girl-whom each Birling had known by a different name-was really a great many different girls. Or perhaps the Birlings' visitor (Thomas Mitchell), who certainly didn't act like a police inspector, wasn't one. Perhaps there had never even been a suicide. Perhaps. . . . In his last 20 minutes, Playwright Priestley has a high old time perhapsing. Unfortunately, he has been prosing for so long before that his last-minute fireworks cannot save the play...