Word: acters
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Cincinnati last week showed the U.S. how to put on a new opera in English for operatic pin money. With a budget of $9,000 (mostly for sets, etc.) and a cast of home-town talent, townsmen rolled up their sleeves and mounted a three-acter by U.S. Composer Vittorio Giannini, based on Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew...
...Browning Version (J. Arthur Rank; Universal-International) is Playwright Terence (The Winslow Boy) Rattigan's own adaptation of his one-acter about a Mr. Chips-in-reverse, an unloved, dried-up academic tyrant on the way out of an English public school after 18 years. Like the play, the film daubs life liberally with greasepaint. But it is still a moving story, and lends British support to the Hollywood slogan that movies are better than ever-especially when adapted with care from successful plays or novels...
...York City Opera resurrected his old (1906) three-acter, I Quattro Rusteghi, never before performed in the U.S. Decked out in an English translation, The Four Ruffians made up in broad mirth anything it lacked in old-school elegance...
This posed a stickler for Shaw's trusted friend, Producer Gabriel (Pygmalion, Caesar and Cleopatra) Pascal, who had to stretch the two-acter, Androcles and the Lion, to feature length. Pascal finally wangled a grudging O.K. from the trustees of Shaw's estate to raise the alteration rate to 25%, and fattened up the script with lines borrowed from Shaw's own preface. With the biggest barrier hurdled, Androcles was only two weeks behind schedule at RKO last week...
Last week the Opera Workshop of Manhattan's Mannes School of Music honored Martinu, its most distinguished faculty member, with two bang-up performances -the first in the U.S.-of his old one-acter. Most startled with its success was Martinu himself, who had always considered the work purely a Czech chuckle. His one admonition to the Workshop group was: "Keep it a comedy." A cast of eight expert singers, accompanied by a chamber orchestra, played the well-scored opera as a near-burlesque...