Word: acters
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...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...
...most important offerings are verso plays: one a translation by Gerhard Nellhaus of Bertolt Brecht's "The Lesson," the other an original one-acter, "Three Words in No Time," by Lyon Phelps. "The Lesson," which is the better of the two, I think, defies analysis. It has almost no action, its characters have no individuality (they are called "The Speaker," "A One" and such), it has a chorus and a musical background, the audience is expected to join in and repeat certain lines. The ostensible topic of discussion is a crashed airman who is on the verge of death...
...Consul, Menotti's first three-acter, has a plot that is just as drab as The Medium's: the story of a desperate woman in a police state who commits suicide when her last attempt to get a visa fails. It is longer and not so compact, but it packs more than The Medium's share of melodramatic punch. It opened on Broadway with a $100,000 advance sale; by last week all seats were sold out through June...