Word: belasco
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...Hull makes the actor-mayor only a conventional juvenile. The Passion Play, traditional drama of Christ's last days, has been given for more than six centuries on the hills of Freiburg, Germany.* Last week the Freiburg players appeared in Manhattan, presented by Morris Gest, directed by David Belasco. The locale was the gigantic Hippodrome, onetime scene of elephantine musical shows in which Annette Kellerman swam, Charlotte skated, Nat Wills buffooned. To see the story of the benign, miraculous Nazarene went a strange audience, women whose faces were chalky with rouge, men with creaking collars and glistening hats. Sensitive...
...Crucifixion which has caused more Jewish agony, persecution and oppression. . . . Were we a devout Christian [and had we seen the Gest production] we could never again look upon a Jew with kindliness and respect; the commandment. 'Love thy neighbor,' would definitely exclude Jews. . . . When two Jews [Morris Gest, David Belasco] indulge in such an obvious commercialization of the Gospel story . . . we must characterize the producers . . . as highly reprehensible from the Christian attitude, and, from the Jewish, as nothing else than contemptible...
Critic Edward Alden Jewell of the New York Times: ". . . There are some big bells swinging?bells about the size that Mrs, Leslie Carter used to swing from, so long, so long ago, in Mr. Belasco's Heart of Maryland. . . . One adoring saint on the right is holding a violin . . . another is holding a baby that looks rather like another violin. . . . Although he calls them music and they were designed for the walls of a music room, there is nowhere visible a melodic line. . . . Let us say that it is a fairly good uprooted modern musical chord slurred and fumbled...
...stars are nearly all on hand just now. Lenore Ulric brings her blandishments to Belasco's "Mima", fairly swarming with devils and nightly shaking the stage when its steel hell collapses in the denouement. There is Katharine Cornell in a poor dramatization of Edith Wharton's novel, "The Age of Innocence", the star at her finest and given brilliant support in a stuffy play by Arnold Korff. Alice Brady graces with effective acting the rather trivial play based on the old badger game, "A Most Immoral Lady...
When John Drew died in July 1927, the deanship of the U. S. stage passed from the Drawing Room to the Library. It might have gone into the Bed Room, but aging David Belasco had long since carried his pawkiness beyond the point where he could command respectful attention. Besides, vague though the title is, the Dean of the Stage should be an actor, if possible...