Word: caesar
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...miserable $25 a week. After a false start as a collegian at New York University and City College, he went back to being a full-time funnyman-first for the late Herb Shriner (for $75 a week), then for Singer Pat Boone, Garry Moore, Art Carney and Sid Caesar. By the time he went to work for Caesar, Woody was making $1,500 a week. He had also acquired three new fields to mine for comedy: an apartment, an analyst, and a wife, Harlene Rosen. He was 19, she was 16. The marriage lasted five nettling, unsettling years. Allen learned...
STRATFORD, Conn.--Bernard Shaw often took a condescending attitude to Shakespeare. But even when taking potshots at Julius Caesar, Shaw conceded that it is "the most splendidly written political melodrama we possess." Since we cannot escape politics, the play is always timely. It is particularly so in a national election year like this one; and again so at the end of a decade of violence wreaked upon major public figures from President Kennedy to Governor Wallace. With Caesar cut down not by a loner but by a handful within his own group, there is a striking recent parallel...
Trimming the play to a running time of two and a quarter hours. Kahn has for the most part adopted a straightforward approach. Although the Renaissance tended to oppose Caesar--as the Middle Ages had sided with him--Shakespeare carefully saw to it that the play as a whole took no stand. The text is ambiguous, the positions balanced; hence a director may easily tilt his production toward one view or the other. Kahn takes here a neutral stand, and leaves it to the audience to weigh the evidence...
Also making his Festival debut is Marc B. Weiss, who has lit the show with unerring taste and skill. Especially effective is the night lighting. In a departure from custom, Brutus and Antony deliver their eulogies of Caesar in the evening, with flickering light coming from flaming torches held by four of the assembled commoners...
...really starting novelty that Kahn has introduced is the staging of the actual assassination of Caesar. At this point Casca and the rest of the conspirators execute their dagger thrusts and other bodily movements in ultra slow-motion, turning the scene into a graceful choreographed ritual. The director perhaps got the idea from the slow-motion violence in such recent movies as Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch, and Bunch Cassidy and the Sundance...