Word: caste
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...word is spoken. The performances of Miss Bancroft and Miss Duke so stand out that they obscure several other important assets. First, Gibson's play is astoundingly free of the oversentimentality that could so easily bog down an enterprise of this kind. Second, the rest of the cast, particularly Patricia Neal as Helen's mother and James Congdon as her half-brother, is very fine. Certain minor defects are also obscured: Torin Thatcher, as Helen's father, is rather rough and overly blustery; both the second and final curtains could use a little tightening...
Incongruously juxtaposed to this, Professor Cherington in Lowell lecture hall (New Lecture Hall to old-timers) begins his bawdy bit about the workings of modern governments in Government la. Lecture-goers with less than cast-iron stomachs should instead try Emerson D where Dr. O'Clair talks with gurgling humor about the nineteenth century English novel (English...
Poet von Hofmannsthal's libretto, embroidered with the common myths of half a dozen cultures, concerns a beautiful empress who is unable to cast a shadow and hence to bear children. In search of a shadow, she persuades a dyer's wife to surrender her own, and thus renounce her power to bear children, for luxuries and an imaginary romance. In a mirage of symbolism about human and superhuman love, selfish and selfless love, the dyer's wife eventually realizes that she loves her husband, and the empress sees that she herself cannot buy love in exchange...
...bring Strauss's vision to the theater, opera designers decked the cast in blazing costumes, filled the stage with striking Daliesque sets. Standouts of a superb cast were California-born Mezzo-Soprano Irene Dalis as a malevolent nurse and German Soprano Marianne Schech as the dyer's wife. Conductor Leopold Ludwig whipped his orchestra through the complex, luxuriant score with a fine sense of surging lyricism, a deft feel for the opera's shadow-flittery moods. "No matter what may happen to the Giants," glowed the Chronicle's Alfred Frankenstein, "San Francisco won the pennant Friday...
...relief, 17 feet wide and 30 feet high, was cast earlier in the year at Nivola's studio in Long Island and was shipped to Cambridge in sections. Construction workers then mounted the sections on the wall with cement and brass wire ties...