Word: conklin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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City Opera has done well by Argento. Set Designer John Conklin's haunted house is properly spooky, and the opera's shifts in time and mood are made decisive by Gilbert Hemsley's lighting. Conductor Julius Rudel kept things going so smoothly one almost forgot that this was a world premiere, the first time for everyone. For Rita Shane there can be only praise. Her acting was fiery, her singing confident, if uneven. It is hard to think of anyone, including Sills, who could have truly commanded the part. Miss Havisham's Fire burns a long...
...simple. It was first introduced to America as a vaudeville clown in 1910, and the country did not respond warmly. Charlie's comic flare failed to ignite enthusiasm until the epochal one-reeler in which he tried on Fatty Arbuckle's pants and Chester Conklin's jacket. In that moment The Tramp was born, and with him a long parabola of triumph and humiliation. The arc described a career bred of deprivation and encompassing nearly every cinematic skill, from producing and directing to the writing of scenarios and scores, gags and tragedies...
This time there are indeed trees, but they create the wrong effect. This play and this production are fine examples of the vital importance attaching to set design and color. Here Kahn presumably settled on the concept and the gifted John Conklin fashioned his scenery accordingly. The first act presents the discordant environment of the "envious court" and "the foul body of th' infected world." For this Conklin has provided barren brown trees. No complaint here...
...best help of all, of course, comes from good productions. Using the same somewhat trimmed text as last summer, Michael Kahn has kept his directorial operations almost intact. His concept, John Conklin's effective scenery, Jane Greenwood's stunning costumes, and John McLain's lighting convey with clarity the play's shape. Shakespeare's emphasis on the cyclicism of the seasons and of human life is reflected in the unchanging raised circular platform and in the large round clockface that is lowered periodically (on the drive home I was reminded of this when the car radio suddenly came forth with...
...with a triple knot. Kahn underlines this by having Time appear wordlessly in the first half bearing a barren branch, and in the second half bearing a green and, finally, a gold one. Miss Greenwood's costumes for Sicilia are stark white; for Bohemia they are brightly colored (and Conklin's hanging transparent tubes are lit with spring like green); and for the return to the indoor court in Sicilia, the white is mellowed with bits of gray. Thus, while the play is bipartite, it is simultaneously tripartite--somewhat analogously to the sonata-form design of a Classical symphony movement...