Word: cues
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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From the piano she led the orchestra (30 strings) in the Concerto No. 1 in D Minor and the Concerto No. 7 in G Minor. As always, the Tureck style was unhurried, her touch firm and glistering, her phrasing spacious. Her cues to the orchestra were kept to a minimum: a somewhat stiff sweep of the arms to launch a movement, followed by a nod of her head or even the lift of an eyebrow to cue individual sections. Her piano itself set the tempo, which Tureck accentuated by bobbing slightly on the piano bench...
...Cue for Passion (by Elmer Rice) has not gone to Hamlet merely for its title; it has gone there, quite openly, for its basic characters and plot. Since many Hamlets of one kind or another preceded Shakespeare's, it is not out of line that others should follow it; after all, it is for being the most fascinating of English plays that Hamlet remains the most familiar...
With any such retelling comes the added fascination of comparison: it is like returning to a former home to see how someone else has furnished it. In Cue for Passion the furnishings are sparser and extremely modern, with a picture window to let in strong, clarifying, psychological light. Hamlet, called Tony Burgess, comes home-sulky, sneering, perverse-after two years in Asia, certain that his new stepfather was his mother's paramour, suspecting he is also his father's murderer. This is an Oedipus-uncomplex Hamlet, so drawn to his mother that he hated his father, so identified...
...Cue for Passion is interesting enough in its way, which is too merely intelligent a way. For the play seems less limited for how much it leaves out of Shakespeare than for how much it puts in of Freud. Plainly, Hamlet was made for Freud, but popular Freudianism much less so for Hamlet. To put all its neuroses in one bedstead is to rob a character of his tangled richness, a story of its resonant depths, and to turn what T.S. Eliot called "the Mona Lisa of literature" into a simple blueprint. And by adhering to such things as soliloquies...
...theater piece, Cue for Passion holds attention and, with no greater indebtedness than many Broadway rewrites, uses a far happier model. But as creative drama it is too explicit, too unlarge, in its writing too literary-often seeming, not like prose as compared to Shakespeare's poetry, but like prose as distinct from talk...