Word: dwarf
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...afford their expensive news-gathering operations and may even be outbid in the future for such attractions as the World Series and Super Bowl; viewers who now see them free would then have to pay to watch. Speaking privately, however, other network bosses often boast that their operations so dwarf those of any cable operator that for the moment they can loftily ignore cable. Nonetheless, predicts HBO's Levin, as cable presents better programming, "it will be harder for the networks to aggregate the kind of audiences they are accustomed to." In other words, the hot new network sitcom...
...scene, Miss Havisham cries out, "I am tired!" There is a derisive titter from the audience. They have sympathy for Soprano Rita Shane, who plays Miss Havisham. She has flung her voice valiantly through trills, runs, arpeggios, and sung paragraph upon paragraph of words that dwarf the great mad scene in Lucia di Lammermoor. But the audience is tired too, because this kind of listening, when most of the words are unintelligible, is also hard work...
Director Sellars and set designer Gary Lovesky have created a visually breathtaking production--they dragged 30 live birch trees from the Harvard Forest and ringed them around the spare, vast, white-draped stage. Huge birches and the bare exposed Loeb stage dwarf the actors and frame Sellar's epic interpretation. The Loeb production emphasizes the tableaux over the characters, but it does so with a brilliance in staging that brings out Chekhov's geometry and starkly, pictorially dramatizes the characters' relationship to each other. The operatic staging also serves to divorce the characters from the world outside the Prozorov mansion...
...sized area; the Loeb stage is pretty forbidding, especially when it's set up as a proscenium instead of the modified theater-in-the-round Loeb directors often choose. Michael Der Manuelian, Ellington's director, didn't even try to protect his performers against the mainstage's tendency to dwarf actors. They sometimes looked a little lost; Ellington at Eight could have far better succeeded in a far smaller theater...
Perhaps celebrity is bad for the talent. In any case, Panama is fairly minor McGuane. In his tale, Chester Hunnicutt Pomeroy is an overnight American superstar rapidly descending to the white-dwarf stage. His act, something along the lines of Alice Cooper's, only more so, included a routine in which he crawled out of an elephant's behind and dueled with a baseball pitching machine. Now, his brainpan made porous by drugs, Pomeroy has withdrawn to Key West, where he maniacally stalks his old love Catherine. A man with a lot less charm or interest than...