Word: finches
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Under Robert Finch's direction, an obviously dedicated cast makes The Crucible superior to most House productions. It shares many of the common faults of House shows: the props are conspicuously modern, the written affidavits invariably blank sheets of typing paper; Reverend Hale enters the Paris house with an armload of books fresh from Widener Library with the little white stickers on the bindings to prove...
...Finch's direction is simple to the point of being unimaginative. When a character has a line, he walks up to the person he's addressing, speaks the line, and moves back to wherever he was standing. The characters who aren't speaking are given little or nothing to do while waiting for their lines, and at its worst, the production becomes a series of stage tableaux: two people talk downstage, and everyone else stands stiffly in the background. He makes an attempt at historical accuracy by having Abigail and her teen-age cronies enter the courtroom knitting (because good...
...Finch's tight professional pacing, particularly of the dialogue, make The Crucible an impressive show. Its three-and-a-quarter hour running time seems much closer to two, and for a student production, that's no small achievement...
Miller was more concerned with theme than with characterization, and most of the male roles read like emblems or attitudes rather than people. As a result, an actor must add character through gesture or vocal power where the script doesn't supply it. Finch's male actors aren't good enough; all of them give unmodulated one-note performances. If an actor happens to hit the right note, as in the case of Tim Hall's paranoid Danforth, the performance can be extremely effective. But in the first two acts, Steve Hill as the nasty Reverend Parris and John Brady...
...stage, Succeed succeeded by being as broad as it was wide. A pastel-colored animated cartoon of contemporary big business, it musically chronicled the rise of a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed rodent, J. Pierpont Finch (Robert Morse), who won the rat race by running just fast enough to keep up with his boss (Rudy Vallee...