Word: gielgud
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Some day, perhaps, there will be a great production of The Doctor and the Devils, one that will make the most of its beauties, since not much can be done to minimize its faults. It would be interesting to see what Frederic March or Sir John Gielgud could do with the leading role; any lesser actor would be over-parted. Robert A. Brooks, who takes the part at Kresge, has the proper dignity of bearing, and makes a noble stage figure. If he is insufficiently heroic, if he does not project the proper intensity of fanaticism...
...first New York appearance since 1956, performed to near capacity crowds every night (Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Henry V). The troupe expects to wind up its 25-week U.S. tour next month with total grosses of $1,200,000. And British Actor Sir John Gielgud, in a one-man tour de force (see THEATER), nearly filled the 1,300-seat 46th Street Theater nightly with recitations from Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, grossed $30,000 his first week...
What stands out along with Gielgud's mastery of his material is his absorption in his subject-the sense, toward Shakespeare, of something loved and lifelong. The effect that such a recital seems to promise most, a flashing virtuosity, is what matters least. The essence of the evening is not glitter but glow...
Ages of Man is a dinner-jacketed Sir John Gielgud standing on an unadorned stage reciting Shakespeare. If such an all-Shakespeare recital must differ from an all-Beethoven program by offering excerpts rather than whole works, it yet resembles it in one important way. It communicates the range and richness, above all the uniqueness of its subject. That it manages to do so, that it seems no mere Victorian display of The Beauties of Shakespeare, is tribute to the range and richness of the interpreter...
Interpreting an equally great dramatist and poet requires someone equally good at acting and speaking words. It is Shakespeare the magician with language who bulks largest in the recital, and Gielgud has his own touch of magic, not from any magnificence of voice or roll of theatrical thunder, but from a projection of feeling, a rush of psychological light. Moving from Youth through Manhood to Old Age, he plays many parts. Few will complain that he includes a host of warhorses-Hamlet's best soliloquies, Mercutio's Queen Mab speech, an abdicating Richard II, a sleepless Henry...