Word: gynt
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Composer Larry Austin, protege of Darius Milhaud. Painters Wayne Thiebaud and Roland Petersen help make Davis tops in art among Cal campuses. Drama boasts talented young acting students with a beard or two, and this year's visiting lecturer, Director Joseph Schildkraut, has already staged an excellent Peer Gynt. Symbolic of the times, the old Davis livestock judging barn is being remodeled as a Shakespearean theater...
...Adams House Drama Society pushed every button, pulled every level, manipulated every winch and pulley that the Loeb Pleasure Palace houses in its bottomless toy box, in an immense and elaborate hymn to tedium. Peer Gynt fell--like the silly feathered pig which makes an agonizing descent from the rafters (while the actors stand and star, speechless)--with a long long, oh so long thud. (Three long hours...
...deafness wouldn't have mattered, really, since so much of the dialogue was inaudible. In the scene at the Royal Hall of the Troll King, Peer Gynt, the Troll King, and the Troll King's daughter stood at the rear of the stage, while at the front the trolls cavorted, pretending to be Harpo Marx. They whistled, grunted, beeped, honked, groaned and gasped--did everything they could, in fact, to ensure the audience's missing the dialogue...
Paul Ronder, who directed, apparently believed that Ibsen hadn't put quite enough sex into Peer Gynt, so he added some. Early in the play, Peer is supposed to be picked up by three lascivious young ladies, all of whose desires he satisfies in the course of an evening. Ibsen leaves the actual act of intercourse to the imagination of the audience by having Peer and the vixens dance off stage together. Not so Ronder. Three young ladies, self-consciously displaying their breasts, crawled all over poor Peer, who lay at the front of the stage...
Thomas Griffin played the title role with all the gusto of a "Beat" "Method" actor playing himself. There was no appreciable difference between the young Peer Gynt, the middle aged Peer Gynt, and the tired, old Peer Gynt. A part of the trouble was that he wore almost no makeup (how a twenty year old actor is supposed to look sixty without the help of makeup beats me), but a more significant trouble was that he had no sense of his physical presence on the stage. His voice never varied, his posture never changed; he was dwarfed...