Word: heartbreaking
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Mercury Theatre, which first made headlines with Julius Caesar, the season's most exciting stunt, and thereafter stayed continuously on the front page with The Cradle Will Rock, the season's most original form of entertainment; The Shoemakers' Holiday, the season's most rollicking revival; Heartbreak House, the season's most difficult play to revive. Synonymous with the Mercury Theatre was Actor-Director Orson Welles...
...Heartbreak House is the one play that G. B. S. himself has refused to explain. "How should I know?" he told actors who asked him what it meant: "I am only the author." But Shaw provided meaning enough when he asserted that Heartbreak House is "cultured, leisured Europe before the War," just as he evoked mood enough when he acknowledged that Chekhov had sounded the same music in his Cherry Orchard...
Here, at any rate, under the aged Shotover's crazy roof, are inert, frightened, hamstrung individualists who in moments of terror can double up their fists but otherwise stand by, dazed and helpless. The world of Heartbreak House is not merely running down, it is cracking up: and in that dangerous hour the pretensions of its people-who represent an entire civilization-are mercilessly exposed by a playwright who despises them. If, on the one hand, these characters are the prototypes for all the bughouse comedy that has recently come into vogue, on the other hand some of theare...
...most men, but for Welles it is only Springboard to Success. Nor does he want the Mercury to pin all its faith on the classics: he pines to do a real mystery, a real farce, a British pantomime, a fast revue, a Mozart opera. He has shown in Heartbreak House, with its careful, elegant sets by John Koenig, that the sceneryless stage of Julius Caesar and The Cradle Will Rock was not the fetish of a flash in the Pantheon, but simply a well-timed theatrical stunt. The brightest moon that has risen over Broadway in years, Welles should feel...
...When the Theatre Guild produced Heartbreak House in 1920, a violent crisis arose with Shaw when the Guild suggested cutting it. The Mercury made no such suggestion. Said Welles: "The play's not good enough to cut." In the next breath: "It's the greatest play of the last hundred years...