Word: helpmann
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...other master stroke by which Chekhov gets the audience to be his collaborator lies in his intuitive understanding that the only undying love is unrequited love. In Uncle Vanya, Vanya (William Hutt) is desperately smitten with Elena (Martha Henry), wife of the crabbed Professor Serebriakov (Max Helpmann), who is many years her senior. Not out of any binding moral scruples, Elena treats Vanya's advances with lacerating indifference. Sonya (Marti Maraden), Vanya's niece, has adored Dr. Astrov (Brian Bedford) for six years, and he has never been aware of it for six seconds. Astrov in turn lusts...
Adapting classic Viennese operetta to dance has been the dream of Sir Robert Helpmann, 67, the Australian Ballet's director for 50 years. The idea is a seductive one. The operetta, of course, has dancing in it. The score is filled with mellow waltzes and Hungarian folk tunes, complete with mandolins and castanets. The trap for a choreographer lies in Lehar's melodies, which enhance the voice like exquisite garments that are no longer made. No steps danced to Vilia are satisfying, because memory hears a soprano singing...
...Helpmann staged The Merry Widow in part because he felt that in Dame Margot Fonteyn he had the ideal leading lady. He was her first partner in the late '30s when, as a teenager, she danced classic roles at the old Sadler's Wells Ballet. Dame Margot is 57 now. She per forms, she says modestly, because people still ask her to. She is, in fact, one of the great international box office draws in show business. Audiences who pay to see her as the wealthy widow of Pontevedro will get their money's worth...
...actresses who play her and audiences who see her. But what was Shaw's personal notion of Joan? Using his own inflective emphases, he describes her as a "protestant" and a "nation-alist." She protests against the authority of the church represented by the Archbishop of Rheims (Max Helpmann) in favor of the individual conscience. She subverts the authority of the lords temporal and their feudal privileges by proclaiming the supremacy of the nation-state. Her real visions, then, are of the dawn of the age of democracy, and her real voice is the vox populi...
...words "so hoary and lost, so unapproachable." Even a few Australians have agreed. Every year some 6,000 of them leave home, mostly for Europe and America, and even today a large percentage of the best-known Australians are expatriates. Among them: Soprano Joan Sutherland, Dancer Robert Helpmann, Actress Zoe Caldwell, Actors Leo McKern and Rod Taylor, Writers Morris West and Alan Moorehead, Artist Sidney Nolan...