Word: hermia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Their female counterparts, Hermia and Helena, emerge woefully lopsided in performance. Diana Davila's Hermia has an unpleasant voice that an occasion indulges in pure squeal- ing; and she doesn't seem to understand what she is mouthing much of the time. Dorothy Tristan's Helena shows a wider vocal range and considerable skill as a farceuse. When she pleads to Demetrius, "Give me leave...to follow you," she waddles on her knees with comic aggressiveness; and when Lysander describes himself as "touching now the point of human skill," she instinctively grasps her breasts in self-protection...
...James Valentine are entrusted two small roles. As Hermia's father Egeus, he has been directed to overplay disastrously by means of a wheezing delivery. A little of this goes a long way, but he turns the theatre for a while into a vertiable asthma clinic. He also turns Philostrate, master of the revels, into an amusingly effete redhead...
Robert Fletcher has garbed the aristocracy in Empire costumes of the Napoleonic period, with an emphasis on brown, white, and gold. The two love-smitten maidens wear identical low-necked, high-waisted white gowns, with a blue sash for Helena and a pink one for Hermia. The "mechanicals" are outfitted in rough reds, oranges, and yellows. Fletcher had, paradoxically, a field day with the forest folk--Titania and her fairies in green and pink, the bicorn Oberon and his winged retinue in sequined blues...
...James Valentine are entrusted two small roles. As Hermia's father Egeus, he has been directed to overplay disastrously by means of a wheezing delivery. A little of this goes a long way, but he turns the theatre for a while into a vertiable asthma clinic. He also turns Philostrate, master of the revels, into an amusingly effete redhead...
...punctuated by the discovery of a sleeping character by his lover, rival or master. It is not necessary that characters be concealed in subterranean niches until the proper moment, but surely it is not desirable that they be left like public statues in mid-stage. The scene in which Hermia and Helena tear at each other becomes silly because of the fidgetings of onlookers who could be set apart from the women if there were a larger stage...