Word: jazzing
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...darkened theatre the blinding spotlight reveals a jazz band in Pierrot costumes. The curtain opens on gaily painted settings, and the lyric intensity of men and women who dance, love, suffer and die, to the casual irony of the bleating rhythm of saxophones...
...there can be no question that the production given it last night by the Harvard Dramatic Club under the direction of Mr. Edward Massey is extraordinarily memorable and stirring. Mr. Massey has approached this difficult production frankly from the point of view of musical comedy. He has built up jazz, noise, excitement, into a simple and perfectly synchronized whole. The settings, done by Mr. Dos Passos himself, are brilliantly successful. As concerns the acting, there are many good performances, and a few extremely bad ones--but this is overshadowed by the imaginative power with which the director has conceived...
Every so often, the editors of The New Student (intercollegiate newssheet, of the liberal persuasion) find time and money to supplement their weekly with a section written around a single idea. For the sake of journalism (and Upton Sinclair*), they usually "jazz" the idea. They are young men, seeking a young audience...
...last American drama seems to have hit upon a pattern and a rhythm all its own. Breaking away from German Expressionism, our native playwrights are developing a special national technique--a sort of radio-ragtime-phonograph-jazz. Two plays in particular illustrate this latest experimental phase. One is John Howard Lawson's "Processional" which has been the storm center of discussion in New York. The other is a still more extraordinary play by his friend, the novelist John Roderigo Dos Passos, a play that has not yet been acted or published, called "The Moon is a Gong". This...
While "Processional" has as its subtitle "A, Jazz Symphony of American Life". "The Moon is a Gong" has as its sub-title. "A Parade with Shouting". "The 'Moon is a Gong" out-processionals "Processional". In his riotous imagination, Dos Passos makes confusion worse confounded. Every device has been accumulated to shock the eye and split the ear. In its revolt from realism it is frankly, blatantly theatrical, and heaps up all the artificial tricks of expressionist drama. As in the Fifth Avenue scene of "The Hairy Ape", so here in the funeral scene masks are used to intensify the impression...