Word: kazan
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...UNDERSTUDY by ELIA KAZAN...
...director, Elia Kazan earned a niche in theatrical history with considerable help from classic scripts (Death of a Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire) and talented actors (Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh, Lee J. Cobb). Kazan's second career in the solitary business of writing has so far resulted in three commercially successful novels that tend to thrash about in alien corn. There is nothing wrong with The Understudy, for instance, that a good script and some believable characters would not help...
Such problems are doubly disappointing because Kazan has tackled a subject on which he qualifies as an expert: actors. Sonny, 54, broke into Broadway as the understudy for Sidney Castleman (né Schlossberg), a much bellied matinee idol 20 years his senior. Now the worm has turned. Castleman is on the skids, sponging off Sonny while sneering at him as a "mechanical rabbit," a thespian technocrat devoid of true passion. To top it all, Castleman involves Sonny in a gang war between black hoodlums and a Polish mobster. But Sonny simply loves the old gaffer all the more...
...third act that proved troublesome. In order to assure the play's production, Williams felt compelled to knuckle under to director Elia Kazan's desires that Big Daddy return on-stage in the last act, that Brick undergo a change of character as a result of Act II, and that Maggie become more sympathetic. Williams saw some merit only in the last, but went along with all three. In Kazan's production, Big Daddy came back to hear Maggie's false claim of pregnancy and to tell a smutty joke. This was a half-hearted compliance...
...King's Men (1949), with Broderick Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge, at 8 p.m., and Elia Kazan's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, at 10 p.m., Friday and Saturday, April...