Word: kazan
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Playwright Williams' instinct for the theatrical jugular makes even this mannikin play bleed greasepaint. Elia Kazan's direction is intense, Jo Mielziner's sets are broodily menacing, and Paul Bowles's mood music shimmers. But the only unfailing source of power and passion in the play is the bravura performance of Geraldine Page. Whether she is thrashing about in bed crying for her oxygen mask after a days-long vodka-and-goofball binge or clawing apart her hired paramour's tape-recorded blackmail scheme, Actress Page is just what the character she plays fears...
...Devil contend for the afflicted soul of a modern Job. Despite some flatness in both poetry and drama, and a hollowly humanistic ending, it makes for an arresting evening in the theater and repeats some eternal questions about the meaning of man's suffering. Brilliantly directed by Elia Kazan...
Helped by MacLeish's dramatic use of Zuss and Nickles, Director Elia Kazan has to a certain degree given utterance the effect of action, though at a certain cost. He endows the second act with a kind of life, but on rhetorical, loud-speakered, high-pressured terms that avoid flatness by forfeiting severity. Moreover, the acting is uneven. Pat Hingle's J.B. has a homely appeal but has no inwardness; J.B.'s wife and J.B.'s comforters lack the proper skill. Despite its ingenuity and authority, J.B. cannot overcome certain difficulties that philosophic drama is heir...
When the best director on Broadway (Elia Kazan for those in doubt), one of the foremost dramatic actors in America, (Pat Hingle) and one of the the finest living poets conspire to produce a play, you are bound to have a masterpiece. And that's what Archibald MacLeish's J.B. is, one of the most distinguished dramatic triumphs of the modern theatre...
...Christopher Plummer as Nickels (the popcorn vendor who portrays Satan) are all excellent. Boris Aronson's set is magnificent; Miss Ballard's costumes catch the proper blend of the gaudy and grotesque; David Amram's music and Tharon Musser's lighting lend almost surrealistic overtones to the drama. And Kazan ringmasters his menagerie with the genius which has earned him his reputation...