Word: langmuir
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...most important obstacle is determined overacting during the first two acts, in which we most the opera's seedy underworld characters. Histrionics are fine and director. Charles Langmuir uses them to good effect, in the big crowd scenes where Brecht attacks society's corruption directly. But in more intimate scenes, where the attack is subtler, the acting ought to be more delicate...
Chekhov's The Seagull is a great play but a very difficult one for young actors. The production at the Loeb Ex, under the direction of Charles Langmuir, is an earnest attempt, but clumsy and ultimately unsuccessful. The actors lack the experience and the finesse to make the boredom that their characters feel bearable, or their characters' doomed hopes and lost loves moving...
...blame can be placed on the actors. Langmuir's direction is uncertain, and sometimes downright sloppy. His blocking, especially when there are more than a few people on stage, is awkward, and often destroys the fragile spell of Chekhov's language. He realizes that the lack of action in a Chekhov play can become oppressive, so he keeps his actors moving, but they move aimlessly and unnecessarily, and simply make us feel uncomfortable...
...because it so often seems headed in the right direction. Carl Fredrich Oberle's sets. which make brilliant use of projections (including a still from D. W. Griffith's Intolerance ), are perfectly conceived, as are Elizabeth Tullis's costumes and Sara Linnie Slocum's lighting. Not to mention Charles Langmuir's assured performance of the hero (an anti-war American who goes off to fight the "war to end all wars") and that swell band gliding through the original Weill orchestrations...
...Illinois, Slichter has built a reputation as a brilliant experimenter in solidstate physics. He recently won the Irvng Langmuir Prize in chemical physics, and last year he was vice-chairman of the President's Science Advisory Committee...