Word: lastly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Just before the final curtain at a Broadway opening one night last week, the theater critic of the New York Times, a mild, slender, unassuming man with steel-rimmed spectacles and a grey mustache, slipped inconspicuously out of the Lyceum Theater and walked two blocks back to his paper. He settled into his chair on the third floor of the Times building on 43rd Street, and following the practice of years, spread out the theater program, a dozen freshly pointed pencils and a legal-size pad of lined paper. Then, writing by hand, one paragraph at a time-each snatched...
When Kirsten Flagstad in 1935 made her Metropolitan Opera debut in Wagner's Die Walkuere, the audience cheered and the press groped for comparisons with "the irrecoverable magic" of Swedish-born Soprano Olive Fremstad.* Last week another Swedish Wagnerian soprano strode the Met's stage, and this time the comparison was to the "incomparable" Flagstad herself. The debutante: 41-year-old Birgit Nilsson, whose appearance in a new production of Tristan und Isolde touched off the kind of debut furor the Met's Wagnerians have not witnessed in a quarter-century...
Soprano Nilsson's career has gathered slow momentum over the last decade. Born on a 'Swedish farm, she was still plowing fields when she was 18 ("My parents wanted I should be a good farmer") and singing in the local Lutheran church choir. Then a neighboring choirmaster started giving her vocal lessons, persuaded her to enter the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm. Delayed by the war, she made her first real splash in 1947 with the Stockholm Opera singing Verdi's Lady Macbeth. Gradually she developed a repertory that now includes all the Wagnerian soprano parts...
...tall, lank-haired man in tweed jacket and maroon wool shirt, was none other than rehearsal-weary Carl Orff, Germany's most famed modern composer. Hours, or even minutes, of Orff have indeed often proved too much for some tradition-minded audiences in Europe and the U.S. But last week crowds were thronging to the Stuttgart Opera House for a solid week of Composer Orff's works, including his latest: Oedipus der Tyrann, a highly individual dissertation on the Sophocles tragedy...
...Beach (Stanley Kramer; United Artists) is a Hollywood vision of the end of the world. It is trumpeted as "the biggest story . . . The single most important film of our time." Last week it had a "Global Premiere," i.e., a simultaneous opening in 17 cities from Melbourne to Moscow. Alas, the version of the Nevil Shute chiller (TIME, Aug. 19, 1957) that Stanley (The Defiant Ones) Kramer has produced and directed turns out to be a sentimental sort of radiation romance, in which the customers are considerately spared any scenes of realistic horror, and are asked instead to accept the movie...