Word: lear
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...King Lear, with Louis Calhern in the lead role, opens Chritmas day. One day earlier the ANTA playhouse will follow Judith Anderson with Jose Ferrer and Gloria Swanson in Hecht and MacArthur's Twentieth Century. For those who like Ibsen, and that includes most of the theatre-going public, An Enemy of the People co-stars Frederic March and his wife, Florence Eldridge, in a special adaptation by Arthur Miller...
...Rodgers & Hammerstein have scheduled Novelist John Steinbeck's Burning Bright, and Producer Cheryl Crawford has Tennessee (A Streetcar Named Desire) Williams' The Rose Tattoo on her schedule. By the time the season is half over, Broadway will probably be seeing Hollywood's Louis Calhern (in King Lear) and Olivia de Havilland (in Romeo and Juliet), besides such stage faithfuls as Dame Edith Evans, Flora Robson, Jessica Tandy, Lilli Palmer, and possibly Tallulah Bankhead...
Hollywood Gossipist Hedda Hopper led with her chin, bravely recorded the result: "When I wrote that I didn't understand why Louis Calhern and Nina Foch wanted to do King Lear on Broadway," she reported, "I got the following note from James T. Burns Jr. of Columbia University: 'The reason artists like Calhern and Foch choose to star in Lear instead of staying in California to portray defunct cattle barons and brilliantined cuties is approximately the same reason a gifted writer would prefer to become a Wolcott Gibbs instead of a Hedda Hopper...
Just as on the stage, Devlin's voice on this record persuades you Lear was "every inch a king." He blazes through the curse of General, commands in the mad wisdom of the judgment speech, "When I do stare, see how the subject quakes." He is calamitous, never pathetic, when he asks, "Is man no more than this?" or when, with dead Cornelia in his arms, he orders the court, "Howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones!" Devlin's performance is virtuosi, raging through extremity of nature, enormity...
Geoffrey D. Bush '50 took the $500 first prize with a critical essay entitled "The Promised End: Oedipus at Colonus and King Lear...