Word: lyric
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Stage Fright, is being released as September approaches. For no matter if they sing about "dancin' through the clover" or some "time to kill" in June and July, the sure flavor of fall, harvest time and autumnal melancholy is in all their tunes, permeating the rhythms, punctuating every lyric...
...been to treat ancient Egyptian art as merely an impressive precursor to the masterpieces of classical Greece. And with some reason, since Egyptian art was known to most viewers only through those available examples brought home by 19th century plunderers. To the Western eye, attuned to the realistic and lyric drapery of Greek sculpture, most seemed sleekly stylized, looking vaguely like objects suitable for reproduction as paperweights...
...countinghouse at the center of the play cannot take seriously Portia's enchanted realm of Belmont, with its fairy-tale plot and flowery sentiments. Miller treats it as either hypocritical or irrelevant. He turns the casket scenes into occasions for extravaganzas of comic stage business. In the famous lyric dialogue between Lorenzo and Jessica ("In such a night as this . . ."), he makes Lorenzo a pipe-puffing bore and has Jessica fall asleep. Thus he undercuts the romantic element of the play, the key to what Shaw called the work's "humanity and poetry." In a world ruled...
...praise. The players are still somewhat awed by their parts, still a little unconscious of each other. Remember that I went opening night, that this play has more scenes than any of Shakespeare, that the lead roles are ferociously difficult, and that the play is his greatest achievement in lyric poetry, which can't abide even minute inattention as to voice and motion. After the disintegration of The Three Sisters and The Tempest, it is moving to find a director who nobly produces this incomparable symphony of a dramatic poem with such integrity. The honor, love, death, the sorrow, rancor...
Snyder also badly misjudged the end of Act III, by eradicating Antony's joy in his ironic recovery, which is really his moral devolution. The Antony of this production seemed incapable of lyric relaxation, of case, forgiveness, vision, and music. The Cleopatra is too often the shallow playacting little girl or the burning termagant. The secret of Cleopatra is that she is always capable of her speeches at the close of Acts IV and V. She must always act in the intuition that her honor and her safety are irreconcilable, that a race of heaven is a death on earth...