Word: macbeth
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Trouble was, Verdi too often neglected the cause of integrating music and drama. Of his first 14 operas, only Nabucco and Macbeth displayed any real staying power; the rest moldered in obscurity. Now, in opera's relentless campaign to resurrect the least-known works of the best-known composers, some of Verdi's early operas are being given a fresh hearing-with unpredictable results. Gianna d'Arco (1845), performed this month by Manhattan's American Opera Society, was a thundering flop. But Attila (1846), as staged last week by the enterprising opera company of Graz, Austria...
...Schaefer, organization has paid dividends ever since his World War II army days, when he found himself assigned to a Special Services unit under the command of Major Maurice Evans. After some 50 wartime shows, including Macbeth and the G.I. Hamlet, Civilian Schaefer directed Civilian Evans in Hamlet on Broadway, went on to the Dallas State Fair for six seasons, co-produced (with Evans) The Teahouse of the August Moon, and then settled in for a long run at Hallmark...
Having read in the CRIMSON the excellent review of Kurasawa's "Throne of Blood," the Japanese Macbeth, I went last evening to see it. At the end "Macbeth" is murdered by his own men, in what the CRIMSON justly described as perhaps the most terrible such scene ever to be filmed; so terrible as to achieve a quality of tragic beauty and catharsis...
...film's major virtues are Kurosawa's, not Shakespeare's. Even with a normal-size screen, the camera, rarely moving in for a close-up or even a medium shot, tracks and frames the characters for a succession of strikingly beautiful compositions. And Kurosawa's time dilation--Macbeth and Banquo galloping endlessly in and out of the fog, or Duncan's pallbearers marching heavily up to the gates of his castle--shows the power that Hollywood in catering to the shortest common attention span, has sacrificed...
Throughout the film (his 17th), Kurosawa took liberties with the Shakespearen plot--Macduff hardly matters, and his wife and children don't exist at all--but it is at the climax that he deviates most widely and most successfully. The minutes during which Macbeth is killed are literally the most terrible I can recall on the screen. Japanese directors seem peculiarly able to treat extremes of violence, neither leering nor covering up the gore. In Throne of Blood, as in Ichikawa's Fires on the Plain or Kobayashi's Harakiri, the violence leaves one shaken and, in something close...