Word: mimed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Stravinsky called the 93-minute Sol at "musical theater without singing." With narration, dialogue, mime and a charming score* that prances through tangos, jazz waltzes and chorales, it tells the parable of a soldier who encounters the Devil and sells him his fiddle (his soul) in exchange for the secret to the world's treasures. When wealth brings him misery, the soldier regains his fiddle but loses his soul once more by violating the Devil's condition that he never return to his homeland...
...Harvard Dramatic Club's Evening With Pinter and Beckett is a fine survey of the tamer modern entertainments. It begins with Harold Pinter's The Collection, one of the quieter works of a very noisy playwright, and after an hour or so moves to a mime by Samuel Beckett (titled, with cheery deadpan, Act Without Words I). Illuminations, a festival of electronic echoes and throbbing lights reminiscent of the best parts of The Ipcress File, brings down the curtain...
...theater program started this fall by New York University with a $750,000 Rockefeller Foundation grant. Taking his cue from European drama conservatories, Director Theodore Hoffman refuses to let his 222 students act until they have been through a year of drilling in the fundamentals of the theater-voice, mime, satire, circus stunts. Only then are they permitted to perfect their art by performing 15 hours a week (v. three to six at most schools). "Perform or perish," says Hoffman...
...they can indicate that it contains bad or good news but not what news. Nevertheless, Macmillan makes the plot clear and moving. When the stage is full for the crowd scenes, he coordinates the whole corps de ballet with incredible skill. The close-ups require the whole company to mime, and they do so convincingly. Macmillan passes the toughest test in his delicate handling of the tomb scene. Here the dying are trying to make love to the dead, potentially a macabre situation without the saving grace of the Bard's poetry...
...play's success depends on the rhythm and fluidity of the action it presents. Brook's production never lagged, but kept things moving almost frenetically by means of sudden racket from the periphery, the rhythmic scurrying of the patients, mime, song, dance, a plentiful use of props, masks, and brilliant physical gadgetry -- and above all, a sheer sense of pace that never allowed either the leads or the audience to breathe or reflect. David Wheeler's Boston version inherits most of Weiss/Brook's inspiration and contributes a little of its own. The play "breathes." Marat (Clinton Kimbrough) hunkers...