Word: miscastings
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...third time the American Shakespeare Theatre has essayed this masterwork. In 1961 Pat Hingle was woefully miscast in the title role. Six years ago John Colicos was an impressive Macbeth, but poorly supported. For me the current go-around, staged by the AST's artistic director, Michael Kahn, proved frustrating...
Robinson originally considered himself miscast as a criminal, and in a way he was right. He was a pillar of Beverly Hills' genteel society, a philanthropist who supported and worked for dozens of causes. He played the harp, amassed an immense collection of impressionist art and was a student of eight languages. When he and Gladys Lloyd, his wife of 28 years, were divorced in 1955, the settlement forced him to sell off his $3,250,000 collection, pieces that he called his "children." But he married again and went back to work despite ill health. Bearded, gray...
...roles in this Cherry Orchard are miscast, not as to skill, but in terms of temperament. Madame Ra-nevskaya, who cannot bring herself to uproot the orchard and build a housing development, ought to be enveloped in actressy vanity and a flighty inability to cope. Yet Gloria Foster displays little vanity and seems to possess such granitic strength as to have sold the estate and axed the first cherry tree herself. Lopakin, the son of a serf, who buys the Ranevskaya property at auction, is played a shade too unctuously by James Earl Jones, who also lacks the quality...
Robert Redford, who plays John son, is severely miscast. Fresh-faced and eager, he is certainly not about to eat any Crow livers, so Redford's Johnson becomes a kind of chivalrous Indian fighter, compelled to slaughter Crows because they killed his family. Thus compromised, the movie still has some virtues. It was photographed in Utah, and the landscapes of fall and winter are regally beautiful. In fact no one seems to fill the screen as well as the mountains, save for Stefan Gierasch, whose performance as a rapscallion mountain man named Del Grue is joyous and exceptionally inventive...
Beau Bridges is appropriately agitated throughout. Preston seems miscast, adept at being folksy and jolly but confounded when he is called upon to be sinister. Memories of The Music Man constantly intrude, and we keep expecting him to break into a chorus of Seventy-Six Trombones. James Mason is superb as a kind of misanthropic Mr. Chips. As written, the part is little more than a cartoon. Mason turns it into a full portrait of a frightened man in the process of being destroyed...