Word: noted
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Amid outcries about freedom, characters die as if it were the last act of Hamlet; amid tirades against power, slave girls uncover and Caligula runs wild. If there is a unifying note in all this it is that the characters, whether male or female, slave or free, vile or virtuous, slain or spared, are orators one and all. So much oratory has its touches of eloquence, so much theatricalism its flashes of theater. But the play as a whole is lumberingly lurid, and Alvin Epstein's Claudius offers some adroit stammering that is more effective than anyone else...
...immense superiority as an actress. But if Callas indeed has a champagne voice, it is also true that champagne can all too easily go sour-as many an operagoer can testify who has heard Callas on an off night. Tebaldi, perhaps because she attempts less, rarely sings an unpalatable note...
...unusual gift of moving from one register to another with no perceptible shift in the quality of her singing, which is almost always unerringly accurate and clear, rarely marred by the edginess or brassy reverberations that afflict some singers. Her special glory is the spun-out, floating high note-which Tebaldi achieves, seemingly without effort, by paying out huge breaths in small, even quantities...
...like runaway jackhammers. She jumped from her bench as if kicked by a mule, grimaced like an ulcer case on the way out, writhed like a belly dancer, sucked her thumb, tugged at her bra, groaned. Sometimes she struck some keys with her elbow, but she never missed a note, and her hands pounded away with incredible precision. Dorothy Donegan. 32, was giving the well-heeled, well-liquored crowd just what it came for, and the Embers, Manhattan's pseudo-ranch-style jazz joint, pulsed with enthusiasm all the way up to its pseudo-adobe ceiling...
...tinkering never ceased. (In 1947 he even dashed off a note to Los Alamos suggesting how to build an H-bomb.) What he could not learn from encyclopedias Behlen picked up by sending postcards to big manufacturers to learn their methods-and most cooperated. Says he: "I never could have stayed in business without Thomas' Register of American Manufacturers...