Word: one-act
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Operatic climaxes are usually marked by surging strings, blaring brass, rumbling kettledrums; but this time, when the crucial moment came, there was silence. Composer Randall Thompson had a good reason. He had made into a one-act, three-quarter-hour opera the last of Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories: The Butterfly That Stamped-and the climax came at the earth-shaking but quite inaudible stamp of the butterfly...
With reference to Hollywood's ingenuity in devising peculiar names, you may be interested to know that Pislam Civ (not Siv or Xiv) appeared in the one-act play contest at Bowdoin College in 1936 or 1937, if my memory serves me. This character, however, was male and derived his name from Psalm CIV. Is this a clue to how rapidly an idea travels from Maine to California...
...owed more than his plot. From his Maya, a translation (into German) of a gigantic compendium of Hindu mythology, Mann took detail, background, much, very likely, of his philo-symbological machinery. It is Dr. Zimmer too who best summed up this novel: "It is as if Hindemith composed a one-act opera, availing himself of the motifs from The Twilight of the Gods...
...found that he was expected to study showy trash like Liszt's Mephisto Waltz, has written two piano concertos, a Whitmanesque Secular Mass, a Polynesian opera, the music for Katharine Cornell's production of Romeo and Juliet. Last week a Philadelphia production of a new one-act Nordoff opera, The Masterpiece, proved the most diverting event of a season in which the LT. S. lyric theatre had been taking a nice...
John Ford's The Long Voyage Home (United Artists) is a dreamy, reverent screen translation of four one-act plays about the sea by Eugene O'Neill. Preceded by enthusiastic rumors heralding it as the best picture since The Informer, it opened in the situation of a celebrated home-run hitter going to bat with the bases loaded and two out in the ninth inning. That it failed to clear the bases is as much the fault of its advance rooters as it is of the film. Director Ford filled it with respectful piety for the hard impersonality...