Word: one-acts
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...Shaffer had pared the show and tightened the pace. Choosing to be optically antic, he evades the opportunity to show how the eye lies and the mind's eye ferrets out reality -which might have given the evening more intellectual relish, a sort of Pirandello flavor. In a one-act opener called White Lies, Shaffer tries to be wise rather than clever about lovers and lovelessness. As an impoverished fortuneteller, Geraldine Page performs with feline grace, but Shaffer's dramatic crystal ball is murky. Fortunately, the evening is redeemed by Black Comedy's dancing waves of mirth...
...Harvard Dramatic Club is soliciting applications for a program of one-act ys to be presented at the Loeb in oruary. The rest of the Loeb's Spring edule, while not yet formally announced, has already been approved by the HDC executive committee...
BRITTEN: CURLEW RIVER (London). On a sojourn to the Orient in 1956, the composer was delighted by Japanese No plays, and one of them, Sumidagawa, is the inspiration for this one-act opera. It tells of a madwoman searching for her son, and her encounter with a boatman who explains his tragic death and shows her where he is buried. Scored for five male soloists, a chorus of nine and an orchestra of seven, Curlew River is a fragile work indeed, more tone poem than opera. Yet in a sedate, masquelike way, it has considerable melodic charm...
This Property Is Condemned begins and ends with excerpts from a fragile one-act play by Tennessee Williams. Its heroine, a waif named Willie, picks her way along the railroad tracks in a desolate Mississippi town, carrying "a banged-up doll and a piece of a rotten banana." Brazenly recounting her hardships to a neighborhood lad, Willie on screen (Mary Badham, the perky tomboy of To Kill a Mockingbird) is still affecting as she sashays through a world of half-truths and childish fantasy in her dead sister Alva's tattered finery...
...troublesome score and libretto of Trouble in Tahiti isn't worth the trouble. Leonard Bernstein's pretentiously modern one-act opera is an attack on hollow suburbia. Even in 1952, when it was written, that was a boringly standard iconoclasm. The music is generally wearisome, the libretto, also written by Bernstein, generally clumsy...