Word: orpheus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...most theatergoers last week it was a choice between a good production of Shakespeare's bloodiest and an excellent evening of Menotti. Next week it will be Orpheus and Patience on one hand and selected O'Neill on the other. Many who would like to attend all the productions will only see two or three of them, and each show will cut into the other's ticket sales. But this is nothing: last spring theatrical activities vacillated between a choke of four and five shows one weekend and none the next, forcing an alternate glut and fast on theatergoers...
...Orpheus Descending is a rewrite by Tennessee Williams of a Williams play, Battle of Angels, that headed for Broadway in 1940 but folded in Boston. A certain sense of remodeling, of altered stairs and corridors, of trapdoors inserted and windows removed, hangs over the play. But the builder's identity, whatever the stage or the style of construction, is never in doubt. Williams writes of life in a backward, bigoted Southern town, and of a young guitar-playing itinerant who arrives there. He becomes involved with its unhappy women, and as a result with its unreasoning...
...point or another, Orpheus Descending achieves everything that Tennessee Williams does well and even does uniquely: whiplashing recrimination, harshly funny humor, the corrosive bite of evil, the shaking fingers of fright. Actress Maureen Stapleton has some extraordinary moments as the wife, Cliff Robertson some quietly effective ones as the guitar player. But, taken as a whole, the play fails, and for three reasons: a faultiness of structure, an obsessiveness of attitude, an empurpling theatricalism...
...isolate material from method, the world's violence from Williams' own, because of the garish orchestrating of his protest, the sheer fireworks of his pessimism. Talent as vivid as Williams' is often as lopsided; few highly personal visions of life are notably panoramic. What tells against Orpheus Descending is less something limited than something lurid; what vitiates the play, even as it animates it, is so canny a theater sense. It is the stage's melodrama, not the world's malevolence, that consistently wears its heartlessness on its sleeve...
...done at the Met and rarely seen in the U.S. anywhere, replaced Die Fledermaus as the Met's showpiece operetta and special New Year's Eve attraction. The score is second-rate Offenbach, first performed in 1868, well after the glories of La Belle Helens (1864) and Orpheus (1858); but it is still the work of a master in his field. The libretto is by two hacks of genius, Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, who vaguely based it (as they did their celebrated book for Carmen) on a work by Prosper...