Word: orpheus
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...Orpheus, by Jean Cocteau, is a witty, complicated, and thoroughly enjoyable play but it is not, despite the author's claim, a tragedy. But then perhaps one should not take Cocteau's description too seriously since he himself holds very little--and certainly not the Greek legend of Orpheus--as sacred. He uses the story of the Thracian singer as little more than a base on which to build a structure of humor and symbolism and allegory, all deriving their meaning through completely modern references. The result is a curious but somehow still effective blending of the past...
...setting Cocteau retains Thrace but he brings the action up, or perhaps the audience back, to the present. Orpheus, ably portrayed by Paul Schmidt as full of moodiness and intensity, becomes a young poet dissatisfied with success. In disgust he turns his search for meaning to the sayings spelled out by a horse which has followed him home. His wife, Eurydice, however, is left bored by the proceedings, and Susan Howe lends much grace and a sort of charming coquetry to her attempts to snap Orpheus out of his infatuation with the horse. In another departure Cocteau introduces an entirely...
Poised and confident as she had been at Cortina, Tenley skated out to repeat her Olympic routine. In her gold wool jersey, she danced across the ice to the music of Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld. Satisfied with her performance, she said: "If that doesn...
...Rodin, moved on to hew lithe, dreamlike figures often drawn from Norse, Greek and American Indian mythologies (TIME, June 27). In 1929 he came to the U.S. to teach at Cranbrook Academy, Bloomfield Hills, Mich., became a U.S. citizen in 1945. Among his best-known works: Stockholm's Orpheus Fountain; St. Louis' The Meeting of the Waters, 19 life-sized figures symbolizing the meeting of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers; The Fountain of Faith in Falls Church, Va., 38 figures representing the reunion of friends in the world of the dead...
...Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice, starring Met Mezzo-Soprano Rise Stevens as Orpheus...