Word: othellos
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Victorious on Broadway (TIME, Nov. 1), Shakespeare is also advancing at a neat clip up the West Coast. Last month Cinemactor John Carradine (Grapes of Wrath, Reunion in France) "dress rehearsed" Othello, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, at Pasadena's famed Playhouse, a Shakespeare stronghold that has produced all 37 of the Bard's plays. Carradine's productions were thoughtful rather than exciting, shunned novelty and sensationalism: as Shylock, for example, Carradine refused to point up the racial issue. But, despite gas rationing, Carradine's three-week run broke all Playhouse records for Shakespeare, turned away...
Gaunt, 37-year-old Actor Carradine has played in 175 movies (at a top $3,500 a week) without wanting to play in any. His passion is Shakespeare (to understand the peculiar relationship of Othello and Iago, Carradine at first alternated in both roles); he got his first movie job because Cecil B. De Mille heard him spouting Hamlet as he tramped Hollywood Boulevard looking for work. For his present nationwide venture, Carradine sold his yacht and mortgaged his house. He is his own producer, director and sole owner as well as star. Says he: "That's the only...
...year's thought has fashioned both a better production and a better-balanced one; in terms of tense and vivid melodrama, indeed, this Othello is as good as Broadway can hope to see. If Robeson last week was a less moving figure than he was at Cambridge, he had tempered the violence that marred his scenes of crazed jealousy, he had better caught the hang of his lordly speeches, the meaning of his crucial scenes. Magnificent in stature, magnificent if a little too solemn in manner, magnificent if a little monotonous of voice, Robeson did not bring...
Conquest of Britain. He went to London, conquered it, then conquered half the cities of Europe. Back in England, he played in Show Boat, The Hairy Ape, Othello. The first night of the London Othello drew 20 curtain calls but, says Robeson, "it wasn't a success to me because I hadn't worked...
Merely for a Negro to be able to play Othello on Broadway, Robeson feels, has justified his decision. In terms of morale, its almost as if they abolished Jim Crow in the Army." For him, it is "killing two birds with one stone-I'm acting and I'm talking for Negroes in the way only Shakespeare can." He will play it as long as possible, all over the country (except in the South) even though his $1,500-a-week salary is a fraction of what he can earn singing...