Word: painterly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...hideous"), tried selling mackinaws in Gimbels' basement. He was also a member of the ménage in the Brooklyn Heights town house shared by W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Carson McCullers and Richard Wright. Smith was the dishwasher and furnace man. He also thought he was a painter. His first show, if little else, attracted William Saroyan, who instantly commissioned Smith, then 23, to design his Beautiful People for Broadway...
...original production. But Robert Walsh has shown his creativity by constructing an entirely new story line and thereby bringing a fresh view to the music. The American is a Cliffie-cum-green book-bag, who is in Paris for the summer. She has an affair with a Negro painter; they separate, reunite, travel around France, and she leaves at the end of the summer...
...interpreted as they were originally conceived. But other parts were completely reinterpreted. For example, Gershwin intended the American blues in the middle of the piece to represent nostalgia for home: in Walsh's plot it represents the Cliffie's sadness during her temporary separation from the painter. Later, the bright French can-can music becomes travelling music for the couple's holiday before she laves. By changing the implications of the music, Walsh adds fresh meaning to the music itself...
...dancing was also interestingly representational. When the girl first gets to Paris and attempts to adjust to her new environment, she is imitating the motions of people in street scenes and of the painter. But before she has left, she has affected as well as adjusted to a new community, for the others are imitating her. And probably the most beautiful part of the whole show is the representation of the love affair, and its culmination, in an unmistakable, yet tasteful manner...
Perhaps the most impressive single performance of the production was Marietta Stevenson's portrayal of the girl. Miss Stevenson is a fine dancer and actress. But most important, she seems to radiate personality from the stage. Ron Porter, the painter, was as expressive here as he was skillful and facile in the other two numbers...