Word: papp
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Nevertheless, Jacobs is backing Papp's efforts; this season the Shubert organization gave Papp's off-off-Broadway Public Theater $150,000 to present ten new playwrights. The grants reflect the change in Shubert, the multimillion-dollar real-estate empire. As landlord of 16% Broadway houses, it was for decades a powerful and increasingly neglectful influence. In 1972, Broadway's blackest year, Shubert was hit hard. It even seemed likely that many Broadway houses would be replaced by office buildings but for the kind of chance known as "actor's luck"; the theater slump had coincided...
Almost every producer believes some form of government help is necessary. Papp and Producer David Merrick opt for straight subsidies. Gerald Schoenfeld, co-executive director of Shubert, thinks that angels should be allowed to deduct investments from their taxes and that the taxes paid by the Broadway area should be pumped back into it. Subsidies from public and private sources already support the flourishing nonprofit theaters that now feed Broadway. The most promising young playwrights have come from them too. Terrence McNally (Bad Habits, The Ritz) got his start at the Manhattan Theater Club. So did Mark Medoff (The Wager...
Though it is an aesthetic dud, A Doll's House is a sold-out hit for its seven-week run. Joseph Papp engineered it that way by settling for star power. This is faintly amusing considering his long and loud castigations of Broadway commercialism. Too bad he didn't consult a Broadway producer before casting the play. ∙T.E.Kalem
...reveal a contemporary parable, freeing the play at last from its wrappings of earlier sentimentality-productions shrouded in tulle and Mendelssohn. Post-Brook directors have no choice but to grapple with this evolution. It is a task clearly beyond Edward Berkely, who has directed the revival at Joseph Papp's Newhouse Theater in Manhattan. He has interred the play in 20th century sentimentality. The actors do their own thing, and the play becomes farce. Unloved Helena is a coy baby-talker and Poltergeist Puck a Harlem Globetrotter; the fairy attendants are reduced to midgets, and Bottom bloats into...
...easy way merely emphasize Shakespeare's use of characters as megaphones. His words are what matter, and of the cast only Oberon (George Hearn) and Titania (Kathleen Widdoes) can get their tongues round blank verse. This raises an overdue point. William Shakespeare has done a lot for Joseph Papp. Surely, Papp could return the compliment and insist that actors be given voice lessons when he mounts a Shakespeare play at one of the seven Manhattan theaters under his dominion. Gina Mallet