Word: playe
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...masterpiece, Don Giovanni. He had once helped Bruno Walter produce it in Salzburg, and had put it on himself in St. Louis. "Always before it is considered first of all music, second music, third music," he said. "Now, first of all, we try to make it a play...
Halasz' company lacked the Metropolitan Opera's roster of big names and its opulence; but it was also free of the Met's frequent stodginess. The actors did not move like automatons; the story was played, instead of merely being staged as pageantry. By careful auditioning, Halasz picked singers who looked, as well as sang, the part. Says he: "Generally speaking, you know, Tristan was not 50 years old, nor did Isolde weigh 250 pounds." The production, unhampered by clumsy stage machinery, had pace. Halasz had picked up some ideas from Broadway and Hollywood, including pretty girls...
Medea (freely adapted from the Greek of Euripides by Robinson Jeffers; produced by Robert Whitehead & Oliver Rea) seemed to many first-nighters last week what it seemed to Macaulay a hundred years ago-Euripides' greatest play. To be sure, Euripides didn't have much to do with last week's enthusiasm. More in the limelight was Poet Robinson Jeffers for his quite free, sometimes florid, but generally effective adaptation. Still more in the limelight was John Gielgud for his skillful staging (though not for his performance as Jason). Most in the limelight was Judith Anderson...
...California presentation of his Greekish Tower Beyond Tragedy. The whacking Broadway success of Medea has made up to Jeffers the recent Broadway failure of a dramatization of his poem, Dear Judas (TIME, Oct. 20). The 60-year-old poet thinks now that he might even try writing an original play "if I knew what to write about...
...Druid Circle is an understanding and very often interesting play, but not quite a success. It is too full of clashing moods and shifting pressures. Between the university and the professor is more difference than at first appears-all the difference between the stuff of satire and the stuff of drama. With fluttering spinsters and tea-table gossip constantly cutting in on the professor's story, The Druid Circle seems too intense at moments, yet not intense enough as a whole. Playwright van Druten, who as a young man taught for a time at the sort of college...