Word: playing
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Kyser does not play up to the TV camera, because "if I'm having fun I ain't looking anywhere." Program suggestions from his sponsor (Ford Dealers) and TV Director Earl Ebi are welcome so long as they do not violate the College's basic Simple-Simon format. Remembering the one disastrous show that resulted when he took his wife's advice, Kyser says firmly: "It's only when you try to get too professional and want to class it up that you fall flat on your face...
Strauss was by no means happy with the way conductors handled Beethoven and his favorite, Mozart. "Some so-called wizards of the baton," he wrote, "play Beethoven and Mozart finales as though they were riding a shying horse and had lost the reins." Strauss also felt that he himself had been badly dealt with by publishers, stage directors and actors. His father, first horn at the Munich court opera, had to contribute 1,000 marks ($238) to the printing cost of the F-Minor Symphony. "My fee for Don Juan," Strauss recorded, "was 800 marks ... for Eulenspiegel...
...Strauss's most difficult productions to get on the boards was his Salome, written in 1903. Asked to play the lead, Soprano Marie Wittich at first refused with the explanation: "I can't do this; I'm a decent woman." Even the composer's father had his doubts, the son remembered. "Mein Gott," he exclaimed, "what nervous music! It makes me feel as though my pants were full of grabbling May bugs...
...play chronicles a cruise taken by two old school friends (Ruth Ford and Ruth Matteson) with their dissimilar and discordant husbands, one a businessman (Arthur Margetson), the other a novelist (Tom Helmore). The wives shortly espy a tourist named Clutterbuck (Charles Campbell) on whom they had both, it transpires, bestowed their pre-matrimo-nial favors. Simultaneously the husbands discover they have both enjoyed the pre-matrimonial favors of Clutterbuck's wife (Claire Carleton). From there in, the play concentrates on how the six of them purr and perspire, recall the past and are moved to repeat it; on their...
...blinking lights, swinging doors, even false statements in the program. Yet The Closing Door is much more seriously written than the usual thriller and is full of clinical detail and therapeutic advice, some of it Freud and some of it scrambled. If this adds to the weight of the play, it only proves, in terms of good melodrama, a dead weight. Toward the end, however, as the adolescent events that poisoned Vail's life emerge simultaneously with the frightful method he took to find release, The Closing Door achieves an extremely gruesome ten minutes...