Word: playing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Middle of the Night (Sudan; Columbia) transforms an honest but clumsy play by Paddy Chayefsky into a cruelly beautiful and moving film, a story of life and love as a man grows older. The man (Fredric March) is a clothing manufacturer-shrewd, hardworking, decent. At 56, still "a vigorous man with normal appetites," still fairly attractive to women, he finds himself a widower. What to do with the rest of his life? At first he simply works, works, works. After a while he starts spending time at his married daughter's house, playing with the baby. Then...
...evil act. which should dominate the book, is not made really believable. The last chapters of the novel have the faintly embarrassing tone of a sermon in jazz language attempted by an overearnest cleric. The tormented murderer asks: "Why is it that if we could all learn to play together the way we did-why is it we couldn't learn to live together?" The narrator's sanctimonious reply: "Woody, if we could-even between us-answer that simple question-seemingly simple-we could turn this into a hip world." But the world remains sadly square...
...warm, romantic production of Much Ado About Nothing has got the Group 20 Players off to an impressive start in their seventh season. Their approach to the play is avowedly different from customary ones; and this approach took a good deal of courage...
...Cymbeline. But at this time, Shakespeare was just casting about for a convenient skeleton to flesh. The whole business of the tragic slandering and the ensuing deception he took from older sources, and clearly wasted little effort on; his treatment of them is decidedly thin. The greatness of the play lies in what Shakespeare himself invented: the dazzing comedy of Beatrice and Benedick, who "never meet but there's a skirmish of wit between them"; and the inspired farce of Dogberry, Verges, and the night watch. (When he used Much Ado as the basis of his last opera, Berlioz...
Most productions of the play whip up the comedy and farce furiously, and abridge or soft-pedal the Claudio-Hero plot. Other things being equal, this may be the best solution--it is certainly the easiest. But Rabb has favored or scrimped no element in the play; he has lavished as much care on the serious as on the comic and farcical aspects. Consequently we can best see the play as it really is: when the lines soar, this production soars; when the writing flags, so does the production. The director's decision was daring, dangerous, and difficult...