Word: playing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...work should be studied by any actor who ever cherished his craft. There is a silent music in Arvin Brown's direction as he moves his players through arpeggios of violence and a discriminating counterpoint of darkness and light to give a final touch of distinction to a play worthy of every tribute...
...these much-touted troupes, San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater, has now arrived in Manhattan. ACT is distressingly average, and its three-play fare is flaccidly representative of regional-theater programming: one funny (A Flea in Her Ear), one classic (The Three Sisters) and one warmed-over Broadway Provocative (Tiny Alice). When he worked off-Broadway, ACT'S director William Ball was a sensitive, scrupulous directorial craftsman (Under Milk Wood, Ivanov). With his own company, Ball has become a puppetmaster who makes his players dance more than they...
...Sisters is open to several interpretations, but to make it insipid, boring and silly requires Ball's gall as well as his company's ineptitude. As the guest director of Georges Feydeau's A Flea in Her Ear, Gower Champion manages to intrude defects on the play that it never possessed. Feydeau was to the French bedroom farce what Einstein was to the theory of relativity. With gimmicks and gaucherie, Champion botches all of Feydeau's intricately precise equations of who-is-sleeping-with-whom-be-hind-which-door? As far as ACT's trip...
...lovers destroy each other. The Bed Sitting Room carries reminders of both the other films and of other styles. Indeed, it shows its lineage proudly: a little Marx Brothers, settings out of Krazy Kat, a lot of The Goon Show (altogether appropriate, since the co-author of the original play, Spike Milligan, was one of the show's originators). Yet it is indisputably a Lester film, a product of a passionate, painful comic vision that is helping to establish him, more and more, as one of the world's most original film makers...
Still, the proceedings-adapted from Peter Shaffer's opulent play-are well managed by Director Irving Lerner in a style that might be called Eisenstein modern, and devotees of the Hollywood spectacular will cherish the bravado of the two leading actors. Robert Shaw bellows and glowers in his ornate armor like a psyched-up Errol Flynn. Christopher Plummer, in cloak, loincloth, gold necklaces and flowing hair, looks like the lead singer of a particularly exotic rock group, and his attempts at a Peruvian dialect occasionally make him sound like one. His performance is unabashed camp, consisting about equally...