Word: plays
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...next offering, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, had to be held over for an extra week. This eloquent and moving tragedy of the little man is surely the finest serious American play since Eugene O'Neill; and it enjoyed a distinguished performance under a British director, Basil Langton, despite the fact that it is an intensely American work...
...major reservation concerned the choice of background music, which was decidedly off-key with the rest of the production. For a play as purely American as this, surely something more appropriate could have been found than the exotic Brazil-inanities of Villa-Lobos...
Jerome Kilty thrives on challenges and obstacles; and once again he took a thorny classic and turned it into a viable and engrossing theatrical experience. The Merchant of Venice is a good play; but director Kilty made it seem like a great play, and this was no mean feat. One forgot that the play is poorly constructed and rather liberally endowed with passages where Shakespeare definitely nodded...
There must be at least half as many ways to play Shylock as to play Hamlet, and most of them have been tried. Max Adrian gave us an unsympathetic Shylock--bitter, gloating, sadistic. Adrian is constitutionally incapable of doing a slipshod job; and this was a notable performance. Morris Carnovsky's unsurpassable portrayal last summer was an extraordinarily complex one; and it was no reflection on Adrian if he could not match it. Adrian's Shylock was simpler and more straightforward, and wholly consistent. And he adopted a faster tempo than most actors, avoiding exaggeration and the temptation to make...
...casket-choosing scenes can be a bore, too. But Jay, doubling as the Prince of Arragon, emerged as a delightful fop. Robert Evans made the Prince of Morocco a glum, dead-pan character, with unfortunate results; the only way to save him is to play him for comedy, as Earle Hyman did so tellingly last year...