Word: plays
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...most important work on a play is done in the last 10 days--when the actors can actually feel the steps they have to walk on and the costumes they have to wear. There should always be at least four full dress rehearsals before the opening. But I find this is rarely possible in the United States. Over here you don't get the sets and costumes till the day before the opening--hence the necessity for out-of-town tryouts...
...does directing opera differ from directing plays? (Guthrie staged the renovated Carmen at the Met.) "In opera there is far less inventing to be done by the director. The chief problem is dealing with people who are not actors and who resent acting, and with an ultra-conservative public. Also, a musical score says more about the finished product than the script of a play. Play actors have a more imaginative, personal contribution than musicians. Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy is actually a musical aria, but the 'score' gives only the meaning, not the melody...
Much of what Guthrie said was reworked from the talk, "An Audience of One," which he delivered in London before the Royal Society of Arts five years ago. This lecture was printed in the highly informative anthology Directing the Play: A Source Book of Stagecraft. Those interested in more of Guthrie's ideas or in the opinions of many other eminent directors can find them here...
Question: "What play of Shakespeare deals with jealousy aroused by a traitor out of pure hatred?" Answer: "Othello, of course." True; but Shakespeare had also treated this subject previously, for it is the main theme of Much Ado About Nothing. And he would return to it again, with self-interest substituted for pure hatred, in Cymbeline. The material for all three variations on the theme came from earlier sources...
...some marks of love in her," the remark takes on a fresh significance through having Beatrice at that moment bending over with her rump sticking out into the audience. Whatever Shakespeare would think of all this, everyone is having a whale of a good time, and takes neither the play nor his own role seriously...