Word: precurtain
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...modern world, stress usually takes other forms. But the fight-or-flight response hasn't changed. Sometimes it's still useful: a demanding job can lead to a sense of pride; a bout of precurtain jitters can motivate a spectacular performance. But many modern stresses are continuing, not acute, and arise in situations we can neither fight nor flee: an unreasonable boss, a harrowing commute, a stormy relationship, a plummeting stock market, a general sense that life is out of control...
Legend's End. Tickets for the six performances were sold out weeks in advance, and a glittering audience of the city's high society turned out for opening night. Jean-Louis Barrault, director of the Odeon Theater, declared in a precurtain speech that since the Odeon was flying the American flag that night, the theater was now the 51st state...
With the eyes of Texas upon her, Callas suffered spasms of precurtain nerves. "If you cut me with a knife," said she, "no blood would run out." But she turned up onstage convincingly gaunt, wild-eyed, almost green with malevolence and makeup. She paced the stage and clawed the air like a caged lioness. Callas took twelve curtain calls, earned, mighty critical bravos ("terrifying," "elemental," "chilling") for a superb dramatic display. As for her voice, critics as usual found it uneven; the Daily Telegraph judged it "disappointingly small and lacking in resonance." But without the Callas dramatic presence, critics agreed...
...last week's Cavalleria, from the moment Tucker's fervent and sensuous voice sounded offstage in Turiddu's precurtain love song, the audience was his. Dressed in a tinhorn gambler's dark shirt and the cheap Sunday suit of a Sicilian villager, Tucker swaggered about the stage in response to broken pleas from Santuzza (well sung by Veteran Zinka Milanov). He powerfully thundered forth his challenge to Alfio, husband of his mistress, and in the final great aria movingly sang his farewell to his mother, the sure delicacy of his voice topped off by his rough...
Towards 4:30* on that "first night" afternoon, some 1,200 people made the Martin Beck Theater resonant with that exhilarating precurtain buzz, like leaves before a storm, which has been familiar to theatergoers for 2,500 years. There was plenty to buzz about. There was the exciting fact that The Iceman Cometh was the first new O'Neill play to be produced since Days without End (1934). There was its cryptic title, clumsily poetic, naively sardonic and intensely O'Neillian, which caused one foreboding wag to suggest that a better name would be The Ice Tray Always...
| 1 |