Word: prosceniums
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Shockers abound. A butterfly is burned alive, and a Buddhist monk pantomimes immolation. An American G.I., in the form of an enormous skeletal death god, hangs in front of the proscenium with blackened doll babies in its eye sockets, a Superman shield on its chest, barbed-wire guts and a six-foot bomb in place of genitalia. An American colonel is satirized as being "anti-Communist, anti-queer, anti-drink, anti-cigarettes." At the end of the first act, the entire cast appears onstage wearing paper bags over their heads. Whimpering, they stumble over the footlights and into the auditorium...
Under a narrow ceiling and then suddenly into the auditorium. But Midas has been there first. The boxes, the ceiling, the proscenium arch, the curtain, and the fifth violinist's teeth are gold. So is a sculpture above the stage that looks like a cubist's idea of a squatting giraffe. In the old Met, the gold was dark, worked and decorated; here it is plain and so bright it hurts the eyes. Little diamond mustaches are affixed to the boxes. And there are more star-shaped chandeliers. Clearly, someone got up one morning out of his Procrustean bed with...
Grand Irrationalities. At that, the showcase easily upstaged whatever took place behind the proscenium. The cavernous auditorium (3,800 seats-179 more than in the old house) is an acoustical success. There, and throughout the red-carpeted corridors, lobbies and unfurling marble staircases, Architect Wallace K. Harrison
Leontyne Price wants a chunk of the stage floor. Richard Tucker has his bid in for a slab of the proscenium arch inscribed VERDI. Rise Stevens has al ready filched the brass numeral 11 from the door of her old dressing room. Regine Crespin would like the toilet seat from No. 10; she plans to install it in her own bathroom...
...conventional approach to Chekhov emphasizes detachment and the fine etching of character. The proscenium arch is mandatory, the sets are deep, the action well separated from the audience. The long, pregnant pause is preferred to the passionate cry. This approach plays up the interaction of secondary "characters" for poignancy and comic effect, and plays down the potential melodrama of violent love, suicide and duels. Jonathan Black's staging of The Seagull at the Loeb last season was a fine production within this convention...