Word: protagonist
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...decayed Thanksgiving turkey. In the orchestra pit the staid Metropolitan Opera orchestra surged and noodled conventionally through Wagner's foaming music. But the cavorting it accompanied would have turned a Wagnerian's hair white in a single act. No Tannhäuser was its central protagonist, but mad King Ludwig of Bavaria (Wagner's patron), who reared and reeled in the costume of Lohengrin. Before him, like something sired by George White out of Krafft-Ebing, pranced a bleached Venus (Nini Theilade), a hoop-pantalooned Lola Montez (Ludwig's grandfather's mistress) with a belt...
...preface, Thomas Wolfe declared this "the most objective novel that I have written," expressed hope that "the protagonist will illustrate in his own experience every one of us. . . ." Exhausted readers, dazed and deafened from their long buffeting, may seek in vain for Wolfe's "objectivity," for an identity...
...because the whole production was one of the finest the Metropolitan has mounted in years. Aside from the fact that it was sung in Italian, it would doubtless have pleased hard-drinking neurotic Modeste Moussorgsky, who, when he wrote the opera in 1873, attempted to make the People the protagonist, gave the chorus a great "Revolutionary Scene," in which he planted ideas which did not come to fruit in Russia until 1917. This scene, which ends with a song sung by an idiot (signifying plenty), underscores its point, as the curtain falls, with red fire in Russia...
...anthologies,, made himself their best-known spokesman. The Fathers, his first novel, exhibits Border-State mentality at its most devious. The story, laid in Virginia and Maryland during the first days of the Civil War, is recalled 50 years later by an old bachelor doctor named Lacy Buchan. The protagonist, however, is the narrator's brother-in-law, a handsome, money-making Marylander named George Posey, whom the narrator worshiped but only vaguely understood. The elder Buchans, Jeffersonian aristocrats, understand Posey even less. He flouts their social codes, which he dismisses as the unpractical rigmarole of idealists who "think...
Current convention for producers of Shaw plays is to dress up the protagonist in whiskers to resemble George Bernard Shaw. Thus disguised, Actor Philip Bourneuf talks his way brilliantly through the heroically talky role of Sir Arthur Chavender. No drunken skipper, but a tired, shilly-shallying Prime Minister, Sir Arthur is discovered, when On the Rocks begins, fiddling aimlessly about the interior of No. 10 Downing Street while an angry mob howls in the streets outside. Halfway through Act I, he receives a visit from a mysterious Lady in Grey (Estelle Winwood) who whisks him away to a sanatorium...