Word: ranevskaya
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...grab bag of general histrionics to carry them through. After Ken Tigar recovered from some painful timing slips in the first act he gave a striking portrayal of a serf turned manager. His nagging, casually enunciated, and loud voice move against the general strength of Marilyn Pitzele's Ranevskaya. But in his most important scene where he exults over buying out the estate of his former landlords, his marvelous whine was crippled by a series of stock agonizing gestures...
...Tyrone Guthrie, gives a balanced rendition of Chekhov's complex last play. The playwright set out to write a comedy about the social types in a changing Russia, but his characters, while absurd in their inflexibility, are also elegiac in their ineffectuality. Jessica Tandy plays an aristocratic Ranevskaya, as flowery as her beloved orchard and just as fruitless. As the arriviste, Lee Richardson is believably ambivalent as he reluctantly reaps triumph over his former employers. Hume Cronyn, however, sounds too nasally shrewd to be the bumbling clerk...
...easy skill was the sight of a living tradition. The production followed Konstantin Stanislavsky's original staging. He first presented Dead Souls in the early 1930's, and several of the actors that were then with the company played with it in New York. Alla Tarasova who played Madame Ranevskaya in The Cherry Orchard, portrayed the young Anya in the same play when the Moscow Art made its 1923 tour. The entire cast seems secure in a form which they have developed, working together first as students and later as a repertory company...
...nurtured the most hopeful stems in his grim orchard, and pruned out the darker growths in his vision of social decay. Trofimov, for example, a pompous dreamer in most Western versions, becomes more the fiercely earnest youth, obviously the bright hope of a Soviet future. And Gayev and Madame Ranevskaya, usually played as cultivated bumblers, appear as sober, ordinary people overtaken by cold reality...
Playwright Logan's Lucy Andree Rans-dall is turned into a rather more aware heroine, and amorously lost lady, than Chekhov's Madame Ranevskaya. Helen Hayes plays the part with resourcefulness and brightness, and serves (more than anything in the play) as a kind of handrail through the evening. For Logan has not learned Chekhov's trick of creating drama by evading it, has not his ability to seem at once compassionate and inexorable...