Word: scene
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...century), the cave or stable in Bethlehem had been an object of veneration. St. Justin Martyr mentioned the present Grotto of the Nativity as early as 155; a century later, Origen discussed the authenticity of the site (even Christianity's enemies, he said, admitted it). The manger scene-with the Wise Men from Matthew and the shepherds from Luke-is one of the oldest Christian traditions. It is also the easiest to dramatize. Canticles of the 4th, 5th and 6th centuries-designed to teach doctrine to an illiterate public as well as to entertain-were the precursors...
...Second Bethlehem. After the elements of the Nativity scene were established, the first recorded real crèche was made in 1223 by St. Francis of Assisi. Christmas had always been for him the "Feast of Feasts" when "God condescended to be fed by human love." In the church at the town of Greccio, three years before he died, St. Francis preached before a manger filled with hay, beside which stood an ox and an ass. Wrote an early biographer, Thomas of Celano: "Greccio was transformed almost into a second Bethlehem, and that wonderful night seemed like the fullest...
...queen and her ladies in waiting sewed silk and velvet costumes for the new figures. One of the most striking of the Neapolitan presepios, owned by Collector Marcello Hallecker of Naples, is shown on TIME'S cover this week. Typical of many a presepio of the period, the scene has been arranged on a replica mountainside 12 ft. across. The manger itself is all but obscured by the teeming, noisy crowd that moils about the inn, oblivious of the vertiginous angels or of the event they herald. And yet the actions of the ingeniously lifelike, exquisitely crafted figures-whether...
...final scene the audience was deeply moved by Oedipus (Tenor Gerhard Stolze) staggering onstage before Designer Caspar Neher's abstract backdrop (it looked like a microphotograph of a germ culture) and raising his sightless eyes with a beatific smile. Soprano Varnay refused to watch from the wings because "I dream about such things." Reported TIME Correspondent Paul Moor: "For a non-German-speaking audience, this opera has long, boring stretches because the music is so subservient to the text. Nevertheless, Orff has created a theater work of gripping power...
...most of its length to make the most dangerous conceivable situation in human history seem rather silly and science-fictional. The players look half dead long before the fallout gets them. But what could any actors make of a script that imagines the world's end as a scene in which Ava Gardner stands and wistfully waves goodbye as Gregory Peck sails sadly into the contaminated dawn...