Word: schaefer
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...director of the play, George Schaefer takes ample advantage of the ties between three very different characters. In fact, the polarity of these relationships is the play's chief virtue. It provokes laughs when laughs are necessary, and when skillful acting steers the comedy, The Southwest Corner has a tragic tone as well...
...last week's NBC-TV Macbeth was a triumph. The camera work was so carefully plotted that, on the screen, the play had a novel air of extreme fluidity. Oddly enough, because of the narrow range imposed by the color-TV control board, Director George Schaefer used only three cameras on the set and one on a platform, instead of the five cameras that handled the black-and-white telecast of Hamlet two years ago. However Schaefer achieved his remarkable mobility by keeping his camera moving into and out of the scene during each long sequence...
...Schaefer concedes that the smoothness of the operation resulted from months of the kind of planning that is impossible on ordinary shows. Long before Macbeth went into rehearsal, he was spending five to seven hours a day over the blueprints of the set, blocking out each scene with miniature cameras and calling the shots that would be used on the air. He was also helped by the physical properties of the set itself. Where the Hamlet set had been built in a circle with the cameras stationed in the center and radiating outward, Macbeth was all of a piece, like...
Except for the enforced shortage of cameras, color TV worked no production hardship. "We just went ahead as though color hadn't been invented," says Schaefer. One unfortunate result: after the murder of the King, the hands of Evans and Judith Anderson (Lady Macbeth) looked appropriately bloody on black-and-white; on color TV they seemed to be literally dripping with gore...
...feeling. So did Judith Anderson, who was superb in the sleepwalking scene. The rest of the cast did not always do so well: the three weird sisters, along with many of the supporting players, often seemed as drowned in gibberish as in mist. For next season, Evans and Schaefer are thinking of deserting Shakespeare for Shaw: Evans has already taken TV options on The Devil's Disciple and Man and Superman...