Word: shaws
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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University College is experiencing an upsurge of interest in the dramatic arts, and its newly-built campus theatre has facilities far superior to those provided at Harvard. Recent productions include HMS Pinafore, Shaw's Gentle People, and Mozart's opera, The Magic Flute. The director, a young and, not unexpectedly, bearded Englishman, felt satisfied with the calibre of the performers, but voiced the eternal plaint of the director in every land: his major problem was simply to remain solvent...
Because I found this article so interesting, I thought it worth while pointing out one inaccuracy in it, which I am sure you too would wish to correct. Mr. Titcomb rightly comments upon the theatrical "coup" of obtaining the rights to Shaw's Pygmalion, but incorrectly assigns the credit for so doing to Mr. Jerome Kilty. Mr. Kilty, as local audiences well know, is an extremely talented and valuable member of our company, but it was Group 20's Managing-Director, Miss Alison Ridley, who was entirely responsible for obtaining the rights to the play, after six months of work...
...Irwin Shaw has taken Patate from the French of Marcel Achard, and he would be well advised to put it back. As a laugh show, this "New Comedy" suffers from a paucity of laughs. And since the script is not a gimmick adorned by gags, in the fashion of most American comedies, but a closely plotted dramatic whole, there seems very little possibility of its being rewritten and rescued by skillful gagsmithing...
...willingly complied, and chose Shaw's Saint Joan. On hearing of the choice, Shaw cabled: "Delighted to hear St Joan being done at Harvard stop have always wanted to see Joan played by male." The choice was excellent; and the production, in Sanders Theatre, was magnificent. Typical of Kilty's directive imagination was the decision to perform the coronation scene in the transept of Memorial Hall. The audience moved out of Sanders and became the congregation; the scene was played on a specially constructed altar at the north end, while fire-department searchlights outdoors focussed on the stained-glass windows...
...This is not surprising, since the group had only the second-best talent to work with. The HDC also had recurring financial trouble. The 1948 spring show was the first HDC production to have its whole run downtown; the group rented the Plymouth (now the Gary) Theatre for Irwin Shaw's The Survivors, and went $5,000 into the red. The next fall production also lost heavily. In a desperate gamble, the HDC undertook an ambitious $9,000 mounting of Kaufman and Hart's The Man Who Came to Dinner, with Monty Woolley as imported guest star. Thanks largely...