Word: somberness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Somber and Unsure. Nixon's main preoccupation was drafting his inaugural address, which he is writing out on lined yellow legal pads. At week's end his Cabinet members assembled in New York at the Pierre hotel headquarters for two days of briefings with the heads of 21 task forces that have been studying the problems facing the incoming Administration. Henry Loomis, director of the policy task force, let it be known that there would be no sudden departures. "Don't expect dramatic shifts or changes," said Loomis. "Maybe Nixon will be able to slow down...
...find the solution. Unlike The Proposition, which thrives on set and improvised satirical sketches, the Light Company has taken its format less from Second City and more from the protest theatre-cabarets of the thirties. The five performers do a rehearsed collection of funny blackouts, serious protest sketches, and somber songs fraught with meaning. This is the stuff of which the Berliner Ensemble, Harold Rome's Pins and Needles, and Marc Blitzstein's Cradle Will Rock were made during the "red decade" so often compared to this...
...frail, solitary boat pitches and tosses in an angry, moonlit sea. An apocalyptic horseman gallops around a desolate racecourse, scythe at the ready. Christ, risen from the grave, appears to Mary Magdalene in a somber garden, Macbeth conspires with the witches on a wind-blasted heath, and Siegfried happens across the Rhine maidens bathing seductively in a river bordered by strangely twisted trees...
...Guthrie production, the cast wears somber masks as they did in the original Greek production, and for a while this adds a dimension of hieratic awe to the play, but soon the lack of human expressions reduces the effect to a kind of puppet show. The women's roles are played by men, also a custom with the ancients. At the outset, this is forceful and a trifle unsettling. Yet eventually the lack of sexual differentiation erases the central fact that this is a bitter domestic tragedy...
...theater and opera in Europe. Last week, at the opening of the La Scala opera season in Milan, his latest paintings hung as backdrops for his own new production of Verdi's Don Carlos. Ponelle's dark, brooding sets, painted on black velvet to emphasize the somber mood of the drama, suggested El Greco canvases come to life. The naturalistic direction he gave to the expert cast assembled by Conductor Claudio Abbado-and headed by Bulgarian Basso Nicolai Ghiaurov-gave psychological unity to Verdi's knotty tale of neuroticism and political intrigue in 16th century Spain...