Word: stage
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...machine addicts, hoofers, young men in love, old men in rags. Some of these people are as touching as his battered Arab who plays an ancient, mournful wail upon a harmonica. Some are as uproariously funny as his prodigious, W. C. Fieldsy liar (Len Doyle) who bursts on the stage with: "I don't suppose you ever fell in love with a midget weighing 39 pounds?" All are forlorn. But by means of a wealthy drunk (Eddie Dowling) with a generous purse Saroyan gives back to these people some of their hopes & dreams, something of their dignity...
Last week Director Michael Chekhov, nephew of famed Playwright Anton Chekhov, offered a dramatization of Dostoevsky's The Possessed. Probably the worst of all attempts to put Dostoevsky on the stage, it reduced the vast forest of his imagination to dead, sapless stumps. One grotesque, blighted scene followed another. The hero Stavrogin-one of the most astounding characters in fiction-became any confused young intellectual seeking an answer to life. The answer itself was pared down to a kind of Dos-toevsky-for-Tots...
...arty director, a not untalented cast was doomed from the start. Apparently assuming that twisted bodies mean twisted souls, they writhed like the Laocoon group. A revolutionary solemnly announced that only a small part of the human race have their heads cut off. The villain twitched about the stage like Mephistopheles with a tic. The audience half expected Fannie Brice to burst in, roll her eyes, and mutter as she did of yore: "It is always c-o-old in Roosia...
...blue sapphire, a memory of childhood, and a "gallant Gesture,"--these are the elements which Percival Wren molded into a chivalric romance set in his own time, the dying days of the Victorian era. Hs novel forms such exciting dramatic material that countless actors of stage and screen have tried their hand at it. Latest are Gary Cooper, Ray Milland, and Robert Preston as the "Beau Geste" trio...
...three grown men to dash off into the Sahara for the sake of a "gallant gesture," there is little to criticize in the production itself. William Well man is too good a director and Gary Cooper too good an actor to start letting their audiences down at this stage of the game. They have cooked up a show in the best traditions of his adventure, complete with a fort in the desert and thousands and thousands of Arabs biting the dust. There's the character of the hard-as-nails Army sergeant this time a Russian in the French Foreign...