Word: stage
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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John Henry (by Roark Bradford; music by Jacques Wolfe; produced by Sam Byrd) took Paul Robeson back to Broadway after nearly eight years. The stage seemed set for a great return. The play was by the man whose stories had inspired The Green Pastures. Robeson's role was magnificently suited to him-that of huge John Henry, the legendary strong man, the Negro Paul Bunyan, of the Black River country...
John Henry performed his feats as though they were vaudeville acts. The music rose & fell, ebbed & flowed, without seeming to come from the hearts of the black people who sang it. Crowds moved sheeplike about the stage as though at the bidding of a traffic cop. Even Robeson could not save the situation. He could not carry on his back 800 pounds of bad play...
Helen Hayes went on the stage at five. From child parts to Little Lord Fauntleroy to Pollyanna to the flapper in Clarence, on to the big roles of her mature years, Helen moved steadily forward-and her mother with her. Whenever Helen signed a contract, her mother leaned over her shoulder. Whenever Helen was on stage, her mother stood in the wings. Mother was even privy to the "snares" Helen laid to catch her husband, Playwright Charles MacArthur...
Tenor Melchior is not averse to wassailing, but he takes his Wagner straight. After dinner on Wagner nights he calls for his roomy Cadillac and is driven with his wife, Kleinchen (Little One), to the stage door of Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House. He climbs the creaky stairs to the primo tenore's dusty dressing room,* fumbles around among the costumes of Tenors Richard Crooks and Giovanni Martinelli for his own raiment of deer skins and knightly robes. He washes himself in an antiquated, marble-topped washstand, glowers at the dead flies in the basin-shaped chandeliers...
...great hunter on the stage, Lauritz Melchior in real life is hardly less terrible. The deerskin costume he wears as Siegfried is the skin of a deer that he shot and skinned himself on a hunting trip in Germany. When he can get a week off from the opera, he makes for the woods of Maine or North Dakota, where he prowls around with a brass hunting horn and a brace of dogs, gunning for ducks, rabbits, deer. He has shot panthers in South America, once bagged a 1,600-lb. bison in North Dakota. In New Brunswick he shot...