Word: stage
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Stage-door Janies have always been more demonstrative than stage-door Johnnies. Juvenal railed bitterly against flirtatious Roman ladies in whose eyes any gladiator, however ugly, was "transformed into a Hyacinthus." No Ziegfeld girl ever inspired a male reaction remotely comparable to the mass hysteria of Sinatra's swooners in the 1940s or Elvis Presley's frantic fanatics in the 1950s. Such adulatory demonstrations were mild, however, compared with those of a new and even more liberated breed of female hero-worshipers. They are the "groupies." Their heroes are rock musicians-and their worship knows no bounds...
Probably the best-known Wagnerian tenor of the century, Danish-born Lauritz Melchior, retired from the opera stage 19 years ago. Since then, he observes accurately enough, "there has been no one to replace me." One reason is that his major roles require a Heldentenor (heroic tenor), that rare breed of singer with the stature of a Valhalla deity, the projection of a diesel horn and the stamina of a Channel swimmer...
What will come after? Nobody knows. What the prevalence of "art for art's sake" creations mainly shows is that artists feel compelled to satirize the status quo. In this sense, the stage seems curiously akin to 1953. That was the year when Robert Rauschenberg set the stage for pop with his own contribution to the "art for art's sake" genre: erasing an Abstract Expressionist drawing by Willem de Kooning...
...gentleman's Hamlet. It evokes the bloody tragedies of revenge from which Shakespeare lifted some of his plots. In fairly vengeful but clean editing, Director Tony Richardson has cut the play to less than three hours running time, erasing a gravedigger here and a courtier there. Returning to stage direction after five years of indifferent film making, Richardson provides no innovative fireworks, but with a firebrand like Williamson on view, who would have noticed...
...line's phantasmagoria of apology and accusation calls for surrealist stage scenery and howling symbolism. A Seine barge becomes a houseboat on the Styx with doomed souls; Charon paddles with bones. Céline submerges readers in his stream-of-consciousness style, a brutal staccato in which about five words stutter out for every three dots. It sustains the impression of uncontrollable anger and unassuageable hatred as Céline rants against every contemporary literary and political figure, against the partisans who looted his apartment in Paris, against the post-Vichy government that imprisoned him. All is'"venom...