Word: stagecrafter
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Furthermore, Dunlop, who has a nimble intelligence and no inconsiderable gifts in stagecraft, seems either to have missed or ignored the moral point of the play. Rome is at the flash point at which a republic blazes into tyranny. Into the crucible of history, the conspirators, and especially Brutus, pour the proposition that evil means (the assassination of Caesar) justify good ends (the preservation of the citizens' freedom). And history, time and time again, has verified the answer proffered by the play: the ends never justify the means; the means degrade and become the ends...
...Bergman's classic comedy about mismatched lovers, Smiles of a Summer Night. Perhaps to avoid potentially odious comparisons, Prince has switched the setting from Sweden to turn-of-the-century Vienna, but he might as well have shot the film in a Burbank TV studio. A wizard of stagecraft, he seems to freeze behind the camera. Since the photography is usually static and the editing monotonous, the lyrical flow of the original production evaporates completely. The movie's arty opening and closing scenes, which suggest that we are watching a play within a film, only underscore Prince...
Movies still are pretty much a national virus, and to people who really love them, "Citizen Kane" is the item to measure the others against. It's such a self-conscious work that every frame lectures the viewer on film and stagecraft both--and even though its technical precocity makes it something of an exhausting film to watch, you want to watch it over and over after it's finished. "Kane" is the object lesson in American movies--in itself, in legend, in its tradition. It's not the starting point, but the center around which everything else moves...
...million. He must economize, but still make opera look grand. He should also take no more than a few seconds changing scenes within acts, the restless bottoms of Met patrons being what they are. Voilà! the unit set, that occasional blessing and frequent curse of modern stagecraft...
...ever there was a play that has no business being a movie, Equus is it. This drama about a stableboy's crime of passion owed much of its three-year Broadway run to theatrical devices that cannot be reproduced on film. Strip the stagecraft away, and all that remains of Equus is 2% hours of talky debate about shopworn ideas. The poor play stumbles and falls before it can break from the gate...