Word: stagecrafter
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Unlike the exuberant, often excessive Italian baroque artists around him, Poussin stripped his paintings down to cool, hard, brightly colored figures gesturing like stagecraft as he recounted his fables. The narrative content of his art instantly made him a mentor for dull academic followers who found cartooning easier than esthetics. But he alone knew how to manifest the inward emotions of his mythical people in outward physical postures. While Narcissus, for example, gazes in the rapturous vanity of youth at his own reflection in a pool, his forgotten lover Echo, is depicted in ashen tones and fuzzy contours...
...result, by general agreement, was the most exciting interpretation of the Nibelungen legend ever. The usually reserved audience in Bayreuth's red brick Festspielhaus stamped and cheered till the rafters shook. Munich's conservative Siiddeutsche Zeitung described the production as "a truly sensational feat of music and stagecraft, which surpassed one's highest expectations. A pace-setting event in the history of opera...
...moving, as well as more accurate, to have the aristocrat leave and the doctor face his fate. Furthermore, the episode subverts the play's moral stance. It is morally impermissible for the doctor to accept his life at the cost of the prince's. Even so, the stagecraft is considerably less faulty than the logic. Miller has written an equation with a missing term-power. Power precedes responsibility. One is not accountable for events that one is powerless to avert or affect...
...voice was not very shapely either, but through intermittent recitative, consummate stagecraft, and the selection of the ablest contemporary poets as her lyricists, she convinced even a contemporary London music critic, George Bernard Shaw, that she was "technically, highly accomplished." Among other aficionados: Spain's King Alphonso XIII, though he laughed at all the wrong parts, and Britain's roistering King Edward VII, who saw her each summer at Marienbad at the luncheons that he reserved for the untouchables...
...this is just about all the production has to offer. What would have been a fine background for an inspired Caesar seems wasted on pallid acting and stagecraft. Never is there an ingenious answer to the technical problems the play poses. Rarely does the acting become sharp; it never becomes inspired...