Word: stagecrafter
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...remains only a lucid diagram. Summer and Smoke has moments of sad, sharp insight, but little coherence and intensity as a whole. The reason is partly structural. In none of his plays has Tennessee Williams made a classic frontal assault on drama. Writing episodically, with tricks of stagecraft and a crutchlike use of offstage music, he has always trusted to a vague sense of poetry and a vivid sense of theater to pull him through. Here the sense of theater is weakened by wordiness and the episodic method is inadequate. The episodes themselves are often skimpy and short-breathed...
...board would let him clean house "without handcuffs," and do some streamlining, he would personally foot any losses for the year (obviously he didn't think there would be any). Billy would "introduce modern lighting, staging, choreography and certain other elements of present-day stagecraft . . . without tampering with what is fine and traditionally right about grand opera." He also thought he could "fire and enthuse the staff into doing a more exciting job"-and the Met could certainly use a little of that. Chairman Sloan's reply was respectful as could be: he wanted to have another lunch...
...been less kind to The Cradle itself. It seemed more strident and less exciting; it had also become less topical. Its cockiness about labor- which had led it to treat the bosses with contemptuous laughter rather than bitter words-seemed early New Deal, not postwar. The Cradle's stagecraft, far from seeming daring, almost seemed dated. Only where Blitzstein's best talent-for mimicking fashionable chatter and parodying popular songs-came into play, was The Cradle really...
...keep his audience on the edge of their chairs, Caniff, a frustrated actor, has borrowed many a trick of stagecraft. He is a staunch Alfred Hitchcock fan, fond of the director's way of opening a suspenseful sequence with a silent sound track. He has aped the best Hollywood techniques (and some of the worst) by switches from closeups to long shots to trick camera angles-and fadeouts with profiles turned to a corn-tinted sunset. He depends on Leo Ardavany, a neighbor who manages the movie house at nearby Haverstraw, to tip him off when a useful picture...
...opera season in Salome. Don Ottavio was sung by Yugoslav Tenor Anton Dermota, whose performance was uneven, but at its best better than any Don Ottavio that Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera has heard in years. Eight years of Hitlerism had not destroyed the old Austro-German tradition of stagecraft; Don Giovanni had been so painstakingly rehearsed that every part added to the whole. But the opening night's applause was more polite than enthusiastic. Said a U.S. security officer standing outside the opera house: "There are an awful lot of Americans suffering in there...