Word: stageful
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...incident could not have happened last week at Bayreuth, where Richard Wagner's grandson Wieland staged a Lohengrin so abstract that the swan was merely a sketchily suggested stationary prop, while the hero made his exit on a descending elevator platform. Since 1951. Wieland Wagner, 41, alternating with his younger brother Wolfgang, 38, has been staging the most effective Wagner productions to be seen anywhere. (He has now redraped all the standard Wagner operas with the exception of The Flying Dutchman, which he will stage in 1960.) Last week's de-swanned Lohengrin was among the best...
...fast-moving and imaginative productions of Margaret Webster proved a stimulus and an eye-opener. And now our Stratford has a handsome, air-conditioned theatre, which contains Rouben Ter-Arutunian's magnificent basic stage and a surrounding physical plant that can accommodate the demands of all Shakespeare's plays with amazing speed and versatility...
...scene between Launcelot and Old Gobbo is, on the printed page, one of Shakespeare's weakest comic passages; and, on the stage, it usually proves to be an embarrassing interlude. For the first time in my experience, thanks to Frederic Warriner's Launcelot and Stanley Jay's Gobbo, the scene came out satisfactorily. Warriner, in an outlandish patch-work costume, turns the clown into a merry stutterer; and Jay sports an over-sized pointed nose and few teeth. Their combined antics are hilarious...
...trials of playing the bush are formidable. The Queensland Symphony Orchestra, for instance, travels 3,500 miles a year in four wooden railroad sleeping cars, carrying with it such essentials as stage curtains, lights, primus stoves and portable iceboxes. In the town of Innisfail, instruments too big to go up the hilltop concert hall's narrow stairway were hoisted 80 ft. by steel cables. At Townsville the musicians heard an ominous crackling sound, scrambled offstage seconds before a 30-ft. beam crashed down on their music stands and chairs...
Very Little Brine. The premiere glowed with the performances of Soprano Phyllis Curtin's surgingly passionate Cathy and Mezzo-Soprano Regina Sarfaty's portrayal of Nelly, the maid. The 36-ft.-wide stage often seemed too small to contain the action, and in his effort to achieve "immediacy," Floyd produced a libretto so cliché-ridden that it dissipated the briny sense of evil that hung over Novelist Brontë's book. But the sweeping, intricate score pulsed with moments of moving lyricism: Edgar's proposal to Cathy ("Make me whole again"), Cathy's "dream...