Word: stageful
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Freeman's poem, in contrast, specifically recognizes the existence of an audience. Certainly the most successful work in this Advocate, it is an hortatory stage whisper to "an audience" accompanied by appropriate rhythmic gestures. The poet succeeds in sharing with his readers some of stagecraft's "dreams," "contrived hallucinations" through which one might "Now in attentive webs, catch rapture fleeting." The sounds are precise, pleasing, and appropriate. The images cast out to the listeners are nearly as fine as the sound that bears them, and there is a welcome humor in the poem's treatment of itself...
...narrow, smoky room, on a stage not quite wide enough for the show's five performers to buck without winging each other, the cast, backed by two pianos, lines out patter songs, monologues, ballads and production numbers (everyone onstage at once). The revue keeps up a two-beat pace with fast blackouts. Most lyrics are aimed at Manhattan's theater set and suburbia's bar-car sophisticates, but they are not necessarily too esoteric for the occasional Sixth Avenue Sindbad who "falls downstairs looking for the subway." Sample...
Miss Isabel (by Michael Plant and Denis Webb) is Shirley Booth, but even that does not help much. With scarcely a sign of talent, the authors of Miss Isabel have tackled a stage subject that might make genius stumble. Their aging, white-haired heroine becomes mentally ill and imagines that she is a young girl and that her embittered, put-upon old-maid daughter is her mother. One act later, Miss Isobel imagines that she is a tiny child who keeps caterpillars in a shoe...
...Actor Coates did not show the ingenuity of the Cherry Sisters, famed in the early 1900s as "America's Worst Act." A net was spread for them in front of the stage to catch vegetables and eggs tossed by the audience...
...comedies. Coates himself cared little for the lines but much for his costumes: playing Romeo on one occasion, he cried, "Oh, let me hence, I stand on sudden haste," and then, as if wording the action to his suit, dropped "on all fours and crawled round and round the stage," searching for a buckle that had burst from his trousers. It was in a performance of Romeo and Juliet that 1) Mr. Coates was almost struck by a flung Bantam cock, 2) Paris, lying dead on the stage, was instantaneously "raised to life by 'a terrific blow...