Word: stageful
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor next year. As curtain time approached in London, $5.60 seats were fetching $98 on the black market, and $30 boxes were going for $280. Shipping Magnate Aristotle Onassis, realizing that the occasion was a great night for the Greeks (Callas, Designer John Tsarouchis, Stage Director Alexis Minotis, not to mention Euripides), desperately placed ads in the London Times agony column in an attempt to get 33 seats for himself and guests. When a purposeful posse from Dallas came yipping into town but found itself seatless, Ambassador John Hay Whitney patriotically handed over...
With the eyes of Texas upon her, Callas suffered spasms of precurtain nerves. "If you cut me with a knife," said she, "no blood would run out." But she turned up onstage convincingly gaunt, wild-eyed, almost green with malevolence and makeup. She paced the stage and clawed the air like a caged lioness. Callas took twelve curtain calls, earned, mighty critical bravos ("terrifying," "elemental," "chilling") for a superb dramatic display. As for her voice, critics as usual found it uneven; the Daily Telegraph judged it "disappointingly small and lacking in resonance." But without the Callas dramatic presence, critics agreed...
Author Greene considers The Complaisant Lover his best play, and the London critics-who were not notably stirred by his earlier stage tries-agreed enthusiastically. Amid the general applause, a minority of Greene fans hoped that he would not give up religious themes for good; quite a few playwrights have successfully written about manners and immorals, but few nowadays even attempt to deal with miracles...
...leading lady was almost dumb with stage fright. On opening night in Philadelphia, her lines faded into half-heard whispers, and the audience squirmed with shared embarrassment. Then a voice rasped down from the cheap seats: "Speak up, Ethel. You Drews is all good actors...
Such early dancing-school training suggests that Shirley was shoved toward the stage by ambitious parents. Not so. Her mother, Canadian-born Kathryn MacLean Beaty, was a dabbler in amateur theatricals, and her father, Ira O. Beaty, a scholarly Virginian, was a part-time musician, but the dancing lessons had a practical explanation: Shirley had weak ankles...