Word: stageful
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Montand has been living two lives. Onstage he is a singer of romantic ballads and risque street songs. Onscreen, in such films as La Guerre Est Finie and Live for Life, he is as grim and bitter as Humphrey Bogart. In The Devil by the Tail, he takes his stage personality out of the trunk and refurbishes it with a series of warm interludes and witty tongue-in-cheek pantomimes. As the marquise's daughter, Maria Schell also alters her usually grim image with a comically erotic performance and an exuberantly uplifted bosom...
...IRONY, on the striking--or fortuitous--juxtapositions which brings the easy laugh or the satisfied and satisfying smirk, on the most promiscuously overtaxed on present literary and theatrical modes. There is no smidgen of irony in this production of Jesus, though certain of its devices, described here outside their stage context, will inevitably suggest the reverse. The hundreds of vivid and contemporary visual references with which Mr. Mayer has leavened this text--derived exclusively (excepting the interpolated songs) from the King James Version, Gospels and Apocrypha--are not, I think, to be take as acid annotations on either the myth...
...QUESTION can be given biblical form: "Can these bones live?" (Or even examination form: "If so, why? Discuss.") But the task of response seems especially appropriate for the stage, as theatrical adaptation has a way of giving back lost things to those who had a way of giving back lost things to those who had suffered--or willed--to lose them. And the style of this response is in the look of the production, formed out of sets, bodies, props and costumes in compositions too powerful to be ignored. The rightness of these aggregations does not reduce easily...
Neither time nor text, for one, allows a full characterization for each of the twelve disciples; but a device must be found to break their identification with the traditional figures of religious art, from Da Vinci canvases to plaster saints. So the disciple of this staging are cast and pressed as street people, marked in dress and aspect by the miles behind and the miles ahead. Together, they resemble both a juvenile gang and a disreputable pick-up football team. Separately, they evoke overtones: St. John (Lloyd Schwartz) suggests a veteran of the Sierra Maestra, while St. Matthew (Michael Dobson...
Credit then, goes to the director--and to designer Howard Cutler, who also portrays St. Thomason stage--for exposing visually one of two sources vitality in the Gospel narrative: the perfect mythical shape which renders it as any other of the few basic stories with which men have chosen to beguile and terrify one another...