Word: stagings
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Eager for new spending appropriations, officials of Japan's self-defense forces stressed the potential "Soviet threat" to Japan's main northern island of Hokkaido. But Premier Masayoshi Ohira, who was busy with the final stage of Japan's election campaign, tried to play down the controversy. Among other things, he feared that a strident debate over the islands would further poison Soviet-Japanese relations, already damaged by Tokyo's friendship treaty with China last year. Accordingly, his Foreign Minister, Sunao Sonoda, dovishly cautioned against "overreaction," sounding very much like U.S. officials on the Cuban issue...
DIED. Yaeko Mizutani, 74, grande dame of the Japanese stage for a quarter of a century; of cancer; in Tokyo. A breathtaking beauty, Mizutani made her stage debut at eight and became the national sweetheart, playing romantic roles in plays by Tolstoy, Shakespeare and Ibsen. In 1928 she joined Japan's renowned Shimpa theater company, and later proved her acting talents in films and on television...
...cast, for the most part, deserves such a show--one would be pressed to find three stage personalities as obnoxious as Brian McCue, Grace Shohet, and Fred Barton. With his pinched face and short catalogue of exaggerated expressions, McCue mugs like an eight-year old who wants a new tricycle; Shohet evokes Ethel Merman; Barton, the ham-handed piano player, thinks it's enough to bellow in a smug voice and grin idiotically like George Burns, jutting his prognathous jaw like a salient into the Comic Void...
Lear takes no notice of them even when they begin to paw him. Suddenly, we hear the women's voices, repeating lines from earlier scenes--but the words don't come from the stage; the actresses are silent. These disembodied voices blare over the same loudspeakers that have simulated the storm for ten minutes. In the din--enough to drive anyone mad--poor Lear's voice drops out, his volcanic speeches unheard, his personal apocalypse mastered by a 50-watt amplifier...
...wooden gyroscope over his head like some mystical wand. The standard swipes, grunts, and lunges of the Shakespearian sword-fight punctuate the duel between Edgar and Edmund, but the preceding battle between France's forces and the English army becomes a strange slow-motion dumbshow on Cain's stage...