Word: stereopticons
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When Sherwood Anderson wrote Winesburg, Ohio, he was trying, he said, to convey "a new looseness [ of ] lives flowing past each other.'' His stereopticon smalltown grotesques were translated with difficulty to me legitimate stage. But last week at the Jacob's Pillow (Mass.) Dance Festival, they took on vivid new life in a fresh medium: a "dance drama" based on the book and choreographed by 38-year-old Donald Saddler, who arranged the dances in Broadway's Wonderful Town...
Visually there can be no complaints about Shangri-La. Peter Larkin's sets have beauty, atmosphere, even-by musicome-dy standards-moderation; and Irene Sharaff offers charmingly exotic and ceremonial costumes. But what is most impressive about the evening could be almost as well conveyed in a stereopticon show. Harry Warren's music is commonplace. What action there is, however momentarily piquant, soon languishes. Hard though the show tries to be cheerful, philosophy is always breaking in, and no sooner does philosophy take its ease than show business bangs loudly on the door. For all Shirley Yamaguchi...
...this celluloid third dimension is not the one we normally see. Sacrificing reality for illusory depth, this process, known whimsically as "Natural Vision," seems too real. Anyone who has looked into a stereopticon viewer knows that the effect of viewing a flat film from a different angle with each eye produces a false sense of overly pronounced depth. The individual figures seem to have depth as does the seem, but all figures are isolated in stages. So it is with Bwana Devil...
None of this has been as easy as it seems today. Back in the day of the barefoot boy and the pigtailed girl, when children collected bugs and horseshoe nails, licked the eggbeater and looked at stereopticon slides for entertainment, any tailgate medicine spieler ("Get away, boys, you bother me") could hold them spellbound. Even so, only the more daring of the barefoot set got within range of the flares and banjo music; parents felt that the childish brain should be allowed to age at least as long as good whisky before being exposed to such works of the devil...
Through this sprawling empire of brushes, mops and cleaners, the spirit of Stanley Beveridge, who believes that "the way to begin is to begin," gleams like a highly polished skillet. Beveridge began by selling stereopticon viewers, joined Fuller Brush as a door-to-door salesman in 1913. He was sales vice president when he quit in 1929 in the hope of working into the ownership of some likely business. He picked the Real Silk Hosiery Mills, but after two years there, took to the brush again. He rented the first floor of an old tobacco shed in Westfield, Mass., founded...