Word: tableau
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...palmy Saratoga Springs, N.Y. The handsome sets and costumes by Cecil Beaton are much the brightest part of the show. Despite some lively Ralph Beaumont dances, some pleasant Harold Arlen music and some neat touches in Morton Da Costa's direction, Saratoga has all the animation of a tableau and all the narrative interest of something written 50 times on a blackboard...
From the opening tableau of the Gentlemen of Japan, looking like refugees from the Kabuki dancers, the staging is in every way impressive. Aided by a magnificent set by James Peters, Sarah Sweezy's beautiful costumes, and choreography by Elizabeth Theiler, the visual aspect of the play is quite stunning. The movement is fast but controlled, and the stage business is meticulous in detail and execution. Novick is especially successful in out-doing Gilbert's spoof of English attitudes, notably those toward the Orient which did so much to produce the Far-Eastern mess of the 19th Century. The chorus...
Orpheus consisted of eight tableaux; seven of them were set to tape-recorded folk music, while the eighth (it lasted a fury-full 20 minutes) proved to be solid concrete. The surrealist scenery included outsize paintings of skeletons and angels with empty faces. In the first tableau Orpheus (danced by Choreographer Béjart) was transformed by turns into a snarling tiger ("His loins," says the program, "are heavy with solitude"), an arm-flapping eagle, a scared rat ("His heart is full of holes, like a cheese"). In a later scene he encountered assorted characters, including Romeo and Venus...
...Bathers represents Picasso's most extreme production of the '50's. (It is no discouraging sign that Picasso at seventy-eight is as flexible as Picasso at twenty-five.) The opus is a single tableau consisting of six larger-than-life-size bronzes, cast of wood and miscellaneous materials. The figures are drastically simplified forms and they compose a play of varied rhythms in which the element of surprise is no small factor--a technique Miro uses to the hilt...
What offended Pastor Duncan about the flower show was a life-sized tableau depicting Christ praying in the Garden of Gethsemane before his crucifixion. Every 45 minutes, the azalea-banked exhibit, fresh from a two-year run on Atlantic City's Steel Pier, lit up and went into a 15-minute "performance" controlled by an impressive set of electronic equipment behind the scenes. Three minutes and ten seconds after the deep, resonant voice on the sound track began the story of Gethsemane came the cue: "He turned to his disciples and they were sleeping"; at this point the head...