Word: tableau
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...itself. A full-scale production of it is simply too long. And even the much-touted tensile strength of its brilliant wordplay and verbosity cannot sustain such ceaseless action. Compounded with this intrinsic difficulty is director Jeff Melvoin's decision to present the play at a grinding, almost gesture-tableau pace. Muffled by the heavy directorial hand, ordered to understatement, most of the actors are left to gratuitous pouting and postured gestures. The only actor who reaches any level of energy is the Player (Tim House), and he is supposed to be histrionic...
PRECISE MOVEMENT and clever choreography make the visual tableau in Walklyndon equally effective. In this lampoon of walking styles, the pacing is so sharp that the dancers give the feeling of a busy street corner in New York. Stern businessmen too pressed to shake hands, matrons walking their pets, friends out for a breath of air, all parade by. The theme grows more intriguing as walkers begin to bump into each other, scramble to avoid a collision, or walk over each other. In this dance, the facial expressions add such personality to the gaits themselves that the piece borders...
...Pause from this time on Sir," the attorney a large man in a dark blue suit said gruffly as he stared down at his watch in apparent ignorance of the tableau he had just created in room 906 of the Suffolk County Court house. For the jury man watching earnestly the partisans in the gallery had stopped rustling their literature the prosecutor was suffering quietly with his back in Edelin, the reporters had stopped taking notes, the officious court officers were sitting in glum disability, and the judge had yielded his court to an cerie silence and the imaginary proscenium...
This gradually became clearer over the course of the medium's history. The first "art" photographs were conscious imitations of paintings. In 1880, Henry Peach Robinson and O.G. Rejlander tried to use multiple imagery--painstakingly assembled in the darkroom--to create "historical" pictures, portraying in one vast tableau all the heroes, villains, and valiant deeds of great events. They more or less failed, but for thirty years, the so-called "Photo-secession" or pictorialist school produced soft-focus, dreamy images with such titles as "Madonna with Child" or "Blessed Art Thou Among Women...
...approach in the production, though, works extraordinarily well--it consists of an easel with a series of mathematical equations whimsically demonstrating the point of "See How the Fates Their Gifts Allot," perhaps the show's wittiest number. This was not the only bit of business that came off--the tableau effects during "The criminal cried" were excellent, and the ruffling and unruffling of large gold foil fans during "A More Humane Mikado" nearly stopped the show. And Katisha's new image as an angular, sympathetic giantess instead of a short, fat grouch worked well as one of the few departures...