Word: webster
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Terry in the 19th, and Fania Marinoff, Agnes Carter, Rachel Kempson, Elsa Lanchester and Margaret Leighton in our own. For the most famous American production of The Tempest (in which only Arnold Moss' Prospero attained distinction, but which still ran a hundred performances on Broadway in 1945), director Margaret Webster engaged as Ariel the ballerina Vera Zorina, who moved beautifully but could not handle the lines...
...cannibal (Shakespeare took some material for the play from Montaigne's essay on cannibals), or it may be related to cauliban, a Gypsy word for blackness, At any rate, Freedman has assigned the role here to a black actor, Joe Morton. A black Caliban is no novelty: the 1945 Webster production had the boxer-turned-actor Canada Lee, whose performance I found too monochromatic; and the 1960 mounting here had an exemplary Earle Hyman, who had been a superlative Othello here three years earlier...
...young lovers in the play pale beside their counterparts in the earlier romances. Anne Kerry's unnaturally studied elocution and rather monotonous vocal timbre do not help Miranda. As her suitor Ferdinand (whom Prospero tests in too testy a manner), Peter Webster is handsome enough and speaks acceptably, save for a couple of misplaced accents...
...shrewd was Freedman's decision to turn Brutus' servant boy Lucius into a grown military orderly. Peter Webster is a good ten years too old, even if he did write his own song and does accompany himself on a mandolin. Brutus is his best self when dealing with a youngster who is a surrogate son. The character of Lucius was entirely Shakespeare's happy inspiration, and having an adult in the role undercuts what ought to be a loving, tender and solicitous father-son relationship--as we saw here between Douglas Watson and young Alan Howard in the 1966 production...
FROM THE PEOPLE who brought you Lamont Library comes this addled admixture of hysteria and laborious detail called Campus Shock, which leaves you with what Daniel Webster called that "miserable interrogatory": "What is all this worth?" Well, not a whole lot. Lansing Lamont '52 has written a book which will be noteworthy, if at all, only in the quickness of its declension to the Remainder Heap over at Barnes & Noble, or its ability to heat a small room at Fahrenheit...