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This half-gorgeous, half-garrulous fantasy does not take easily to the stage, and is seldom performed. But last week, under the shrewd direction of Margaret Webster, who has pumped new life into Hamlet, Macbeth, many another Shakespeare play, The Tempest, proved surprisingly good theater. Its length cut, its storyline sharpened, its comedy underscored, it held to gether and moved along, became a more mettlesome play than the one Shakespeare wrote...
...also a less poetic one. In The Tempest, with its wonderful language, words speak louder than actions; not everybody in the Webster production knew how to utter them. Arnold Moss was a sonorous and commanding Prospero, Frances Heflin a sensitive Miranda. But as Ariel, Ballerina Vera Zorina let a good many speeches dwindle, and her grace was cold rather than sunlit. As Caliban, Negro Actor Canada Lee could not (like Shakespeare) make poetry of ugliness. Stressing the rather dull comedy also shattered the mood; the revolving stage was more practical than atmospheric. This generation may never see a livelier Tempest...
Bennington College's President Lewis Webster Jones echoed, "In 1945-46 higher education will face the greatest crisis and greatest opportunity in the nation's history. . . . All indications are that the returning veterans will be most eager to . . . work hard on a serious adult curriculum...
...casting Canada Lee in the debasing role of Caliban. Miss Webster has invited the criticism of all who profess an interest in the race question. The choice of a Negro for the role of the misshapen monster, half-human and servile, suggests sinister implications. Lee, however, said during a backstage interview that he has attempted to play down all social connotations in his part, and that he feels genuinely honored to follow in the footsteps of Sir Herbert Tree and other English actors who have played Caliban...
...Harvard's more prominent literary critics has dryly commended that Margaret Webster apparently considers herself the owner of a private pipeline to the ghost of Shakespeare. She has been known in the past to doctor up her productions for modern consumption, and she has done it again by lifting Prosperous famous "We are such stuff as dreams are made of speech and using it at the final. It may not be true to art, but it is a highly effective outran. Miss Webster has used her pipeline well in "The Tempest...