Word: workshops
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...experienced in theater work than they--and most of all, they were opposed to the period of candidacy required of new members of the Club. It was this anti-HDC feeling, more than a case of veterans buddying-up, which was responsible for the founding of the Veterans' Theater Workshop...
...handed out in the dining halls, the VTW had learned that the most popular playwrights were Shakespeare, Shaw, and Noel Coward--a winning combination which might have come as a surprise to any but the last two named. A Shakespearean play would have been too expensive for the indebted Workshop, so Shaw's "Saint Joan" was selected for their second production in the spring...
Professor Herschel Baker has told his class in modern drama that he can never again speak on "Saint Joan" without recalling the Workshop's production of the play. It has had a memorable effect on all who saw it. Presented in Sanders, a theater which offers some of the most unreasonable handicaps ever placed on a college group (no proscenium, no sconery allowed, no backstage, no dressing rooms, no curtains, etc.), the VTW production made inspirational use of its handicaps. Aside from the excellent cast now working "ensemble," the real coup do theatre was made by the designer, John Holabird...
...Saint Joan" paid the old debt and the Workshop's four productions since, all Shakesperean, have either met expenses or made a profit. Under its new and more accurate name, the Harvard Theater Workshop presented in 1947-8 "Henry IV, Part One" and "Richard II." "Henry IV" was the first play in which the group used recorded music to great effect. This was unquestionably the most popular production of the HTW, and one which brought it praise and attention, not only from the critics, but from leading figures of the academic and the theatrical worlds as well...
...because of its intensely rigid poetry, its bitter theme, and its lack of histrionic possibilities. (It might be pointed out here that Shakespeare is rarely given a first-rate showing on Broadway until some actor promotes it as a vehicle for his own glorification. Shakespeare for itself, no). The Workshop did for "Troilus and Cressida" what museum workers have done for old masters; they scraped away the centuries' accumulated alterations, "improvements," and dust; they restored it to its natural vigor and color. It was the Workshop's most noble effort, and, surprisingly enough, one that proved commercially ennobling, also...