Word: ziegfeld
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...newest hot ticket on Broadway these days?$55 a pair from scalpers ?is an admission to a haunted house. Elegiac strains of the '20s, '30s and '40s hover in the wings. Ectoplasmic chorines, all beads and feather boas, wander across the stage like Ziegfeld girls come back to life. Characters are at once 19 and 49. Time bounces off the walls, like sound and light brilliantly altered and distorted...
Follies is almost sans plot. Just before his old Broadway theater is to be torn down, Impresario Dmitri Weismann (read Flo Ziegfeld) orders a first and last reunion of his celebrated personnel. All the familiar types attend: Phyllis, the leggy brunette (Alexis Smith) who married well; Sally, the third-from-the-left blonde (Dorothy Collins) who didn't. The bolero-dancing couple (Victor Griffin and Jayne Turner) who bought a Fred Astaire franchise ("Styles change; you never can tell"), the wisecracking queen bee (Yvonne De Carlo) with her hive of young drones; the feathery Continental (Justine Johnston) who remembers Franz...
Compacted of memory, dreams and desire, the illusions and disillusions of love, the shifting structure of the self, Follies fuses all into one of the great haunting themes of the Western mind: Time. Follies is a triple-edged title. It means the Ziegfeld Follies, the follies of people in love, and the follies one commits by not fully knowing who one is or what one wants...
...side when you have six-hundred out front?" The size of the Loeb exasperates him, because of its unfairness to non-professional actors. "These are people-sometimes very talented but who have little or no voice training, and they're being asked to appear in this cavernous auditorium !" (The Ziegfeld, now a cinema but the largest built-for-legitimate theatre in New York, has fewer seats downstairs than the Loeb...
...adapting Days of the Commune in "Cantata" form, Lehrman included the four songs by Hans Eisler which Brecht originally wrote into the texture of his play. But hoping to make Brecht's uncompromising moral preachments more palatable to American audiences, whose effete musical diet dates from the Ziegfeld Follies, not Wagner, Lehrman has inserted six more songs by Eisler and the Communist anthem "Internationale" to make Commune more fully music-drama ( Theater mit Musik ). He justifies the increased emphasis on music not solely as a concession to American sensibility, but as the "use of a Wagnerian technique to make...