Word: elizabethan
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Duchess of Malfi (by John Webster; adapted by W. H. Auden; produced by Paul Czinner), though one of the most famous of Elizabethan dramas, received its first Broadway production in 88 years. From a theatrical standpoint, there were possibly reasons to explain the delay. For all its magnificent flashes of drama and snatches of poetry, The Duchess moves slowly, mounts uncertainly, lets its fire go out between quick, bright blazes. It lacks, too, the humanity that a Shakespeare could fuse with horror; Webster's tale of the rich, widowed young Duchess who remarries in secret, fearing her rapacious brothers...
...tone, in large measure, remained Elizabethan. Costumes were sober; the dim-lighted sets were mainly just drapes of black and grey, so readily shifted for change of scene that the play flowed pauselessly as fate itself to its blood-slippery conclusion. The cast, down to the minor roles, played with assurance and conviction. Head & shoulders above this excellent support stood the Hamlet of Louis-Jean Barrault, onetime pantomimist and cinemactor, and a brilliant renegade from the Comedie Française. Barrault's Hamlet was real, immediate, full-bodied, and above all intelligent...
...year, is beginning to assume the proportions of a full-scale engagement in the American Theatre. This week the new American Repertory Theatre entered the lists against the established Theatre Incorporated, Theater Guild Repertory, and Old Vie companies with a high-powered, grandly conceived production of the rarely performed Elizabethan chronicle. Henry VIII written partly by Shakespeare and chiefly by his contemporary John Fletcher...
Opening night jitters could not have accounted for all the had timing and unblended musical effects. Lehman Engel's composition was chiefly at fault, for it not only failed to produce the distinctive Elizabethan musical flavor captured by William Walton, for example, in the cinematic Henry V, but it was in addition so poorly adapted to the play that dozens of lines were lost under the blast of a trumpet or the wheeze of the organ...
Miss Webster, who by now is an old hand at producing Shakespeare, has still not mastered the job. She has attempted to tie loose historical ends together with two speeches by a chorus-like character who informs the audience by a homespun Elizabethan intonation of what is happening. And she has aggravated the injury of the famous pre-curtain eulogy to Queen Elizabeth by humorously poor staging...