Word: footlights
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Bancroft nightly brings to Annie Sullivan, besides sheer physical stamina, is an extraordinary talent for observation, an ear and an eye for the small, significant detail that transforms mimicry into understanding. So the coarse, curbside intonations of The Bronx were erased with intuitive skill at the flare of a footlight and the rise of a curtain. Seesaw's Gittel spoke with an inflection that convinced thousands of theatergoers that the actress must be Jewish ("I didn't even know what a Jew was until I was grown up," says Anne Bancroft). As Annie Sullivan, Actress Bancroft erases...
...routines and lyrics straight from Mama's potboiling hand. Ordeal by stage mother drives gentle would-be husband No. 4 (Jack Klugman) to the suitcase-packing point of no return, and June elopes with a chorus boy. And just when Mama Rose's star-making dream seems footlight-years away, the Big Break comes for Gypsy-Louise in a Kansas burlesque house, where she begins by taking off Mama's apron strings...
Suds & Tears. Playing a lewd, brash burlesque comedian, Sir Laurence often lifted the play-a juvenile soap opera in its triter lines-to the heights of a new Pagliacci. Most critics agreed that Olivier, with real virtuosity and superb support, had disproved the footlight adage that actors can be no better than their material. But Playwright Osborne was not disparaged too severely. Of all theatrical talents, perhaps the uncanniest is an ability to write the sort of humdrum drama that great actors can instinctively exalt. On this bittersweet basis, John Osborne got his share of the applause. But the tears...
...evening in the theatre with William Saroyan is likely to be a confusing experience. In most of his plays, the California writer laughingly throws away plot, character development, time, and even the idea that the footlight mark a rigid line which separates the actors from the audience. In the end, all that is left behind is Saroyan, glibly tossing out an idea and then circling around to laugh...
...intervals, famed footlight personalities wander into the picture (it was produced with the help of the Council of the Living Theater, which will get 25% of the profits to advance the cause of the legitimate theater outside New York City). Among the guest artists: Shirley Booth handing out autographs; Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II shown composing a new song, a process which, in this version, consists chiefly of Hammerstein complaining that he cannot think of any words, and Rodgers saying soothingly, "It will come, Oscar, it will come"; Joshua (South Pacific) Logan and John (The King...