Word: houseman
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Prince and the Pauper; a musical edition of Junior Miss; and a Cole PorterS. J. Perelman musicollaboration on Alladin. To plug the Ford Motor Co.'s new Edsel, Crooners Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra will team up for the first time on TV. And Producer John Houseman's new Omnibus-type show, The Seven Lively Arts, will kick off in November with Perelman's treatment of The Changing Ways of Love over the past 30 years. Arts will also tackle: Ernest Hemingway, Evangelism, the Ray Bradbury stories and The Nutcracker Suite. Critic John Crosby, currently on leave...
...production that opened yesterday at the American Shakespeare Festival is controversial with a vengeance, for co-directors John Houseman and Jack Landau have changed Shakespeare's old Sicilian locale to 19th-century Spanish-American Texas. (This is not a wholly new idea, for the Brattle Theatre production here two summers ago was laid in 19th-century Spain.) Rouben Ter-Arutunian has designed a handsome and versatile two-level residencia as well as a dazzling batch of costumes liberally provided with holsters and pistols. And Virgil Thomson has written some colorful incidental music, partly original and partly borrowed (e.g. "The Mexican...
...Festival Theatre's artistic director, John Houseman, served as the director of this production. Clearly understanding the special demands of the play, he has avoided all the major pitfalls and most of the minor ones. For the constructive plan of Othello, Shakespeare's most masterly, and most daring, occurs nowhere else in the playwright's works. Othello lacks the usual extraneous trappings and non-essentials. We do not have here scenes of tension or conflict alternating with scenes of "comic relief"; nor do we have any separate sub-plots. Everything is directly related to the main current of the drama...
...Houseman has come up with a superb example of living theatre, a production of tremendous impact and impetus. The marvelous characteristically Baroque drive and momentum are there, thanks in part to the right pace throughout. To this end he has wisely allowed only one ten-minute intermission. And he insisted that there be no pause or lowering of curtain between scenes, a demand that fortunately Rouben Ter-Aruntunian's ingeniously mobile slatted sets and a precision-drilled stage crew have been able to meet. He moves his cast fluidly over the stage and the apron that projects into the audience...
...regret, however, that Houseman succumbed to the temptation of "improving" the play by cutting, although there are fewer cuts than one normally finds. A museum director does not crop a Rembrandt painting to fit the space on the wall; nor do music publishers and performers "correct" Beethoven's and Chopin's "mistakes" as they used to. We should be allowed to judge a play just as the author left it, without the benefit of the director's superior insight as to how it ought to have been written. And, of all Shakespeare's plays, Othello is the one that most...