Word: shakespearean
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Moon, who could also be wonderfully benign and sweet-tempered, a sort of rock-'n'-roll Shakespearean fool, commanded perhaps the greatest affection from the audience. He was also dosing himself for disaster, and he began to undermine the group. During an American tour in 1975, he failed to show up for a sold-out concert in Boston and, Daltrey says, "Pete never forgave him." Townshend and Daltrey had wrangled bitterly over Quadrophenia, and during the first half of the '70s each member of the band had spent as much time on his own solo projects...
Leontes is one of those daunting Shakespearean leads that is almost impossible to pull off. His jealousy of his wife in the first three acts must grow until he loses the ability to think or function as king, or as human being. After his tyrannical madness, Leontes must reappear in the fifth act and be convincingly penitent and remorseful. He must also make credible the revalation scene in which the 'statue' of his wife, who for 16 years he has thought dead, comes to life from her pedestal...
Jamie Hanes portrays a strong, if unspectacular Tom. He delivers best in Tom's narrator role, reflecting over the poetry of his own sentences, speaking softly, a clear ribbon of regret winding through the words. But at tims, Hanes' voice rings too smoothly, Shakespearean in tone, stagy. Tom is a writer, not an actor, and the immense presence that Hanes gives his character is oddly wrong, too smug, too fulsomely gesturing, too much exterior acting. It is a terrific role, at once subtle and obvious, but the actor's energetic anger, bitterness and sense of adventure must come from deep...
Across the street, at the home of Shakespearean scholar Harry Levin, Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature, no one answered the door. Only a small bowl of treats stood outside. As Macbeth said. "This supernatural soliciting cannot be ill, cannot be good...
...Lear leaves you with a lot of questions about the place of innovation on the Shakespearean stage. No one would argue for a theater of sterility, shunning all new ideas as "deviations from the author's intentions." But when you have a competent group of performers, and at least one actor of stature and brilliance who can use a play like Lear as a personal vehicle, it seems a cheat to squander the resources on half-baked ideas, directorial interpretations that aren't followed through, and "innovations" that clash with each other. Cain should either have moved in and molded...