Word: stagecraft
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Displaced Narrative. In portraying its altogether central figure, the play resorts, as perhaps it must, to peculiarly centrifugal stagecraft. There are too many episodes that, if vivid, are sketchy, hurried, discontinuous, that seem flashes of ethnic scenery rather than stretches of dramatic mileage. Mister Johnson not only concerns a man who cannot keep to the road; it unfolds its story with almost no road to keep to. It comes off a kind of displaced narrative: as Mister Johnson emerges neither native nor British, Mister Johnson emerges neither novel nor play. But if too fragmented and saltatory, it yields...
Equally inventive is the staging, with outsized venetian blinds manipulated like a kaleidoscope to vary the settings and change the scenery. Stagecraft, however, can only do so much: the orchestra plays, the screens shift and slide, the old scenery is miraculously whisked away within a second, and then back you are again, stranded in Virginia City with Irra Petina, Paul Valentine, and Miss Miele's lyrics...
...awareness of the cultural context of a literary work . . . Further, the American student is often allowed to collect his 'hours' of English courses in a quite arbitrary fashion, and may get his degree on the basis of a course in Donne, a course in Elizabethan stagecraft, a course in Yeats and Eliot, a course in Joyce, a course in the modern American novel, and some courses in 'creative writing' - having read nothing of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, or Keats ... It is also true that, as a result of a rather scholastic training in critical methodology, he often...
Cheek to Cheek. The result was one of the best TV shows ever. Making his TV debut, Evans had to unlearn, in 30 hours of camera rehearsal, nearly all the stagecraft he had amassed in playing Hamlet 777 times on the legitimate stage. "In TV, it's all cheek to cheek," he says. "You can't stand away from another actor and project, like you do on the stage." NBC Director Albert McCleery's biggest job was "pulling down" Evans' projection to TV size. Both men were brilliantly successful, and Evans' famed clarity of diction...
...Fourposter is the story of a marriage. It is told in six unrelated scenes which take place at crucial points of the marriage and in which Mr. Cronyn's hair grows progressively thinner and his wife's grayer. The standard stagecraft is complemented by standard situations: the wedding night, the first child, the other woman, the wayward children, and the realization of age are the incidents on which the scenes are built...