Word: caesar
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...Orson before the age of ten was a professional actor, ma-ing $25 a day dressed up as Peter Rabbit in Chicago's Marshall Field's. At twelve, in the progressive Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Ill., Orson was staging his first production of Julius Caesar-in which he played the Soothsayer, Cassius and Marc Antony with relay-race technique...
...child. It was first just an idea, bounded north & south by hope, east & west by nerve. Crossing their Rubicon before they even started to march, Welles & Houseman leased the Comedy Theatre for five years, renamed it the Mercury, then started looking for their first play. When they found Julius Caesar, they started looking for the money to produce it. Houseman combed Wall Street, got dibs & drabs, enough to keep the cast stringing along and repair the Mercury toilets. He also got promises of $12,000; then the recession came and two of the Mercury's seven angels had their...
...advance sale of $8,000 finally saw the Mercury through the opening night of Caesar, which all told cost $16,000 to get under way. After that, finances were a pleasure. Today Welles & Houseman own 70% of the Mercury which, sticking to a $2.20 top, has had an average gross of $6,000 a week, an average...
...Mercury, Houseman runs the business end, Welles is Caesar (not Brutus) where stagecraft is concerned, and in his own opinion "pretty dictatorial." Welles does all cutting and rewriting, and does it with a fearless hand. For the much-applauded episode of Cinna the Poet in Julius Caesar, Welles cooly snitched lines out of Coriolanus. When a Mercury actor was asked when rehearsals on one of the season's classics would begin, he answered: "As soon as Orson has finished writing...
...Mercury to pin all its faith on the classics: he pines to do a real mystery, a real farce, a British pantomime, a fast revue, a Mozart opera. He has shown in Heartbreak House, with its careful, elegant sets by John Koenig, that the sceneryless stage of Julius Caesar and The Cradle Will Rock was not the fetish of a flash in the Pantheon, but simply a well-timed theatrical stunt. The brightest moon that has risen over Broadway in years, Welles should feel at home in the sky, for the sky is the only limit his ambitions recognize...