Word: mayer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...ALWAYS a cliche, most always a lie, to say that a director has somehow emancipated a play by taking liberties. So I won't say that, not exactly. What Timothy Mayer has done for The Bacchae is put it out of harmony with the stage conventions according to which it was written. He has emancipated it only from a narrow theatrical orthodoxy which insists on treating all plays of a given place and period alike, whose loyalty is to a set of rules empirically drawn from history rather than to the will of an author as unfolded in his work...
...underinterpretation. There is no avoiding, for example, his irregular attitude toward the divinity, which seems to have ranged from outright negation to the most grudging and unsettling sort of affirmation. In The Bacchae, the gods are gods indeed, but their order is--besides whimsical--cruel and misguided. And Mayer's willingness to portray Dionysus as an effeminate, self-absorbed individual, worthy of nearly every label the unbelieving Pentheus attaches to him, brings this side of Euripedes out into the open. The modern costumes, particularly the policemen's garbs in which Pentheus's men are clothed, suggest the further metaphor...
...until The Adoration was cleaned in 1937 did Duveen find an expert, August Mayer, who identified it as a genuine Giorgione. The reddish tints, a peculiar softness, the rendering of the grass and small figures in the middle ground, Mayer declared, were all typical of the master's hand. With that, Samuel H. Kress bought the painting. Was Berenson wrong? Perhaps. In later years, even he grudgingly admitted that the painting had been done "in part" by Giorgione. But he refused to yield on his main point that "it was probably finished by Titian...
...movie camera who rejects Everyman's plea for companionship by saying, "My life's a silver screen: lots of hand-held stuff, but no adventure flicks." When Everyman misses, it does so by picking overeasy targets to snipe at: American dream complacency, religious hypocrisy, etc. But as in Mayer's Midsummer Night's Dream the reinterpretation of type is often shocking, always cunning. The archetypal morality play proves a perfect vehicle for calculated improvisation...
...Grinning impersonally, asleep, or reminiscing about the good old days of the Great Plague, Gitter's creation is compelling and convincingly pragmatic. Jones as Everyman holds the center of attention firmly, but much of the first act could be played with less method intensity, more of the light farce Mayer is wont to introduce on occasion. Last night, Iver's tightly-knit band, his stylized compositions and arrangements, and extraordinary singer George Leh, came as close to stealing a show as anybody comes working with Mayer...