Word: passions
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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...matched by a thirst for the best of the West. The reigning King, grandson of Anna's princely Chulalongkorn, comes by it naturally: he was born in Cambridge, Mass. 32 years ago while his father was studying medicine at Harvard, and slakes his thirst with a special passion for clarinet and sax. Last week King Bhumibol Adulyadej (pronounced Poom-i-pon A-dool-ya-date), who looks half his age, and his almond-eyed Queen Sirikit, who looks like mandolins sound, landed in Manhattan on their four-week swing through the U.S. And all the ticker-tape parade...
Decades ago Cecil B. DeMille went to Oberammergau, saw the Passion Play, and left with a vision of all the great celluloid saint-and-sinner-ramas that he hoped to produce. Last week, to attend the century's seventh production of the 300-year-old Bavarian pageant, pilgrims 'crowded into Bavaria in Peugeots, Rolls-Royces, light aircraft, bikes and buses. As the play went on and on and on, lids closed over once reverent eyes: what everyone had come to see-from seats of softest oak-was nothing less than DeMille squared, a seven-hour pseudo-Biblical presentation...
...Heavies. Performed on a 160-ft. stage under an enormous shed, the Passion Play strikes many in its audience as deeply moving, but to even more it seems a cumbersome who-done-it that turns eventually into a hope opera. Will the Sanhedrin succeed in its plot against the Nazarene? The outcome actually seems uncertain most of the time. Despite occasional effective scenes-such as Christ's Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem-the scenario is often less lively than the begat-begat-begat chapters of Genesis. "Living tableaux" of scenes from the Old Testament contribute little but an impression...
After Intermission. But anti-Semitism was only the beginning of the Passion Play's troubles. As drama "it is a mixture of Lourdes and summer stock," said a perspicacious lady from Philadelphia last week, and at least ten years of rewriting seem required. Oberammergau has just enough time for that, is meanwhile tithing a catch of visitors whose total will have reached half a million when the show closes on the last day of September...
...Thought of Power. The passion for public anonymity is readily understandable at the individual level. Every alcoholic needs pals on whom he can lean for help, and whom he can help to bolster his own ego. At the organizational level, the anonymity is more complex. Bill W., a forceful speaker with a cutting wit, explains: "Identification leads to power drives. The thought of power is one reason we were drunks in the first place. A.A. takes no denominational, political or economic stands. It stays out of controversy. We do not claim that anonymity is a virtue. Rather...