Word: plotting
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...were upstaged by the magic. Several of Houdini's feats, including his water-can escape, were authentically and grippingly duplicated by Mark Mazzarella, a 19-year-old college sophomore. But the cost of going for such theatrical pizazz was a loss of psychological depth. Houdini offered almost no plot, almost no human interplay. Throughout the evening, a large portrait of the magician stared out at the performers from the ear of the stage, as if challenging them to account for his mysterious driven nature. The tricks, the career, the public appropriation of him as a hero were all here...
Shakespeare paid insufficient attention to King Alonso and his five lordly cronies--"that dismal sextet," Agate called them. The actors can do little but go through their plot-serving paces, though someone should have kept Theodore Sorel from going way out of vocal control in Alonso's "billows" speech. As old Gonzalo (a weak retread of Polonius in Hamlet), Daniel Benzali gets an unintended laugh from today's fuel-conscious audience when he outlines his ideal commonwealth as having "no use of...oil." And it is a nice touch, at the end of the play...
Western intelligence circles had some other suspicions about whodunit. One theory involved a possible Egyptian vendetta for the recent Palestinian guerrilla seizure of the Egyptian embassy in Ankara, which Mohsen is said to have directed. Another was that he was the victim of a plot within the P.L.O., where Mohsen had numerous enemies because of his Syrian connection...
...Bedbug, a satire of Party bureaycracy, describes the ordeal of a petty official who is frozen in an accident on his wedding day in 1929 and is defrosted in the Socialist world-state in 1979. This plot is barely intelligible in Peter Sellar's frenzied production, however. Mayakovsky's satire works mostly through verse, parody and puns--Sellars in effect obliterates all verbal content in frantic pursuit of visual pyrotechnics. Admittedly, The Bedbug demands to be staged as spectacle, but Mayakovsky also valued his words. Sellars' production reduces them to high-speed spurts of incomprehensibility...
...knew whether lisa Lund (Ingrid Bergman) would stay in Casablanca with Rick (Humphrey Bogart) or leave with her husband (Paul Henreid). The production took on a kind of war-zone chaos, with scenes filmed as fast as writers typed them. When one of the cast inquired politely about the plot, Director Michael Curtiz shouted, "Actors! Actors! They want to know everything." Ingrid Bergman complained that she did not know how to act toward the two men because she didn't know her fate. Screenwriter Julius Epstein told her simply, "As soon as we know...