Word: stagey
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...staged performance, so self-consciously theatrical is Lumet's direction. The play was so successful in the theatre, that Lumet can't really be blamed for borrowing some of its techniques for his film. The Bruhl's Hampton home looks lovely with its woodsy interior but it also looks stagey. Doors, windows and a spiral staircase are too neatly arranged around the sides of the set; by shooting rooms up from the floor and down from the ceiling Lumet adds a closed-in effect that verges on the claustrophobic. This may be intentional--a kind of tribute to the play...
...production gains its only vigor. Its spasmodic brightness, from the cast members, most of whom deliver very fine performances. As pat, the punchy cynical caretaker of the house. Brian McCue is quite good, but, as in many of his past performances, the seams show. There's a "stagey" quality to his limp, his wry grin, his extravagant gestures: one can see too clearly the thought behind every inflection, perhaps. McCue hoped to play upon Behan's theme of dramatic distance, to make the audience sharply conscious of the fact that they are in a theater viewing a performance. Unfortunately...
...memorable gymnastics of Sammy Davis Jr. flinging his little arms about Richard Nixon. Franklin Roosevelt, in fact, enlisted Playwright Robert Sherwood as a ghost, and subsequent Presidents increasingly turned to theatrical artisans for help, especially after TV got big. By the 1970s the political scene seemed so stagey that Anthropologist Edmund Carpenter was moved to say that "the White House is now essentially a TV performance." He exaggerated, but not by much...
...return, they let him know where they're at through the first dance sequence, Aquarius. The number, like all the rest, is infectuously buoyant. The camera unerringly swoons and follows the gliding choreography by Twyla Tharp: the film's greatest asset. Avoiding cute, stagey, Broadway production-type dance, Twyla Tharp has given new hope to musical choreography. The movements flow naturally; instead of watching a static dance number, we are taken by the camera into the movements, intrinsically swaying with them...
Though two of the Abbey's finest actors, Cyril Cusack and Siobhan McKenna, returned for this production, the acting somehow seems stagey and lackluster. Surface characterization is emphasized at the expense of deeper emotional involvement. Siobhan McKenna plays Bessie Burgess with grandeur but drops the ends of her lines; Scorcha Cusack staggers a bit too much as Nora. Bill Foley, as Peter Flynn, says his lines as though reading them for the first time. Maire O'Neil, as the prostitute Rosie, makes immediate some of O'Casey's profoundest lines, his true revolutionary credo of communism--but her characterization slips...