Word: stagey
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Chee-Chee may sound like part of a soundtrack of Irven DeVore's latest researches into primate behavior, but is actually someone's transliteration of the title of a play by the great Italian playwright Lujgi Pirandello. Pirandello is best known for his somewhat stagey plays Henry IV, Six Characters in Search of an Author, and Right You Are [If You Think You Are], which pretty much made reality vs. appearance the central obsession of modern theater. Chee-Chee is austere (it lasts only a half hour) but full of depth. This is the kind of play--rarely performed pieces...
...Leadbelly and Sleepy John Estes blues numbers through main-line ballads of the 1940s to reggae and rock 'n' roll. "Ry's pure," says a record producer who has worked with him. "He's scrupulous in everything he does. He's never false or stagey...
...underscore the informal tone that he has set for his presidency, Ford dispensed with Nixon's trappings-a stagey backdrop of blue velvet draperies and a massive, bulletproof lectern. Instead, Ford stood before a door that was symbolically left open and used a narrow, hourglass-shaped stand. He wore no makeup; despite the bright lights for the television cameras, he did not perspire. He seemed relaxed and self-assured-in part perhaps because he had carefully gone over the issues with five key aides for two hours on Tuesday and for another hour the morning of the press conference...
...script changes were either attempts to improve on Ibsen (Jane wanted the line "the law is wrong" to become "the law should be changed"), or they were insertions of stagey speeches that had been cut for the sake of cinematic fluidity. Losey, who objected to the "platform tone" in which Fonda performed these insertions, recalls: "Ibsen says everything five times, so three times in the film was more than enough. Jane wanted it said all five times...
...half the play--the bottom half). In one of the most dramatic sequences, the two figures which were formerly protraits step out of their frames as live figures (this caused the girl next to me to gasp aloud, and then crumple with embarrassment). Such a gimmick might seem overly stagey or self-consciously dramatic in another kind of play, but here it fits in very well with the whole theme of theatrical pretense...