Word: stagey
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PERHAPS THE MOST embarassing scene in a film of too many embarassing scenes is a stagey confrontation between director Fellini and a contingent of radical students who insist that the film include an economic analysis of the ills of contemporary Rome. Fellini smiles disarmingly and mutters something about the need to address personal problems before tackling social crises. Maybe no one has a more interesting subjectivity to indulge than Fellini, but self-indulgence on this grand scale tends toward incoherence. This is personal journalism driven to the limit, the reporter reporting himself. And, inevitably, Romabecomes a film of moments, some...
...critical commonplace that Godot is a kind of abstract, modern Everyman, or Well-theater. In director Bobbi Ausubel's stagey production, the mechanics of living life are identified with those of putting on a play. Characters know just where they are: they wave away a too bright spotlight, carry around the portable tree, and once or twice stop out into the audience to make a comment like "I've been better entertained." The scene is the stage itself: the props represent little more than props. Like the characters, we are given very little information to go on. Getting...
...kind of water music when it was not sneaking, like a villainous lover, up the winding stairs to the tower bedroom. The music and poetry were well co-ordinated. Yevtushenko almost broke into a rasping song. Teasing the audience who knew the poem well, he was at his stagey best. His showmanship gave the poem a fine sense of ironic melodrama. Obviously pleased. Yevtushenko bowed out snapping his fingers. An amused audience applauded. If the role of the poet along with that of the intellectual is to raise and not stoop to the public's standards. Yevtushenko came closest...
...same sort of show biz is another new work in the Jeffrey repertory, Alvin Ailey's The Mingus Dancers, based on a grouping of ponderously orchestrated pieces by fabled Jazz Bassist Charlie Mingus. The work is an odd mixture of five abstractly modern sections and four stagey "vaudeville" routines, some comic, some gloomily Brechtian in flavor. They include a morose parade of grinning soldiers in clownlike, whiteface makeup, a lady from Spain heel-clacking through a campy flamenco, a pair of policemen mock-dueling with nightsticks. The vaudevilles have no discernible relationship to the abstract sequences-nor, for that...
...Doctor's place where very strange things start to happen, strange powers begin to exert themselves (i. e. Dracula ). Bauer engages the unsuspecting youth in a lot of bizarre psychosexual games with his wife Francesca. (Adriana Asti), who is voluptuous and ostensibly psychotic. Sontag gives almost everything in clear, stagey medium shots (except for a few subjective long tracks and closeups to get us involved with the younger couple). The Bauers perform along the horizontal axis of this frame most of their contradictory scenes, confrontations and seductions. Tomas (and the audience too: we're on his side) keeps trying...