Word: staging
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...famed pre-Christmas parade of Manhattan's R. H. Macy & Co., Inc. 13 years ago, he got an idea. A showman with a small boy's taste for shows, Jean Gros, 54, had spent years building up a marionette road-show business. He had lost it all staging a grand opera with puppets (75 singers were hidden behind the curtain). He decided that if he could get huge balloon figures like Macy's, and somehow design them to fit under trolley wires, he could stage such parades on any Main Street...
Sturges takes far too much film footage setting the stage for his gag. Rex Harrison is an aging, temperamental and gabby symphony conductor. He is madly in love with his beautiful young wife (Linda Darnell), but he begins to suspect her, unjustly, of carrying on with his handsome young secretary (Kurt Kreuger). Brooding over his jealousy as he conducts a concert (Rossini, Wagner, Tchaikovsky), he imagines himself solving his domestic triangle in three different ways: 1) by murder, 2) by generosity to the young "lovers," and 3) by suicide...
Such convictions soon proved correct. As soon as the Band sounded off on the Brown medley, they hit their stride and many aisle-sitters kept craning their necks to see when the big drum would roll down past them to the stage. The big drum didn't appear, but the especially sonorous piping of the clarinets during the Brown number set the stage for a bear that seemed likely to pop out through the curtains at any minute and shuffle up to the podium. In spite of the ten sousaphones looming up at the back of the stage, the Brown...
...central part of the program suffered, for the Band was off the stage, and except for a brief triumph of the Hungry Five, a small combo that combined um-pahs with lumps and grinds things were pretty spotty. The Krokodiloes did well with "You Tell Her, I Stutter,: and "How'm I Doin'" was very good, partly because of the dancing of Mildred Blacklock. She was the high spot of the choral numbers: a consistently skillful dancer who adapted herself especially well to the cramped stage. The Cliff-Riffs of Radcliffe also sang; they were not cramped by the stage...
...demand that it have either a plot of some universal theme or else a pertinent parallel to the present. The Idler Players obviously felt the latter to be true, which may be so. Counterparts of Mr. Congreve's people certainly do exist today, but the people on the stage at Agassiz are confused and confusing hybrids, standing with one leg in the Seventeenth and one in the Twentieth Century...