Word: time
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Allegiance to the Theatergoer. A reporter at heart, he has always felt a stronger allegiance to the theatergoer than to the theater. A man of many interests, he has published seven books, mostly collections of casual, contemplative essays, is a chronic bird watcher and boat watcher, a part-time farmer (he owns 153 acres in Durham, N.Y.), and an amateur woodworker. When World War II broke out, he insisted that the Times send him abroad as a correspondent, spent two years in China, followed that up with a ten-month reportorial stint in Moscow that won him a Pulitzer Prize...
When Kirsten Flagstad in 1935 made her Metropolitan Opera debut in Wagner's Die Walkuere, the audience cheered and the press groped for comparisons with "the irrecoverable magic" of Swedish-born Soprano Olive Fremstad.* Last week another Swedish Wagnerian soprano strode the Met's stage, and this time the comparison was to the "incomparable" Flagstad herself. The debutante: 41-year-old Birgit Nilsson, whose appearance in a new production of Tristan und Isolde touched off the kind of debut furor the Met's Wagnerians have not witnessed in a quarter-century...
...real splash in 1947 with the Stockholm Opera singing Verdi's Lady Macbeth. Gradually she developed a repertory that now includes all the Wagnerian soprano parts, many of the great roles of Verdi, Puccini, Richard Strauss, plus an assortment of contemporary roles. Two and a half years ago (TIME, June 3, 1957), her Isolde at Florence's Maggio Musicale was one of the great Wagnerian performances of the decade...
...moved by Oedipus (Tenor Gerhard Stolze) staggering onstage before Designer Caspar Neher's abstract backdrop (it looked like a microphotograph of a germ culture) and raising his sightless eyes with a beatific smile. Soprano Varnay refused to watch from the wings because "I dream about such things." Reported TIME Correspondent Paul Moor: "For a non-German-speaking audience, this opera has long, boring stretches because the music is so subservient to the text. Nevertheless, Orff has created a theater work of gripping power...
...Beach (Stanley Kramer; United Artists) is a Hollywood vision of the end of the world. It is trumpeted as "the biggest story . . . The single most important film of our time." Last week it had a "Global Premiere," i.e., a simultaneous opening in 17 cities from Melbourne to Moscow. Alas, the version of the Nevil Shute chiller (TIME, Aug. 19, 1957) that Stanley (The Defiant Ones) Kramer has produced and directed turns out to be a sentimental sort of radiation romance, in which the customers are considerately spared any scenes of realistic horror, and are asked instead to accept the movie...