Two Young Stars Shine in Broadway
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
Two Young Stars Shine on Broadway By Joseph T. Shipley THERE is an old controversy, revived in Michael Redgrave's The Actor's Ways and Means (Theater Arts Books, $3.00), between those who regard...
...It has deft and lively episodes...
...Three men won their present wives because the actress smiled and nodded--what else could she do?--when the girls brought their beaux for her approval...
...Adapted from the French of Jean Giraudox by Maurice Valeney, Music by Virgil Thompson...
...Lyries by Leo Robin...
...The rest remains interim stuff, to endure while waiting...
...Fortunately for theatergoers, two such performers can be seen on Broadway this season...
...She has now a quick grasp of the essentials of a role, and two qualities that can hardly be acquired: authority and charm...
...When she frisks about the stage, or tilts her head to dare us the old Johnny in the play, who sips champagne from her slipper...
...If he strays, he dies...
...Fullness of compassion and refinement of technique come with the ripening years...
...but the spirit of the waters, which should undulate, should inundate and in Ondinate the lover and the theater, is not felt...
...At the 40th Street Theater...
...Music by Sigmund Romberg, Dances by Agnes de Mille...
...yet, Ondine loves him so deeply that she tries to sacrifice herself to save him...
...in the choreography of Agnes de Mille...
...Music by Sigmund Romberg, Dances by Agnes de Mille...
...Book by Jerome Chadorov and Joseph Fields...
...Audrey Hepburn, whose performance in Ondine indicates that she will soon deserve the praise that was given to this grand lady of the theater...
...Directed by Alfred Lund, Presented by the Playwrights' COmpany...
...1 Ondinc...
...She has leapt from the ballet into a musical, and all the stage shimmers with her spell...
...At the Hollinger Theater...
...Lyries by Leo Robin...
...a Frenchdancing troupe found itself stranded in New York when the theater it was engaged for burned down...
...The story is an engaging one: It tells how the first American musical comedy came to be...
...Adapted from the French of Jean Giraudox by Maurice Valeney, Music by Virgil Thompson...
...Directed and presented by Spheard Traube...
...1 Ondinc...
...Book by Jerome Chadorov and Joseph Fields...
...Music by Sigmund Romberg, Dances by Agnes de Mille...
...The producer of a rehearsing melodrama bought the troupe at bargain rate, reshaped his melodrama with balletsand "transformations"??palace into undersea grotto, windswept flowers into dancing girls...
...Two Young Stars Shine on Broadway By Joseph T. Shipley THERE is an old controversy, revived in Michael Redgrave's The Actor's Ways and Means (Theater Arts Books, $3.00), between those who regard the drama as literature and those who consider a play something to be played--just one of the associated arts that fuse into theater...
...The Girl in Pink Tights succeeds through fire, indeed, but that fire is in the spirit of the girl in pink tights...
...Out of my earliest theater memories, one name has embodied all the luster of the stage--an actress I saved my pennies to see again and again...
...At the 40th Street Theater...
...There are...
...But inexorably the water powers submerge him and the immortal sprite forgets...
...Lyries by Leo Robin...
...Mark this event on your calendar of stars...
...Mortal love proves fickle...
...There is a song, and she cuddles it into your fancy...
...The girls I knew used to wait outside the stage door at all her matinees, and, after a time, she would come to greet them...
...2 The Girl in Pink Tights...
...The audience is left high and dry, but the fluid grace of Audrey Hepburn fills the theater...
...Some ninety years ago...
...Directed by Alfred Lund, Presented by the Playwrights' COmpany...
...2 The Girl in Pink Tights...
...And, for the first time since Maude Adams left the stage, there is a young actress on Broadway...
...2 The Girl in Pink Tights...
...The play has less of a sparkling flow...
...that shrewdly mocks the sort of thing dancers used to do with The Afternoon of a Faun...
...The entrancing water-sprite falls in love with a mortal...
...the water powers grant her abode with him as long as he is faithful...
...At the Hollinger Theater...
...The play itself gives the actress a rude test, for it might so easily have been good that it irks by the very closeness of its misses...
...At the Hollinger Theater.1 Ondinc...
...however, many moments, such as the quarrel between the amateur fire brigade and the early professional firemen while the theater is burning down, that more astute handling could have made hilarious...
...A mischievous madcap who defies summation, she evades thecritical questions: Can she sing...
...Adapted from the French of Jean Giraudox by Maurice Valeney, Music by Virgil Thompson...
...Can she act...
...Adapted by Maurice Valency from "a romance by Jean Giraudoux," it is really a retelling of Friedrich de la Motte-Fouque's legend of Undine (1811...
...James Matthew Barrie said that whoever had not seen her had not seen the theater...
...Thus transformed, The Black Crook introduced tights to the American theatergoer, won scandalized editorials in the press, and ran for over a year...
...There is a scene, and she imbues it with style...
...There is, of course, much growth ahead of Miss Hepburn...
...There is a "Bacchanale" without her...
...She moves, and you are bedazzled: she smiles, and you are bewitched...
...But occasionally there comes a performer who illuminates a work in incomparable fashion...
...Directed by Alfred Lund, Presented by the Playwrights' COmpany...
...Directed and presented by Spheard Traube...
...At the 40th Street Theater...
...To the tender sprite of Audrey Hepburn add the playful imp of the lass who calls herself Jeanmaire...
...Book by Jerome Chadorov and Joseph Fields...
...You can see that her name is not to be bandied in loose comparisons...
...The turning of her head for a quizzical glance, the bending of her body the better to listen, and the sudden teasing lilt away are effortless, though radiant, movements in her playing of the water-sprite...
...Jeanmaire...
...A good drama deserves both seeing and reading, no doubt, and it may even be that some imaginations can glean depths of understanding from the printed page that are beyond the reach of the stage...
...This story??with an imagined scene or two of the play??is told in The Girl in Pink Tights...
...The play does not quite blend the magic of the legend with the emotion of its human appeal...
...While Jeanmaire dances, all is delight...
...Directed and presented by Spheard Traube...
Vol. 37 • April 1954 • No. 15
