On Stage
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE By Joseph T. Shipley Off-Broadway Scores Over Main Stem Waiting for Godot. By Samuel Beckett. Presented by Michael Myerberg. At the Barrymore Theater. Volpone. Ruth Langner's...
...Directed by Philip Lawrence...
...Ralph Richardson emphasizes the lecher in the general, smacking his lips and the hips of all and sundry females...
...be given us via a German adaptation?—presents the satire on greed overreaching, in a vivid, exciting flow, with fluid sets by Mordecai Gorelik...
...it is the pious but partly daft daughter whose love and Christian spirit infuse the family with hope and a measure of peace...
...Directed and presented by David Ross...
...Uptown, the Shakespearewrights have again shown the quality that earned them the Brandeis Award, with a production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night...
...Presented by Donald H. Goldman (264 West 87th St...
...Off-Broadway has had much the better of things theatrical in these early winter days...
...He maintains this standing in the current Measure for Measure, which Arnold Moss, as the Duke, again dominates...
...Measure for Measure...
...Presented by the Producers Theater...
...By William Shakespeare...
...The Broadway revival of Waiting for Godot, for example, cannot compare in quality of drama or production with the four recent revivals around the city...
...Twelfth Night...
...English by Lucienne Hill...
...The result is a muddle of moods, distaste where there should be amusement, with snatches of thought ami glimpses of character swept away in a pinch and a leer...
...The clowning and singing of Roger Starr as Feste contribute greatly to this smooth effect...
...Beneath the laughter smolders the tragedy of mis-mated lives...
...Godot's all-Negro cast plays too stiffly, as though impressed with the importance of that which they cannot understand, and succeeds in exposing the basic barrenness of the drama...
...Mildred Natwick gives a great performance as the shrew, but shows no shred of the great singer the general had snatched from her career to make his wife...
...At the 4th Street Theater...
...The play is as fruitless as the tree on stage, which between the acts shoots forth a single leaf...
...At the Rooftop Theater...
...Easter...
...By William Shakespeare...
...It is set in 19th-century Vienna, where we can accept the story with amusement and its "Victorian" ethics without a shrug...
...The Waltz of the Toreadors...
...At the Phoenix Theater...
...Beneath the bawdy comedy, the play s points persist: the corrupting influence of power, and the problem of finding a balance, in terms of living, between the claims of justice and the pleas of mercy...
...The revival of Jonson's Volpone— why must these great English plays (The Beggar s Opera, too...
...Isabella would rather die than yield what many a maiden today seeks to bestow...
...The Shakes-pearewrights production...
...By Jean Anouilh...
...The murals by Edward Melcarth are especially good...
...her scenes with Lydia Bruce as Olivia and Gene Rupert as Orsino avoid the saccharine but dally in the sentimental...
...Easter, a mystery of the resurrection of man, uses as its symbol the realistic story of a family whose head is in jail for embezzlement...
...Instead, we watch a lecherous old general with a termagant wife who pretends to be sick to command his attention and tries to control even his wandering thoughts...
...he can win his divorce and marry the girl—and promptly she falls in love with the general's secretary, who turns out to be a chip of the old blockhead...
...Shakespeare is the liveliest playwright in town...
...The Waltz of the Toreadors, calls for an adroit alternation between tragedy and farce that the English version and the direction do not provide...
...Another off-Broadway revival shows the great pessimist Strindberg still gloomy in story but, for once, hopeful in mood...
...The one new play of the fortnight...
...At the Coronet Theater...
...An unobtrusively deft set by Richard G. Mason gives a natural background to this wry drama of the resilient human spirit...
...Michael Higgins as the troubled son also gives power to the mood behind the story...
...The poetic values of the play are jewels in the gold of its comedy, as Philip Lawrence's direction fuses the diverse elements into smilingly integrated entertainment...
...Ruth Langner's translation of Stefan Zweig's adaptation of Ben Jonson's comedy...
...Presented by T. Edward Hambleton and Norris Houghton...
...Phyllis Love superbly catches the mystic mood of the girl...
...The comic scenes with Aguecheek and Sir Toby display Joseph Ruskin as a Malvolio bent on out-caricaturing his predecessors—and largely succeeding...
...By August Strindberg...
...the son has taken on the burden and the bitterness...
...Of Lucky's long speech, this time, you cannot even make out the words...
...Howard da Silva's Volpone may lack a little of the grandiose, but the fun all comes through...
...Directed by Harold Clurman...
...The American Shakespeare Festival production...
...In the new production, that green leaf is Mantan More-land, a natural burlesque buffoon more winning than last fall's self-gralulatory Bert Laltr...
...Presented by Sidney Bernstein and Gene Frankel...
...but he completely ignores the implications of the seventeen waiting and faithful years...
...The girl he has chastely loved for seventeen years comes now with proof of his wife's dalliance...
...Grace Chapman, as Viola, deftly suggests the feminine charm beneath the male attire...
Vol. 40 • February 1957 • No. 5
