The Smell Of The Greasepaint

[poliphilo]

I've never been much of a theatre goer. If I'm honest I find theatre disappointing. 

I wish I'd seen Olivier on stage. I really do. Maybe then I'd have understood why he's supposed to be so great. 

I saw Alec Guinness in one of Alan Bennett's plays about spies. It was awfully talky. I remember the verbal music and a wonderful twitchy, mini-nervous breakdown thing he did at the end.

I saw Antony Hopkins as Lear. Not very good. Hopkins admitted afterwards he really didn't understand what he was doing. The best thing in that production was Anna Massey's Goneril.

 Dorothy Tutin and Alec McCowen as Antony and Cleopatra. Both of them woefully miscast. That's the nearest I've come to falling asleep during a show.

Charlton Heston in the Caine Mutiny, Lauren Bacall in Sweet Bird of Youth:  just because you can fill the screen doesn't mean you can hold the stage.

Good experiences? David Warner's Hamlet- and a sexy, greenwoody As You Like It in Manchester with Janet McTeer as Rosalind.

Comments

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

See, I LOVE live theatre. I'm one of those 'if you build it she will come' theatre fans. I've seen productions here (Central New York) with people who later went on to become 'stars' - or at least, in the movies. But LIVE theatre is kind of warts and all - no time to edit out the mistakes (or the bad acting.) Way way back, before the movie was even a gleam in the eye of whomever, Syracuse Stage did a production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. It was so popular that after playing to PACKED HOUSES every single night for two weeks, they brought it back at the end of the season and it ran for a month - packed houses. The movie...just was kind of an anemic version of a play that held everyone in thrall, live. (I worked as an usher, I got to see the play a couple of times and it was great every single time.)

I saw a live production of "Horsefeathers" that was played a little less broadly and (IMHO) much more funny than the Marx Brothers ever were. (David Canary was the star of that one.)


I saw Jill St. John and Robert Wagner in "Love Letters" (in Waterloo, Ontario).

oooh, you saw Anna Massey LIVE? (turns green with envy)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

If I had a time machine my first stop would be Shakespearean London- so I could go and watch a few shows at the Globe. I would love to experience what it was like to be in that audience experiencing those plays for the very first time.