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

[upasaka.livejournal.com]

My best theatre ever: Ian McKellan's one man show "Acting Shakespeare" in Princeton in the early 1980s. He was an awesome Lady Macbeth. That was long before any Americans had heard of him, and I only went because someone gave me tickets!

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

Saw Judi Dench and Donald Sinden in Much Ado at Stratford on a skool trip once. They were tremendous. But agreed, memorable productions are rare.

[queen-in-autumn.livejournal.com]

Film acting and theater acting are not the same talent. Fine film actors often flounder on stage -- and sometimes I'm sure they've been cast only to bring in ticket buyers who wouldn't bother if it didn't have someone famous in it.

One of my favorite performances was our local theater's production of Arson and Old Lace, which I'd never seen before. I loved it. The wolfling loved it. We rented the movie, and even though I'm a Cary Grant fan, I enjoyed the play much more.

It's all about what the actors bring to the performance -- truth-telling as well as technical skill -- and what the director does to shape it all.

My favorite target for film-director bashing is Geroge Lucas, who can take talented actors, people capable of giving extrordinary performances, and transform them into wooden puppets.

[sovay]

I saw David Suchet and Michael Sheen in Peter Shaffer's Amadeus in 1999. That was awesome.

[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)

[sculptruth.livejournal.com]

Do you think the actors who have successfully crossed from one to the other had previous theatre experience before starring in movies? I'm thinking of Ian McKellan and Catherine Zeta Jones, as examples; but I don't know McKellan's history for certain.

Film is simply an entirely different medium. I wish I went out to see more plays...