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| Question for Alan Scott.... | |
| Posted by: portenopete 05:13 pm EDT 09/03/18 | |
| In reply to: re: She will be missed. - AlanScott 03:50 pm EDT 09/03/18 | |
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| I'd forgotten she'd done so much at the Shaw! It was a time when there was far more va et vient across the border. What a treat her Margery Pinchwife must have been! She had the spark and insouciance in spades. Alan, do you think there are actors coming along who can do what Carole Shelley and her generation have done? Especially in the period pieces: Restoration, Wilde, Coward. I don't feel that I am seeing them, but I wonder whether it's not just short-sightedness on my part and a growing longing for the past and romanticizing it out of all proportion? |
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| re: Question for Alan Scott.... | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 09:49 pm EDT 09/03/18 | |
| In reply to: Question for Alan Scott.... - portenopete 05:13 pm EDT 09/03/18 | |
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| I hope some other folks may jump in. Here is my two cents: It's a tough question for me to answer, partly because my theatregoing has diminished so much in frequency in recent years. Like you, I sometimes wonder if I've romanticized some of the productions I saw in my youth, and I probably have to some degree, but even at the time I didn't love them all. But here goes with something that I'm going to keep somewhat general: I feel like when I see productions of classic plays and also classic musicals nowadays, too often I see a sort false, revved-up acting in which the basics are thrown out. People don't listen to each other, people don't talk to each other, and some people sound nothing like any human being who ever lived. I hasten to add that not all productions of classics nowadays are like this, but too many are. And when such productions get favorable or even rave reviews, it's very disheartening. It all has to start with people talking to each other and listening to each other and behaving like human beings. And I feel like some directors nowadays don't get that, and they push their actors toward giving very false performances, thinking it's stylistically right. Obviously, there are characters in classic plays who should behave in ways that seem to us very careful, perhaps sometimes a bit flamboyant, or sometimes extremely controlled, but the sense of people talking to each other and listening to each other and of behavior that seems organic to those actors and the situations must never be lost. I need to see impulses that seem organic, I need to see actors who seem to be in the moment. I really hate seeing the forced, revved-up, results-oriented performance style that I sometimes see nowadays. People somehow think that's what classical acting in the past was like. I think only bad acting was like that in the past. I'd rather see some honest uncertainty and awkwardness — people are awkward in real life — than a certain type of confidence that I find so false. Having said that, I'm sure there were productions in the past that had plenty of that false confidence. I saw some of them — I saw Shelley herself give a sort of overdone performance in The Play's the Thing at BAM in 1978 — but I think they less often got the praise that some productions that are full of forced, phony acting get nowadays. So perhaps it's all the critics' fault. :) Btw, there's a neat Times interview with Carole Shelley by Patricia Bosworth from while she was doing The Country Wife in which she discusses how hard she was working to be up to the demands of classical roles, and how aware she was of her own limitations for which she had sometimes been criticized. She also discusses how she approached Margery Pinchwife. It's from July 15, 1973, if you want to try to find it. |
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