Barefoot In The Park - Greenroom

Quick run down to Newton to the Green Room to see "Barefoot in the Park".

Lots of fun to see, the play went well, and was very good at times. Acting sometimes seemed like actors acting like characters they had read about somewhere. Sometimes they did very good, sometimes they acted good. There were a lot of short comments, pithy and salient quips, which appeared to be an overtone of the play, some of which were very funny, some of which just couldn't be completely heard.

The staging of the play however, was compelling and interesting. The entire stage was totally redecorated between acts one and two by people apparently coming out of the audience. There was a lot of this type of reward for those who went to the Green Room.

The four personalities revealed on stage were developed through vignettes which must have been Neil Simon's niche, but they didn't really catch fire, probably because of the acoustics in the auditorium. Laughter throughout the audience was scattered, probably more to the ability of the auditorium to deliver the short statements rather than to the comprehension of the audience. Yet it was a very entertaining evening and the venue was nice. After the play was over, the actors were out "front" meeting and shaking the hands of the patrons who were on their way out. Touch of class.

Hickory Museum of Art - Chagall Presentation

Vivian Jacobson presented a discussion and slide show about Marc Chagall Sunday, March 15, 2009, in the Hickory Museum of Art. The presentation was attended by about sixty people and seemed well received. A short discussion followed and included comments about the contributions from the audience about some of the effects of Chagall's work including other well-known personalities such as Martin Buber, Author Koestler, Toscanini and even Elvis Presley.

Ms. Jacobson had known and worked with Mr. Chagall during the last 11 years of his life and she commented about him both as a personality as well as from personal knowledge. She also made insightful pointers about some of his paintings. I was struck by the composition of many of his paintings. Many, perhaps most of his subjects were positioned in the center of the frame, there seemed to be no verticality to the figures except in the final sense that they were somehow balanced and stable, he extensively had white areas touching the sides or top of the pictures and he used color in a remarkably contrasty manner. Green was largely absent from the work we saw today and when it was used it was richly saturated, heavy in value and sparingly used, or else it totally dominated the picture. Blues were his main color, lushly tinted and shaded, and a reddish-brownish-orangish-ochreish color shared that rule of his pictures with the blues, although the blues seemed not so richly melded with other hues.

Another "bravissimo!" for the Hickory Museum of Art. Nice work Lisë.