But, although the British theatre is rich in playwrights, it is still essentially a directors' theatre, and Bond's directing must have rankled with many.
("I was essentially a stage director," he said of his films pre-1950).
He's essentially a comic director, but one whose sense of humor is laced with dark and poignant melodrama.
But if the production is essentially traditional, that director had better come up with compelling alternative action.
Wood points to the remake of Michael Haneke's thriller Funny Games, in which the celebrated Austrian director essentially reproduced his own film with an American cast, including Naomi Watts.
Take Goldman Sachs, where the average annual compensation for a director — essentially a part-time job — was $488,709 in 2011, the last year for which data is available, up more than 50 percent from 2008, according to Equilar, a compensation data firm.
As legend has it, Monteverdi oversaw a performance of the work as his audition for the position of maestro di cappella (essentially, the music director) at the Basilica San Marco in Venice in 1613.
Only in France, you might say, and only from someone as astute as Hansen-Løve, who made the French techno-generation film Eden, and who is herself the daughter of philosophers; Huppert says she essentially plays the director's mother.
And allowing an artistic director essentially to handpick his successor — especially one who has never run a theater — has its risks, as Mr. Sher and the theater's president, Kim A. Anderson, acknowledge.
"There's a great value to working in the Hollywood system, where people are involved in very intense collaborations, and there's value in an auteur system, where a director essentially conceives an idea, writes it, shoots it, and it comes out as something completely different.
