Gloomy, gloomy, gloomy guys!
It was 8 p.m., and Ken Meyer was smiling gamely from a gloomy high school stage at an audience of disgruntled teachers and parents to whom he had been introduced as "a bigwig from Washington," come to Utah to explain President Bush's centerpiece education law.
Kudos, too, to Derek McLane for the wedding-cake-y pink-and-red fabric-tufts stage-within-a-stage he moves into place to obscure the gloomy deteriorating Weismann Theatre stage he's liberally draped with funereal tarpaulins.
Tsubasa Kamei's lighting design transferred the focus from one tank to the next but left much of the stage oppressively gloomy.
With things looking glum and gloomy on the world stage (assassinations, international statehood drama, typhoons, etc), Michelle Obama brightened things up with her neon ensemble on Monday.
Mr. Schickele's dreadful puns (Brittany Spears as French weaponry) would not long survive outside the pomposities and gloomy rituals of the symphonic stage.
But ten years ago, on the remembered afternoon, he was still relatively unknown; at least, I hadn't a clue to who he might be when, arriving too early at the "Streetcar" rehearsal, I found the auditorium deserted and a brawny young man stretched out atop a table on the stage under the gloomy glare of work lights, solidly asleep.
The event, much of which is staged at a gloomy 1970s convention center, is a somewhat surreal eruption of luxury in a landscape that, after five decades of Communist rule, is an odd mélange of tropical exuberance and stern socialism.
My one complaint is that, especially given Bertrand Killy's lighting, the stage picture is unrelievedly gloomy.
The scenes in the sisters' apartment -- which, in an effective, mildly gloomy set by Mark Symczak, shares the stage with the studio of the blocked artist -- teem with repressed feeling.
