In Ian McKellen's Acting Shakespeare, he tells the wonderful old story of actor-manger Sir Donald Wolfit's astonished (and possibly horrified) reaction to the news that the great dancer and choreographer Robert Helpmann was planning a ballet of Hamlet:

 "You're going to dance Hamlet, Bobby?"
"Why not Donald? You've been singing him for years!"

Image result for robert helpmann hamlet ballet

 What many might miss in the story is Helpmann's dominant (and indeed horrifying) presence in pop culture -- as the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang!

Image result for robert helpmann child catcher

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bill & Blair

Image
 Blair Tindall, author of Mozart in the Jungle and professional oboist, was very briefly married to Bill Nye the Science Guy. The marriage was declared invalid by the State of California. Neither Nye nor Tindall has since discussed the dissolution of the marriage. Tindall ater broke into Nye's house and stole his laptop, using it to send defamatory emails in his name. She also used herbicide to destroy his garden.
Read more
Image
To my mind, each of these describes the same world: de Chirico, Brancusi, Gaudi, the 1973 Czech film Fantastic Planet, Borges' “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Satie ’ s   Trois Gymnopédies,  Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights,  Gulliver's Travels ,  Cirque du Soleil ,  Brian Quinette’s Invisible Library,   both the  Codex Seraphianus  and the Voynich Manuscript, the library at Alexandria, the game of chess and the numbered (but not the titled) chapters of Calvino's   If, on a Winter's Night, a Traveler .   And Barcelona.
Read more

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Image
 The line is: "I k now a bank where the wild thyme blows, W here oxlips and the nodding violet grows, Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine..." 30 years later, in the middle of the night, it occurs to me that I might have said "Quite o'er-canopied" rather than "over-c anopied...' And now I can't sleep!
Read more