8/6/2023 0 Comments Chew scenery![]() ![]() He was always chewing the scenery, over-emoting and pulling focus from his cast mates. Those offbeat inflections, extreme facial expressions and strange cadences - his acting was so obvious I figured that meant it was great.Īs I matured, however, I started to appreciate the fine art of subtlety and suddenly Shatner's shtick looked pretty humorous. When I was a child, I thought William Shatner was the best actor ever because of his over-the-top performance as Captain Kirk. Her acting has never been described as "chewing the scenery.Putting the ham in Hamlet. She never found a prosthesis that she was comfortable with, so when she appeared on the stage subsequently she was always in a wheelchair. ![]() ª Sarah Bernhardt, perhaps the most famous actress ever, suffered a similar fate, having had a leg amputated as the result of a fall. I saw him only once, doing Jack Point in "Yeomen of the Guard," in which he did very well with a prosthesis.ª He did not, however, jump up onto the scenery. (He died in 1975.)Īccording to some sources, Green, in his D'Oyly Care heyday, did indeed chew the scenery, or at least bounce off it from time to time. I cannot discover whether Green's most famous predecessors, George Grossmith and Sir Henry Lytton, ever acted in a manner which could be described as chewing the scenery, but there is no doubt that Martyn Green did, at least before 1959 when an accident required his left leg to be amputated. The last really famous leading comic with D'Oyly Carte (the original producer of G&S operettas) was Martyn Green. Having a good voice was not a requirement, although singing is-more or less. ![]() In "The Mikado," for instance, the leading role is not that of the Mikado, impressive as that is, but Ko-Ko, the comic baritone. A good example of a role which invites the infliction of damage to the scenery is the comic baritone part which is found in all of Gilbert and Sullivan's most popular operettas. ![]() The phrase is often used disparagingly, but when the theatrical work is either comic or deliberately melodramatic, a certain amount of chewing the scenery may be entirely appropriate. " Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, Volume 1, A-G has a much earlier example from Coeur D'Alene, by Idahoan novelist Mary Hallock Foote." (He quotes the example. According to him, although Dorothy Parker used the phrase in 1930, it was actually used earlier. World Wide Words (Michael Quinion) is sometimes cited in efforts to locate the first use. (Color me purist, since I don't care to see the term used when there is no scenery to interact with.) Critics and reviewers tend to use this phrase rather freely for actors who ham it up (like William Shatner in "Star Trek" and everything else he has done.) It is also used to decribe melodramatic behavior even when no theatrical performance is involved. However, the term is also used by extension when an actor simply becomes overly melodramatic. Some purists say that, by definition, whatever a comic actor may do to furniture and props doesn't become "chewing the scenery" (or "chewing up the scenery") unless the scenery is actually involved. Yes, it refers to overacting, probably because some actors, especially comic ones, make the flats on which the scenery is painted part of their act. : How did the phrase "chewing the scenery" come about? I believe it refers to overacting. In Reply to: Chewing the scenery posted by Judy on at 18:33: ![]()
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