"Proscenium" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... used. A curtain, preferably of some dark color, should be hung on each side, and a lambrequin or valance across the top. Where circumstances admit, the directions we give elsewhere as to the construction of a stage and proscenium for private theatricals may be followed with advantage. In any case, a piece of fine gauze should be carefully stretched over the whole length and depth of the opening. This is found, by producing softer outlines, materially to enhance the pictorial effect. If it is practicable ...
— Entertainments for Home, Church and School • Frederica Seeger
... as the lights went out. Prosper was amused at his own intense excitement. "I didn't know I was still such a kid," he said, flashing a smile, the first spontaneous one he had given her, upon Betty who sat beside him in the proscenium box. ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... half-dark that there was never anything like this seen on earth or in heaven. Mr. Anisfeld's scenery explodes like a succession of medieval skyrockets. A phantasmagoria of sound, color and action crowds the startled proscenium. For there is no question but that the proscenium, with the names of Verdi, Bach, Haydn and Beethoven chiseled on it, ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... Bowery Theatre, but lacking its cheerful aspect. The audience is without exception of the blousard class: the patrons of the Old Bowery, even in its latest years, were almost millionaires in comparison. The highest-priced seats (excepting the proscenium-boxes, which are never occupied) cost forty sous. You can sit in the gallery for five sous if you like the company of the Paris gamin. At the entrance of the theatre there is a placard which reads thus: "By ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... Italy so perfect and so entirely suited to their unreality as this classic theatre. It is a Greek theatre, for Greek tragedies; but it could never have been for popular amusement, and it was not open to the air, though it had a sky skillfully painted in the centre of the roof. The proscenium is a Greek facade, in three stories, such as never was seen in Greece; and the architecture of the three streets running back from the proscenium, and forming the one unchangeable scene of all the dramas, is—like the statues in the niches and ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... sometimes remarked by listeners at the opera, that we sing too loud, or that we scream. They surely never think of the great size of the stage, of the distance from the proscenium arch to the footlights, or from the arch to the first set of wings. They do not consider that within recent years the size of the orchestra has been largely increased, so that we are obliged to sing against this great number of instruments, which are making every possible kind of a noise except ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... countenances, society men, artists, journalists, the whole category of those that never fail to go where everyone else goes. In the balcony and in the boxes he noted and named to himself the women he recognized. The Comtesse de Lochrist, in a proscenium box, was absolutely ravishing, while a little farther on a bride, the Marquise d'Ebelin, was already looking through her lorgnette. "That is a pretty debut," ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... himself grotesquely, in an attitude of mirth, On a damask-covered hassock that was sitting on the hearth; And at a magic signal of his stubby little thumb, I saw the fireplace changing to a bright proscenium. ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... went with the youngest M. to see a strolling band of players in the townhall. A large table placed below the gallery with a print curtain on either side of the most limited dimensions was at once the scenery and the proscenium. The manager told us that his scenes were sixteen by sixty-four, and so could not be got in. Though I knew, or at least felt sure, that there were no such scenes in the poor man's possession, I could ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sake of facing the most difficult form of the problem of amateur staging, let us suppose that this play is to be given in a parlor or hall, without platform, without proscenium arch or curtains, with the walls, floor and ceiling of such material and finish that no nails may be driven into them, and that the depth of the stage is only nine feet. It looks hopeless but it can ...
— Why the Chimes Rang: A Play in One Act • Elizabeth Apthorp McFadden
... theatre, the stage was brought nearer to the audience (the arc not exceeding a semi-circle), and made considerably deeper than in the Greek theatre. The length of the stage was twice the diameter of the orchestra. The Roman orchestra contained no thymele. The back of the stage, or proscenium, was adorned with niches, and columns, and friezes of great richness, as may be seen in some of the theatres of Asia Minor, and in the larger theatre at Pompeii, which belong to ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... here to-night we undertook to represent something of the all-pervading feeling of that crowd, through all its intermediate degrees, from the full-dressed lady, with her diamonds sparkling upon her breast in the proscenium-box, to the half-undressed gentleman; who bides his time to take some refreshment in the back row of the gallery. And I consider, gentlemen, that no one who could possibly be placed in this chair could so well head that comprehensive representation, and could so well ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... theatre bureau, as he had determined to sell all the tickets himself. For the first night of "Les Ressources de Quinola" the audience was to be brilliantly representative of the aristocracy, beauty, and talent of France. The proscenium would, Balzac hoped, be occupied by ambassadors and ministers, the pit by the Chevaliers de St. Louis, and the orchestra stalls by peers; while deputies and state functionaries were to be placed in the second ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... the auditorium of a music-hall. Indeed, that is what it must once have been. But now there were tiers of benches on the stage; and on these was packed a quarter or so of the members and their friends. The other three-quarters or so were packed opposite the proscenium and down either side of the hall. And in the middle of this human oblong was a raised platform, roped around. Therefrom, just as I was ushered to my place, a stout man in evening dress was making some announcement. I did not catch its import; but it was loudly ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... sustained the simple melody perfectly, and it was evident when the little girl began the second verse that she was singing wholly to please herself and some one in a proscenium box. Before the close of the first stanza the gallery experienced a turn, the audience as a whole a sensation. Night after night the gallery gods had made it a point to be present at that hour of the continuous performance when the Little Patti—such was the name on the poster—sang either her ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... kind of wilderness of ruin; there are scarcely any details; the great feature is the overtopping wall. This wall being the back of the scene, the space left between it and the chord of the semicircle (of the auditorium) which formed the proscenium is rather less than one would have supposed. In other words, the stage was very shallow, and appears to have been arranged for a number of performers standing in a line, like a company of soldiers. There stands the silent skeleton, however, as impressive ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... shape and physical appointments of the theatre he is writing for. Plays must be built in one way to fit the theatre of Dionysus, in another way to fit the Globe upon the Bankside, in still another way to fit the modern electric-lighted stage behind a picture-frame proscenium. The dramatist in constructing his story is hedged in by a multitude of physical restrictions, of which he must make a special study in order to force them to contribute to the presentation of his truth instead of detracting from it. In this regard, again, the novelist works ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... inconclusive. The body, the expert testified, showed evident marks of violence. There was a distinct lesion of the oesophagus and a decided excoriation of the fibula. The mesodenum was gibbous. There was a certain quantity of flab in the binomium and the proscenium was wide open. ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock |
