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Show Summer Festival Will Employ Greek Stage Form An ancient stage form, developed de-veloped by the Greek theatre, has been employed for the first time in the University of Utah Summer Festival to speed the changes in the festival's 1958 shows. The form, properly called peri-aktoi, peri-aktoi, puts walls of triangle-shaped triangle-shaped pillars about the stage. Dr. G. Lowell Lees, production director of Summer Festival, said the triangles meet at their edges to form solid walls. Each of the three faces of the pillars shwo a different setting. "As the pillars are rotated, we change scenes almost instantaneously," instanta-neously," Dr. Lees said. "The periaktoi will enable us to run the musical, Carousel, as fast or faster than it was done on Broadway." The device will be equally valuable to both shows. Carousel, the Rodgers and Hammerstein hit starring two Broadway notables, David Atkinson At-kinson and Betty Oakes, will open the 1958 Summer Festival with seven performances in the Stadium bowl July 5 and 7 through 12. The second production, the colorful Rickard Strauss opera and concert stars Lorenzo Al-vary, Al-vary, Frances Bible and Wilma Spence, will be performed July 17, 18 and 19 in the stadium. The Utah Symphony, conducted conduct-ed by Maurice Abravanel, will perform the music in both productions. pro-ductions. The University Theatre Ballet company will dance in Carousel. Vern Adix, Summer Festival supervisor of scenery and design has engineered the set for the two shows. In Carousel, rotation of the pillars will carry the drama from a carnival midway into wooden coutryside, onto a harbor water front and into a star flecked dreamland. In the opera, the periaktoi will provide not only fast changes in scenery but handy exits, in some scenes for the players. A partial turn of a single pillar permits a performer to pass easily past the pillar wall. The pillars flank another important im-portant feature of this year's set. The feature is the "inner" stage a small stage centered at the rear of the large stage is familiar to Summer Festival fans. Intimate scenes in both shows will be played on the inner stage. In the opening scene of Carousel, Carou-sel, the inner stage houses the carousel. Later, it serves as the setting for garden love scene, for the robbery scene in which hero Billy Bigelow dies, for the nice heavenly perch where Bigelow watches the progress of his little daughter's life, and for a variety of featured settings. "Periaktoi is one of the oldest stage forms we know anything about," Dr. Lees said. It appeared as early as the sixth century, B. C, in the Greek theatre, which was the cradle of our dramatic arts. |