Orson Welles · aftercurtain

Shows & credits

Around the World

Book · Musical · 1946

Around the World is a musical based on the 1873 Jules Verne novel Around the World in Eighty Days, with a book by Orson Welles and music and lyrics by Cole Porter. It involves an around-the-world adventure by Phileas Fogg. The expensive musical extravaganza opened on Broadway in May 1946 but closed after 75 performances. As he did with his unsuccessful 1938 stage production of Too Much Johnson, Welles shot film sequences that were integrated into Around the World. This footage is lost.

Bright Lucifer

Playwright · Play · 1932 est

Burned-out horror actor Jack Flynn retreats to a family cabin with his newspaper-editor brother and the brother's strange young ward after his marriage and career collapse. Against the backdrop of an ongoing funeral outside, tensions spiral into murder, madness, and grotesque acts.

Caesar

Adaptation and Original direction · Play · 1937

Welles's modern-dress adaptation recasts Shakespeare's Roman tragedy as an anti-fascist political melodrama. A bare stage and stark lighting evoke contemporary dictatorships, and Cinna the Poet is killed by secret police rather than a mob.

Horse Eats Hat

Playwright and Original direction · Play · 1936

When a horse eats Agatha’s hat during her secret rendezvous, she fears her husband will discover the affair and sends Freddy searching for a replacement, though he is about to marry. Welles’s version folds the farce into a spectacle that blurs staged action and events among the audience.

Marching Song

Playwright · Play · 1950

A historical drama about abolitionist John Brown and his effort to organize a slave revolt in 1859, framed through a journalist piecing together his life from contradictory recollections.

Moby Dick — Rehearsed

Playwright · Play · 1955

In a mid-19th-century repertory theatre, actors milling about an empty stage are told to rehearse a version of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. As they improvise scenery from the sparse objects around them, they gradually become the characters and enact the story.

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