Word: accents
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...such luck. Carlo met his rommmate later that first night when he came back from the movie and found a pudgy kid with fuzzy hair and a New York accent sitting in his room playing poker with the people from down the hall. The kid was wearing a blue corduroy vest and a T-shirt from his neighborhood volunteer fire department, and he was drunk enough to be smoking a very cheap cigar without realizing it was burning a hole in the vest. The kid's name was Larry and he dad gone to a Catholic high school in Queens...
Given that Shakespeare's delicate handling of indelicate subjects has burgeoned into blatant indelicacy these days, burlesque has surely become the right accent for romance. Guare and Shapiro's Two Gentlemen of Verona revels in the vulgarity of sex and the naivety of love; it treats the profounder pretensions of lovers and politicians and wealth with sarcasm. It teaches no lessons and believes in happy endings. It declaims old poetry and drives new music hard at you. It requires relaxed yet precise coordination which the production in Harvard Yard, directed by John Bard Manulis, pulls off with only minor hitches...
Jennifer Marre's Julia stands out from the rest of the cast with Elizabethan integrity. Her singing is competent, her spoken Spanish sassy, but her forte lies in the elegant enunciation of Shakespeare's lines with a pleasing hint of an English accent. Her waiting-woman Lucetta (Annie Fine) has the only vaguely Puerto Rican visage of the lot and sings with stern indignation about "The Land of Betrayal." Judy Banks as Silvia dances with enough seductive verve to convince you that indeed she "wouldn't know a spiritual relationship...
...Gustafson, encomiums are harder to parcel out. Linda Greenbaum, as the Lady Ella, has an unusually winning voice, and Stephen Montgomery as the extremely eligible Duke of Dunstable sings in a rich, clear tenor. As Major Murgatroyd, David Brown stumbles out of step, mugs and affects a Cockney accent with comic virtuosity. On the other hand, Jeanette Worthen's characterization of the irksome Lady Jane, who clings to Reginald when the rest of his admirers have deserted him for Archibald, is blunted by an annoying hamminess...
Anne Meara manages to chew gum and act at the same time as a Gerald Ford figure; her role is amusing, but it fits poorly into the narrative. Playing Kissinger with a Greek accent, Melina Mercouri advises Jackson from abroad, using a portable phone to check on the abbess' progress. It is funny once or twice, but not as a running gag. Still, there are few problems with the acting save the occasional air of embarrassment from the nuns who deliver the poorest lines...