Word: airaldi
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Marilyn Sokol (Gittel, Sender Shlamazel, Yenta Pesha) is a performing genious as far as bawdy presentational exhibition is concerned, and Charles Levin (Gronam Ox) knows how to sing and strut mock arrogance and hammed idiocy as well as anyone. Remo Airaldi, with a stout frame assisting, caricatures overweight kids and clever petty thieves with equal virtuosity. So why are they only supporting performers...
...everyone (including and especially his wife) gets assigned missionary duties by the village wisemen (read: idiots) only to lose his way and assume another identity. For reasons unexplained and unimportant everything somehow, oddly works out for the better, I think. The end. Cut back to the music; enter Sokol, Airaldi, Levin etal...
...best of all possible worlds Sokol, Airaldi, and Levin would carry the main strain of the show. Instead of musical theater there would be only approximations of cabaret style theatrical music shows. Then real entertainers like Sokol would never have to mix their song with Andrew Lloyd Weberesque drivel, and anyone tempted to drama would have to be good--and find good scripts. Why do real entertainers have to be the sideshow for insipid love-interest fragments which gets dragged and carted through the interruptions of festive show tunes posing as drama...
Through the choreography of chair dances, great moments with Sokol et al, and some well executed sequences with Airaldi, Schlemiel may be worth seeing for true fans of the genre. But one can never have too much of good music, especially when the alternative filler is drama of the substance and caliber that Schlemel has to offer. If only there was no need to wonder "What it?" about the future of musical theater; what a wonderful world it would...
...acting--with a few negligible exceptions--is superb. The heart of this play--Prince Hal (Bill Camp) and Sir John Falstaff (Jeremy Geidt)--beats with perfect rhythm. Mistress Quickly (Remio Airaldi), Doll Tearsheet (Maggie Rush), the Archbishop of York (Herb Downer), and Justice Shallow (William Young) are particularly memorable. Under the direction of Ron Daniels, these characters are shaped pertinently from the text. Not simply characters from Shakespeare, they are characters we interact with daily They are our friends and families; they are ourselves...