Word: argan
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...from the great fresco cycle in Arezzo), the night's work in Urbino seemed less of a theft than a lobotomy. "The theft of the Raphael and the Piero della Francesca masterpieces is a loss beyond measurement," said Italy's leading art historian and critic Giulio Carlo Argan. "It's as though all the existing copies of Dante's Divine Comedy and the verses of Petrarch were suddenly to disappear from the face of the earth...
Moliere's play concerns a hypochondriac, Argan, who wants his daughter Angelique to marry a doctor, though she meanwhile has fallen in love with a musician. At the same time, Argan's wife schemes to get his fortune, and his brother tries to cure him of his hypochondria...
...when it lacks the sparkle Richard Wilbur's verse translation has given other Moliere plays). It calls, not just for good actors, but for expert farceurs. The cast at the Loeb is very earnest and energetic, but rarely brings the play to life. The two leads, Ralph Martin as Argan and Melissa Mueller as his saucy, scheming maid Toinette, mug and ham it up endlessly, but it just doesn't make us laugh...
What Liz Coe decided to do in this situation evidently, was to throw sense and consistency to the winds. At the beginning of each act, characters come out and sing clever rock parodies, using Moliere's lyrics and music by Michael Gury, Ed Zwick, and Mark Hunter. Argan adds up his medical bills on an old-fashioned adding machine (meanwhile writing down the totals with a quill pen). Toinette makes her first appearance on roller skates, and after a while takes them off and goes through the rest of the play in shoes. The daughter's lover, Cleante, comes...
There is one point in the play, however, when everything works--a screamingly funny scene in which the young doctor whom Argan intends for his daughter pays his first visit. Bill Fuller is short, fat and funny-looking, with a high-pitched voice and a great pair of pointed French eyebrows. His carefully rehearsed speeches to his prospective father-in-law and wife steal the scene, and some business he has with a glass of milk and Nestle's Quik is the high point of the show...