Word: babe
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Thomas Babe, a senior, is currently making his adieux to the Harvard stage by directing a production of Measure for Measure, and also playing in it under an assumed name. In the latter role he is unobjectionable, if uninspired; in the former, he has been led by his obviously extensive acquaintance with the more prominent modern critics of the play to create an awkward intermission in the middle of Act III, Scene 1. Mr. Babe is not, however, without his own reading of the play: he finds it a crashing bore. Now this is probably a novel interpretation...
...Babe's actors, Donald Lyons and Andreas Teuber, have refused to attempt to bore. Mr. Lyons' rebellion, happily enough, has extended to a complete repudiation of his part. He is the Duke; not Shakespeare's Duke, to be sure, but a dazzlingly royal admixture of Hapsburg and Abdul Hammid, of Bette Davis and John Finley, with perhaps a hint of Angela Lansbury and Major Strasser. When he is on the stage, he does not dominate so much as devastate the pretensions of everyone else. He is, in fact, infinitely more attractive than Shakespeare's Duke ever...
...Babe has been more fortunate in the rest of his cast, which is helplessly inept. Philip Heckscher's pre-adolescent and pre-Raphaelite Claudio cannot conceivably be guilty of the crime for which he stands condemned. Presumably he hopes to play Hamlet some day; meanwhile he might blow his nose--and get into something roomier than the shockingly indecent tights he has been asked to wear. Carol Schectman gives us a plump-cheeked, milkmaid, Putney-girl Isabella and somehow makes a two-dimensional part seem barely one-dimensional. Jacqueline Winer transforms Mistress Overdone into an inaudible New Orleans madam...
Some simple facts about The Cursed Daunsers' presentation at the Loeb are worth acclaim in themselves. The opera presents the original work of two undergraduates, the libretto of Thomas Babe and the music of Alfred Guzzetti. The production succeeds without employing more than a few minor personnel from outside Radcliffe and the College. And the drama's appearance at the Loeb is the first such Harvard production there and marks a significant return of opera to the University stage...
...clerical puritanism is not an issue today, and it is indeed very clear that Babe did not regard the question as his chief concern. He and Guzzetti make a simpler use of the medieval setting, for they adopt it to capitalize upon the mystic aura of the medieval church, upon the color of the liturgy's communalism and ritual. Borrowed to produce its very immediate awe, the opera's medievalism is a facile expedient for proclaiming the profundity of the drama; by the last scene the sections in more obvious liturgical setting have become annoyingly irrelevant. The two writers...