Word: bohemia
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...serves among other things to bridge the (much criticized) gap of 16 years. In the first half we witness the wintry tragedy of King Leontes in Sicilia, prefaced by the prose duologue of lesser figures. The second half, similarly introduced by a prose duologue, brings us pastoral comedy in Bohemia. But the playwright goes on to take us back to Leontes and Sicilia at the end, where all the seemingly disparate elements are miraculously tied together with a triple knot. Kahn underlines this by having Time appear wordlessly in the first half bearing a barren branch, and in the second...
...ambles in to the rinky-tink beat of Joseph Lamb's rag, Bohemia, a little guy in a shiny satin shirt and crushed-velvet breeches. Mikhail Baryshnikov, loose of limb with plenty of shoulder action, adjusts his bowler hat. From the wings a woman's leg appears, and then the rest of Marianna Tcherkassky. The two link up, meet Martine van Hamel, and ease downstage in a vaudeville shuffle. Stop. Resume action, triple speed...
...tripartite, a fine example of the Hegelian dialectic. In the first three acts we have a thesis: the chill, sterile, tragic life of Leontes's middle-aged court in Sicilia. In the fourth act, we have the antithesis: the pastoral and exuberant life of the young commoners in Bohemia. The fifth act brings us a synthesis, in which the two components are brought into mellow harmony with each other...
...this production director Michael Kahn has made all this especially clear, with the help of Jane Greenwood's costumes and Ken Billington's lighting. In the first Sicilia scenes, everyone is in snowy white. In Bohemia, John Conklin's handsome cyclorama of hanging Lucite tubes is lit with the green of vegetation, and the actors wear colorful yellows and greens. When we return to Sicilia for the last act, the whites have been softened with patches of light grey. In addition, the character of Time (Powers Boothe), whom Shakespeare brings in only to bridge the celebrated 16-year hiatus, appears...
...those belonging to the pastoral life of Bohemia, it is the Autolycus of Fred Gwynne that stands high above the rest, His rubbery face and his antic movements are a joy and though he is a liar and a thief (like his protonym in Greek mythology), one can't help loving the rascal, Gwynne has a way of taking lines that are obscure on the page and making them seem perfectly natural. He can also put over Shakespeare's puns--as when, in a colloquy about a three-voice song,he turns a ballad scroll into a phallus while assuring...