Word: bouzoukis
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ZORBA. Producer-Director Harold Prince has turned out a brassy bit of Broadwayana that is as far from the Mediterranean basin as is Shubert Alley. Herschel Bernardi is never really possessed by the role of the grizzled Dionysian pagan, and the bouzouki music sounds as if it were piped in by Muzak...
ZORBA. Producer-Director Harold Prince has turned out a brassy bit of Broadwayana that is as far from the Mediterranean basin as is Shubert Alley. Herschel Bernardi is never really possessed by the role of the grizzled Dionysian pagan, and the bouzouki music sounds as if it were piped in by Muzak...
...theater lights dim. The audience hushes. It is that tingling, anticipatory moment before the curtain rises. Suddenly, bouzouki music shreds the air, and in orchestra seat D-113 Jean Kerr says with a trace of apprehension: "Sounds like we are back at Zorbd." The fear proves groundless. True, the initial setting is Greece, but the play, Forty Carats, is a frothy French farce from Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Gredy, the team that wrote Cactus Flower. It is a comedy of new marital modes and manners, precisely the sort of show that people always say they want...
This wholesale miscasting might have been redeemed in part if the songs and dances possessed ethnic veracity and virility. As it is, the bouzouki music sounds as if it was piped in by Muzak, and the lyrics are insipid. The characteristic tone of Levantine lament is scarcely heard, since music that weeps and words soaked in pain might dismay the theater-party ladies. The dances have the look of old folk dances-any old folk. Greek fire is missing. Zorba danced because words could not contain his vaulting spirit. Bernardi clodhops, while the supporting cast dances by a timetable...
...Onassis is only a superficial sophisticate. His humor has a peasant strain. One of his favorite jokes describes "the noisiest thing in the world?two skeletons making love on a tin roof." A hardheaded Scotch drinker (only at night), he has smashed upwards of $700 worth of crockery in bouzouki establishments, and has been known to snore in a La Scala opera box during a Callas première. Even his fellow Greek shipping kings long dismissed him as a crude upstart. Says one acquaintance: "He was trash to some Greeks, the way old Joe Kennedy was trash to some Irish...