Word: cesario
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Freedman's concept has been aided by Robin Wagner's settings and Michael J. Cesario's costumes. Wagner, who did the sets for Kahn's 1973 Caesar here, has this time designed a huge three-dimensional grid of steel rods. Walls, glass panels and movable furniture slide in and out as required. The effect suggests a technological society surrounded by steel and glass; the only color is gray...
...Viola, who spends almost the whole play disguised as the pageboy Cesario, we have Lynn Redgrave, attired in an aquamarine suit and sporting a head of short red hair. She brings a surprisingly forceful voice and a sure comic instinct. It is fun to watch her lapse from her assumed machismo--as when, on exclaiming of Olivia, "She loves me sure," she girlishly claps her hands over her face, or repeatedly swoons at the prospect of having to duel with Sir Andrew. Her performance perhaps owes something to her recent portrayal of another witty and manly woman, Shaw's Saint...
...surface. Not only is she intent on a seven-year period of mourning for her brother, but she carries a black fan and even keeps her two sofas draped in black. In private she pops mints into her mouth from a pillbox. In her first meeting with Viola--Cesario she raises a smile by ticking off her virtues--lips, eyes, neck, chin--and then tucking her locket mirror into her bosom on the words "and so forth." She leaves no doubt that she is smitten by the young page since she whips the black drapes off her sofas when...
...play is as implausible as ever, but rarely has it been given a production of such marvelously sustained enchantment. Duke Orsino (Stephen Macht) is bewitched by the lovely Countess Olivia (Marti Maraden). She, in turn, falls madly in love with Cesario, who is really the shipwrecked Viola (Kathleen Widdoes) in male disguise. Before the plot is piloted to safe harbor, there are mistaken identities to be resolved, twin brother and sister to be reunited, true love's partners to be mated, and the lowbrow comic shenanigans of that Tweedledum-Tweedledee pair Sir Toby Belch (Leslie Yeo) and Sir Andrew...
...Fortune forbid" soliloquy is particularly distinguished. But there is more beauty in the "damask cheek" speech than she is yet able to convey. (Siobhan McKenna's portrayal remains the yardstick for this part, as for Shaw's Saint Joan and others.) The plausibility of confusion between Viola-Cesario and Sebastian is helped here through Donald Warfield's soft, rather womanly portrayal of the brother (a role once played by a 19-year-old Marlon Brando...