Word: clowning
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...consequently the U.S. has been at a loss at producing competent performers or appreciative audiences. The National Mime Theater, now playing at Lesley College's Welch Auditorium, may have gone a ways to solve that problem. The troupe has combined old-fashioned mime with the stylized anarchy of a clown show and the result is a production that is at times uneven, but one that is unusually creative and often extremely funny...
...Beyond Words. He is an engaging mime with a bouyantly-light and sure feeling for comedy. He makes his varied talents readily plain during the nine short sketches of classical mime which combine to make Beyond Words the perfect introduction to this too-long ingnored stage craft. Dressed in clown's costume and white face, working without props and only occasionally with music, Martin almost miraculously manages to create a palpable world out of nothing but his own imagination...
...costumes that Jane Greenwood has fashioned are lovely, though sometimes a bit late for the period. The shipwrecked sibling twins Sebastian and Viola (disguised as a pageboy) wear Cavalier rather than Elizabethan dress, similar to the "Blue Boy" garb Greenwood provided for the 1966 production. Unwisely she made the Clown's outfit insufficiently differentiated from those of the rest of Olivia's household...
...move, but he also gives us a soundtrack of their swashing, and even an actual ocean mist. When Viola is washed up on the Illyrian shore, she turns and takes a long look at the ocean before telling the Captain, "Lead me on." At the very end, while the Clown sings the stanzas of "When that I was," the remaining characters gradually depart, leaving him alone; when he is finished, he turns his back on us and gazes off across the water, whose whoosh is the last thing we hear...
Jack Gwillim is a fine Clown when carousing with the others in the comical caterwauling cantata at midnight; but, later, he simply does not have a good enough singing voice to do justice to "Come away, death" and the concluding curtain song (which would also benefit from better synchronization between singer and backstage orchestra). This is no small point, for Shakespeare wrote the heavily musical role especially for Robert Arnim, a new company acquisition who happened to be a superb singer...