Word: comic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Cinderella Liberty, a run-of-the-mill item about sailors in Seattle, comes to the Harvard Sq. on Wednesday. With it is The Heartbreak Kid, a film directed by Elaine May with the comic touch of something like The Graduate. It's about the young, sheltered and Jewish boy being carried away. If you can handle Cybill Shepard...
...priggish majordomo Malvolio is the play's pivotal role. He is, along with Shylock, one of Shakespeare's two great comic butts. Malvolio was modeled on Sir William Knollys, Queen Elizabeth's puritanical and much ridiculed comptroller. Both Malvolio and Shylock were so richly written, however, that later ages have often found the roles sympathetic and even tragic. Both offer much leeway to directors and actors. Here, Philip Kerr '63 offers a thoroughly dour and self-inflated misfit who deserves the gulling he gets. In this production, not only is he imprisoned in a dark cell as a lunatic...
...both succeeded and failed. He certainly brought about a change in inner attitudes, so that the comic material for which he was scorned and prosecuted meets with relatively easy acceptance today. Outwardly, little has changed. The substance of the first two-thirds of this one-man show-a toilet-training routine, assorted scatology, corrosively Jewish anti-Semitic byplay-could no more find its way into print in most publications now than when Bruce first delivered it in the '50s and '60s. Most supper-club managers would still label it as "sick...
...form an unlikely trio, trying to figure a means to make the money back. There is a final burst of sentimentality that manages to promise both happy futures and just deserts. It also reveals the sappy foundation beneath the movie's superficially tough exterior, like a stand-up comic who spikes his patter with a tear...
Beyond such essentially show business concerns, Caldwell was operating on the premise that beneath the breast of the war horse beats the heart of a thoroughbred. The Barber ranks as a 19th century buffa masterpiece because its music is so innately ingratiating and so illustrative of both character and comic situation. Figaro's patter aria Largo al factotum ("Feeegaro! Feeegaro!") quickly defines him as one of the most likable hustlers in all opera. Rosina's Una voce poco fa is a song of such poise and bravura style as to remove all doubt that she will...