Word: comical
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Presenting The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro on successive evenings not only gives the New England Opera Theater a repertoire of two standard works, it enables audiences to follow Beaumarchais' drama from the Count's frivolous courtship of Rosina through their tragi-comic marriage. Rossini's music for the first play perfectly reflects its brittle stylized comedy. And the score of Mozart's "sequel" (actually written thirty years earlier) given to the older characters an almost bitter-sweet maturity...
...expulsion from the party, but Togliatti talked Secchia into suppressing his demands for sterner policies in return for a promise of no reprisals against the rebels. Then, Palmiro Togliatti strutted back into public view to pretend, by sarcasm and ridicule, that such a thing as dissent had never existed. "Comic . . . ridiculous . . . grotesque," said Togliatti. "These reports only show how stupid our enemies are. We are glad of this because stupid enemies are easier to fight than intelligent enemies." The delegates roared their approval, and 1,200 hands voted their endorsement of the leadership of Palmiro Togliatti. Outwardly, at least...
Deep in My Heart (MGM) stars Actor-Dancer-Singer-Comic José Ferrer in the life story of Composer Sigmund Romberg. As Ferrer plays him, Romberg is just Ferrer with a Viennese accent. When the story begins, in 1911, Romberg is a piano player in a Manhattan restaurant belonging to Anna Mueller (Helen Traubel); when it ends he has made the big time. This thread of a story sews together some patches and snatches from Romberg shows (Maytime, The Desert Song, etc.), most of them super-duper production numbers. Among the performers: Rosemary Clooney, Gene Kelly, Jane Powell, Vic Damone...
Faye Banter gets top billing in the show, and her portrayal of the mother (put them all together you've got MOTHER. . .) is engagingly domineering. Hers is the usual Junior-League-25-years-after sort of role, however, and her comic talents are barely exercised. Arthur Starch, as her son, alternately months and shouts his lines. And his boudoir transformation obviously seems as preposterous to him as the stilted lover scene through which the authors wring him in the first act. It is not his fault that the growing pains have a few audible creaks...
...best performance, and the best comic part in the whole play, belongs to George Turner, the stuffed shorted, Edwardian butler. Turner's carefully measured pace and diction add a rare ludicrosity to the otherwise shabby proceedings. Joan Wet more, as the young man's sister, brings a facile smugness to some of the play's better lines...