Word: comical
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...last, a movie that truly captures the essence of Harvard intellect. If you've been watching Happy Gilmore on video every Friday night, now's your chance to absorb the latest of Adam Sandler's comic genius. The Waterboy, long awaited by the masses, arrives in a theater near you tonight. Check local listings for theaters and showtimes...
...script itself falls short of supreme comic genius, the premise is redeemed in last weekend's production at the Loeb Ex. Actors Erik Amblad '99, Adam "Waka" Green '99 and Sabrina Howells (B.U.) recite the play's more lackluster puns with sarcasm, making a parody of the parody...
Abridged though it is, significant chunks of the play are lifted directly from the Bard himself, and it is in these lines of straight Shakespeare that the cast's comic engineering is most visible. Shakespeare is reinvented Amelia Bedelia-style with a suggestiveness that invites one to reconsider the comic potential inherent in even the most serious Shakespearean dialogues. Here all those idiosyncracies of Elizabethan English that we profess to understand in section are given a thorough airing. What does the guard mean with his "Stand and unfold yourself?" When did thumb-biting stop being synonymous with giving someone...
Though the lack of plot continuity adds comic flair to the most serious interchanges, the text of The Compleat Wrks really isn't much different than what you'd find on 10 randomly selected pages of the Riverside Edition. With men playing women, pathetic melodrama, the overuse of gaudy props (i.e. silly string which makes several repeat appearances as a vomit substitute) one begins to wonder if this isn't Shakespeare as it was meant to be. A frequent object of ridicule throughout the show are Shakespeare companies that fret about making Shakespeare accessible to modern audiences. The show suggests...
Green and Howells are well picked challengers whose different comic sensibilities play well off one another in a multiplicity of dramatic situations. Amblad's strength is in the physical dimension of his caricature while Green's is more verbal and prop-oriented. Howells plays a great straight man whose misguided traditionalism is artfully thwarted by the other characters' antics. Though all of the parts they play are similarly ridiculous, the ability of the three actors to cover in one form or another the pantheon of Shakespearean roles without becoming excessively confused is no small feat. Amblad goes from flight attendant...