Word: comically
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...slightest of the plays were produced with engaging theatricality, as in the swaggering bawdiness of the Drama Club's Mandragora, the Machiavelli farce. Czech acting at its frequent best combines an animal energy with the timing of aerial acrobats. Czechs make superb comedians, and have that highest comic skill-to slip with a flash of the eye into the tragic mask. Czech direction is passionately intelligent. In Architect Josef Svoboda, they have the most imaginative stage designer working anywhere today...
Unfortunately, the current Loeb production production under the direction of George Hamlin, never rises above being just a comedy. In an effort to flush out any and all possible amusement that Turgenev might have tucked away in the script, Hamlin allows his actors to employ too many different comic styles. The result is that this production is both unfaithful to the play as well as to itself; in fact, during a few crucial scenes there seemed to be at least three different plays going on all at once...
Armstrong first set eyes on an airplane at the age of two, and he made his first flight at six in an old Ford tri-motor. As a boy, he was forever assembling model airplanes, and while other youngsters were still scrambling for comic books, he went right for the aeronautical publications when the magazine shipments arrived on the stands. He worked part time in the drugstore (400 an hour) and as a grease monkey at the airfield to accumulate the money for flying lessons ($9 an hour), and earned his pilot's license on his 16th birthday, the first...
...burlesque devices: there is a set of three doors to facilitate confusion, lots of ramps and runways that bring the actors right up to their audience, and a piano at dead center to give the whole thing some stability. In short, this juxtaposition of the tragic and the comic pinpoints the mentality of a people who have survived politics (both their side's and the other's) only because they have grown accustomed to treating life and all it brings as, at best, a blasphemous joke. As The Hostage makes clear, even death--however black--has its own peculiar humor...
...only comic equal in this production is Leland Moss, as the homosexual Rio Rita. Not content to play the stage queen (masculine) as a simple grotesque, Moss maintains some semblance of delicacy. If the way he kept jumping up and down in his seat is any indication, the flamer of a middle-aged fag who ended up in the seat next to me simply loved Rita--so I guess Moss also puts in a pretty credible performance. At any rate, he is the only actor on stage who manages to stay in character for the entire evening, which in this...