Word: commedia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...same complaints might be made about Clarke's Miracolo d'Amore, which is rescued by being exquisitely beautiful. Clarke usually credits a painter with inspiring her imagery. This time it is Tiepolo. But the ancient crone sweeping and cackling, the commedia dell'arte clowns, the quartet of nude women gently interweaving in a dance, the men employing a variety of bird noises, the eerily believable copulation between a girl and a skeleton also bring to mind Cocteau and Gertrude Stein and Picasso and Diaghilev. If more explicitly violent and more frequently nude than necessary, Miracolo is nonetheless a fitting tribute...
...Quincy House production is a funny, frolicsome farce in the 16th Century commedia dell' arte tradition. Director Joseph Giani fills the show with characters in brightly colored, Harlequin-style costumes, masks with grotesquely distorted features, troubadours with recorders and guitars, people hitting each other with padded swords, puppets, actors mixing with the audience, and lots of physical, semi-improvisational comedy...
This year the La Jolla roster has included a commedia dell'arte farce, The Three Cuckolds, starring Mime Bill Irwin; Shout Up a Morning, a musical based on the work of Jazzman Cannonball Adderley that went on to a limited run at the Kennedy Center in Washington; and the U.S. premiere of Odon von Horvath's Figaro Gets a Divorce, a work of protest written in 1937 in Nazi Germany. Currently playing are Gillette, a comic adventure set in a Wyoming boomtown, and a modern version of the Greek tragedy Ajax, directed by Peter Sellars and imported from Sellars...
...King Stag, written in 1762 by Carlo Gozzi in revolt against the realistic naturalism of contemporary theater, is a feast of the imagination with the technique and logic of the commedia dell'arte, Italy's native improvisational comedy. The third Gozzi production directed this year by Andrei Serban. The King Stag is a fairy tale set in the oriental kingdom of Serendippo where the good king Deramo is looking in vain for a worthy wife. His trusted but treacherous minister. Tartaglia, tries to insinuate his own daughter, Clarice, into the king's affections to distract the king from the beautiful...
...costumes, worth the price of admission in themselves, are a cross between commedia dell'arte and Oriental styles, corresponding to no known time or place. Some, like Tartaglia's shimmering, black, bat-winged cape, are sumptuous and frightening. Truffaldino, the simple-minded bird catcher, on the other hand, looks hilariously like Big Bird with a truffle-shaped head. The characters' exotic masks, with their fixed and staring eyes, give even the humans in King Stag an entrancing and surreal beauty. When the characters speak from bodies not their own, as when Tartaglia inhabits Deramo's body to deceive Angela...