Word: commedia
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Comedy. A new "musical commedia" on its Boston tryouts. The chance to be a trend-setter, at your own risk...
...expansion of the play within a play device, Wayward Saints concerns a trouble-prone Commedia dell'arte troupe which tries to stop quarrelling long enough to earn passage money home. The players, who have blown their own opening curtain, introduce themselves and then proceed with their financial backer's nearly impossible assignment: an improvisation of "The History of Man." Their irreverent rendition of civilization, more 1066 and All That than Encyclopedia Britannica, bumps comically along, but the players keep breaking character to bicker with each other. In an explosion of petty grievances they disband, only to regroup for a second...
...play a villain for his sympathetic qualities (as Stanislavsky counseled his actors); to play tragedy with a light touch; above all to play comedy straight. The maxim has worked trenchant revelation with English Restoration comedy; with Molière, from whom the Restoration playwrights learned, it rips the commedia dell'arte mask off the bleeding man beneath...
...vulgarian. In Aristophanic comedies, male characters were endowed with huge prop phalli with which they thwacked each other. Early forms of the Kabuki theater were closed down by the shogun in 17th century Japan for encouraging prostitution and inciting lewd homosexual byplay on and off stage. Italy's commedia dell'arte was frequently obscene in word and gesture...
Shifting Coalition. To see how this came about, it is necessary to pause and contemplate the plot as it has unfolded over the years. It is a commedia dell' arte script with occasional touches of Machiavelli...