Word: commedia
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Cooper's puppets perform with great gusto, but in a commedia dell'arte the stage should be filled with action. Too often the stage is held by just two people--essentially a fault of Benavente's play, but a few extras cleverly slipped in would have helped a great deal. Still, in the second act revelry breaks out as the entire cast shows itself for a switching, twisting, joyous denouement...
Rivals in Pleasure. That Gilles should remind Chastel of Bottom is no surprise, for both play essentially the same comic role. In the commedia dell' arte farces so popular in Watteau's day, Gilles, or Pierrot, was the simple-wilted country bumpkin, often a servant who pointed out the follies of his master and for his audacity got his ears boxed. But Watteau's dignified, wistful figure is aimed not at burlesque. In all probability it was intended as a portrait of a patron or friend...
Watteau often painted such personalities in commedia dell' arte costumes, for the masquerade was the sign and symbol of his era. To capture its magic, the Flemish-born painter had run away to Paris at the age of 18, then studied with Stage Designer Claude Gillot and Interior Decorator Claude Audran before striking out on his own. The times cried out for a chronicler. After the aged Sun King, Louis XIV died in 1715, French society, under the leadership of the dissolute regent, the Due d'Orleans, gave itself over to a rabid pursuit of pleasure, rivaling that...
...Initially, he and his company of 23 performers-as with most of the guerrilla troupes, few have had any previous professional experience-specialized in silent, Chaplinesque skits. Despite its name, the troupe has since broken loudly into song and speech; and its repertory, performed around the country, includes Renaissance commedia dell'arte, Moliere farces and group-created modern morality plays with so much bawdry that the actors have been arrested by local authorities for obscenity. At the festival, the troupe's musicians, who call themselves the "Gorilla Band," offered a blatantly sardonic, nose-thumbing rendition of favorite American...
Theatregoers of today can reasonably be expected to show familiarity with the stock characters of the old Italian commedia dell'arte, from which Shakespeare took the five low-comedy figures that Berowne ticks off as "The pedant, the braggart, the hedge-priest, the fool, and the boy." Respectively, Holofernes corresponds to the dottore, Armado to the capitano, Nathaniel to the pantalone and parasite, Moth (a wit) and Costard (a dimwit) to the comic servants (zanni). But it seems that Shakespeare also had in mind here poking fun at such now-forgotten men as Thomas Nashe, Gabriel Hervey, and John Florio...