Word: commedia
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...style, too, had been spontaneously requested by the audience. What's more, they could have done it in any style from Euripides to the Reader's Digest. For Nichols and May, getting ready for their first Broadway show after years in nightclubs, are essentially modern practitioners of commedia dell'arte, the spontaneous comedy of Renaissance Italy in which strolling players improvised their skits and lampooned their...
...crayon-blue eyes and round, astonished mouth suggesting that he finds the world just a little too much to cope with. Elaine is a dark-eyed Columbine of many moods who wears her immemorial, feminine wisdom a little uncomfortably, like an ill-fitting evening dress. Just as the commedia players ridiculed the braggarts and poltroons, cuckolds and scheming Don Juans, Mike and Elaine act out caricatures of their own time and place-the phony intellectual, the lecherous boss and his confused secretary, the little man at the mercy of the distant, unreachable, untouchable telephone operator. In An Evening with Mike...
...young apprentices who get themselves invited to the summer estate of a wealthy British couple and plan to rob the latter of their valuables and their nieces. An example of the frivolous boulevardier school of writing, the play harks back in form and style to the tradition of the commedia dell' arte, of Moliere and of Marivaux...
...history. Kaendler's pieces were intended chiefly for banquet settings of a sort that had previously been made in candy or wax. He could turn his patron's dining table into a miniature park or stage alive with glistening birds or gaily obscene mimes from the Italian Commedia dell'arte. Sometimes he would create a hunt, a concert, or a table-top display of drawing-room conceits. The Hand Kiss is part of a humorous circle of distractions derived from Molière, in which the gallant's daring is brought to nothing by the lady...
...Virginia's new Watteau dates from the period when he had first found his own formula for combining artifice with nature. For it was not in the mincing, grandiloquent French courtiers that Watteau found his prototypes but from among the mocking, high-spirited, slapstick players of the Italian Commedia dell'Arte. By placing them against the superb park landscapes he sketched in and around Paris, Watteau created a half-make-believe world of his own that paid homage to nothing but his own poetic imagination...