Word: cordelia
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...rests like a hearse--Lear's castle--upstage center. Its grille grins, its headlights stare. Seven stars, like seven gods, watch from the rafters. Lear emerges from the automobile, masked in sunglasses, master of his court, eager to dispatch the richest third of his Kingdom to his youngest daughter Cordelia. But Cordelia refuses to flatter her father and the play commences, careening out of control...
...Cordelia too complex, and her Fool too simple, Jenny Cornuelle portrays both parts with haunting skill. But when the special effects do not smother her, she delivers some of Shakespeare's most beautifully ironic peotry with quivering power...
Lear's entourage--Martha Jussaume's Cordelia, Tom Dinger's Fool, Richard McElvain's Kent--clearly got the word from Cain to "be loving," to be tender, to fit his interpretation of the play in the program notes. They hug each other a lot, hold each other's arms, "are supportive," as the psychologists say; they form pieta-like tableaux of familial affection. There's little wrong with that, and it might make a valid production of Lear someday, but all the actors--not just the nuclear family--would have to work towards realizing it, and the director would have...
...details and many of the show's cleverest lines. The thematic link between the Lear and Purgatorio motifs is the search for a missing woman who represents some kind of an ideal. For LaZebnik's Lear, who is both actor and director in a play about himself, it is Cordelia who is lost, while for Thomas, the young male lead, it is the elusive Adeline, who takes the place of Dante's Beatrice. Since Tome is also the name of the fool in King Lear, it's not too surprising, given the workings of LaZebnik's mind, that characters from...
...most of LaZebnik's score. LaZebnik is a better lyricist than composer, but even some of his lyrics--like the blackly humorous "Happy When" a nostalgic ode to murderous wives--are not particularly inspired. Among the show's best numbers are Lear's quizzical lament, "Where is Cordelia?" expertly delivered by Stephen Morris, and the finale, "So What If Hope is Gone," which suggests a way of coping with unhappy endings...