Word: elizabethanism
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...limited. ("I was slated for a part as one of the strippers in Gypsy, but Ethel Merman nixed me.") It is a sad thing, says Jones, that "today, female impersonation is a dying art. It goes back to 300 B.C. The Roman, Greek and Japanese theaters relied on it; Elizabethan plays were done...
...study of (1) unrequited lovers (in which, by rare exception, young love is not opposed by an elder generation), and of (2) poseurs. Every member of the personae is a persona in the old Latin sense of a mask-wearer; and the play is, in a way, an Elizabethan counterpart of today's best-seller, The Status Seekers...
...brilliant elaboration. It is also leisurely: the carousers join in singing, one after another, a wonderful series of catches and glees--and not just snatches, but entire pieces. These, and the rest of the extensive musical score for the show, were composed in a sure-handed, neo-Elizabethan style by Andre Singer (his instrumentation is comprised of flute, trumpet, harp, and a sizable battery of percussion...
Viola is the one honest, sincere, and normal person in the play. Yet for most of the time she must go about abnormally disguised as a young boy, who looks like her twin brother Sebastian. The problem was quite different in Elizabethan times, since actresses were interdicted and both roles were taken by young boys. Miss McKenna is able to convey a zestful boyishness without ever losing her innate womanliness. And more than any one else in the cast, she pays attention to the poetic qualities of the text (though on opening night she sometimes lowered her voice...
...require the players to convey the music of poetic lines--an area in which the company as a whole is weak. This is not to say that the writing in the play lacks interest; far from it. The text is a rich mine of various kinds of lower-class Elizabethan speech, including laughable treatments of French and Welsh dialects. It is filled with captivating puns, doubles ententes, and novel images; and it constitutes a veritable dictionary of original invectives, insults, and expletives...