Word: epstein
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...Epstein and Mark Leib, who translated the play, have gone back over every line and scene of the original text, delicately excising those barbs that are simply too topical to appreciate two centuries later but leaving intact the many strands of Beaumarchais' plot. Figaro moves through its intrigues and mistaken identities in a vast double action to teach both the sluggish-witted Count Almaviva and his valet Figaro the uselessness of scheming the pointlessness of jealousy. When Mozart unleashed his inventive genius on the play, these were the themes he focused on, and his opera manipulates musical and dramatic structures...
...maze of sexual conflict, class warfare and social satire. For those traveling this labyrinth for the first time the American Rep production offers a speedy tour with plenty of helpful directions. But for those who thought they already knew Beaumarchais' twists and turns from the Mozart/da Ponte opera, Alvin Epstein's new mounting will seem more like an expedition in dramatic archaeology, overturning new treasures and hidden surprises around its corners...
...successful was the adaptation that it elbowed Beaumarchais' prose off the stage. In brushing away the encrustations of age and restoring the original to us. Epstein and Leib have unearthed no new themes; they have instead uncovered a wealth of satiric ornamentation, the angry undergrowth of the author's mind, that either was cut for the opera or lost its punch in Italian...
...servants; and most of the action, appropriately enough, occurs in the middle ground. Figaro's wedding procession winds through the audience and the several rendezvous in the Count's garden take place under green-and-white nets hung from the ceiling as a sort of makeshift forest. Epstein's staging and Edmunds' design, in other words, are as inventive as Beaumarchais' plot...
...excitement of these sessions, when the imaginations of Lennon and McCartney met electronic technology; for a few years, the sounds that emerged from a studio on London's Abbey Road dazzled intellectuals, teeny-boppers and nearly everyone in between. At the same time, the end was nearing. Epstein was dead, an apparent suicide; the Beatles were quarreling, no longer that the whole group was big enough for its parts. Writes Norman: "Each, in the stupendous collective adoration, felt himself to be overlooked as an individual...