Word: falstaffs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Every decibel was earned. The production of Verdi's Falstaff by the Los Angeles Philharmonic-cosponsored...
...sets and costumes. In Giulini's hands, the final masterpiece of Verdi's old age emerged not as a simple, sometimes cruel romp, but a wise, humanistic view of life's pleasures and follies. Brimming with a youthful freshness and ardor, the seamless music of Falstaff could have been written only by a man well versed in the ways of the world. Giulini's interpretation went straight to the heart of this central paradox: fleet and light when it had to be, yet suffused with touching sympathy for Shakespeare's fat, amorous knight...
...village naif (Jack Gilford). For sage advice the victim consults the local, and unfunny, rabbi: "Why is the sea salty?" "Because of the herrings who live in it.'' In The Bandit, Gilford plays Aleichem himself, terrified by a thief, then retelling his role, à la Falstaff, as heroic. In The High School, the longest and most didactic episode, Gilford plays a domineering and ignorant father whose son is anxious to leave the ghetto for the new century. Between these sketches, Adapter Arnold Perl has shoehorned Bontche Schweig, by I.L. Peretz, a man without Aleichem's name...
...transformation from brat to warrior is a shaky bridge for any actor to walk. Audiences have always found it hard to sympathize with his duplicity in leading on a lovable rogue like Falstaff, and the actor who plays him must make his deviousness seem right as well as log ical. To preserve his life and his position he must be more clever than other men: he is the son of a regicide and knows that the throne he will inherit has been made slippery by blood. "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown," cries his father. David Gwillim adroitly...
...Falstaff, Shakespeare's greatest comic invention, is scarcely an easier part to play, but Anthony Quayle makes it seem not only simple, but natural, as if he had grown into it, just as Falstaff grew into his big belly. His most eloquent speech comes not from his mouth, but from his eyes, when Hal, now king, repudiates both him and his own past misdeeds: "I know thee not, old man . . . Presume not that I am the thing I was." Jon Finch is also good as Henry IV, who has won a crown but lost his peace of mind...