Word: figaro
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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News of the attack dominated front pages from Boston to Bangkok. JEAN PAUL II: THE WORLD APPALLED read the 1½-in. headline in Paris' daily Le Figaro. In Johannesburg, an afternoon Star editorial bemoaned the violence "that seems to pervade the whole world." The New York Times devoted its first seven pages to the story and upped its pressrun by 180,000, to 1.16 million. The Los Angeles Times hit the streets two hours earlier than usual with a rare extra edition; the Washington Star printed two extra editions within hours of the shooting. In Vatican City, staffers...
...first time this season, though, the individual A.R.T. performers do not match the precision of the rest of the creative team. Their errors are of emphasis, not conception: Shalhoub's Figaro, feisty and engaging in his monologues, seems too resentful and angry in his battle of wits with the Count--his "high spirits" reach only middling altitudes. As he counters the Count's designs on his bride-to-be Suzanne with plots of his own, he acts more like an lago than a Prospero. Karen Macdonald's Suzanne follows his lead--spleen overbalances sweetness. Harry Murphy's smug Count...
...A.R.T.'S FIGARO is funny enough, in fact, that you have to think hard afterwards to figure out why it's also unsettling. Epstein has managed to underscore the class tensions in the play without turning it into a Marxist dialectic, and wherever Beaumarchais' introduces a didactic speech. Epstein finds ways for his characters to deliver it naturally. Each character, in turn--except the Count--gets to spout off about his oppression; and those who believe women's issues are a 20th-century invention will note that Marceline (Barbara Orson), who starts the play as Figaro's nemesis, offers...
...through little touches and shades of emphasis that Epstein works his interpretation into the grain of Beaumarchais' play. When Shalhoub presents Figaro's epiphanic monologue, he strides from seat-top to seat through the empty first rows of the auditorium, with all the precarious confidence of his social-climbing instinct--then hops down, nods furtively and scurries by the legs of the audience with some submissive mutters of "excuse me." The moment when the jealous Count gives Cherubino an army officer's commission to remove him from the scene--immortalized by Mozart in his mock-heroic, trumpet-and-drum aria...
Such serious flourishes enrich this Figaro--without detracting from the abundant comedy, they help recreate for us a sense of why this play was taken up as a banner of revolution across Europe, why it was suppressed by governments as an act of subversion. It's a sense obtainable today neither from the opera--performed extravagantly before wealth audiences--not from the leaden translations footnoted in drama texts. If there are individual lapses in the production, the whole moves unquestionably in the right direction--towards, Beaumarchais, capturing his language, temperament and ideas...