Word: gentlemen
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...come in from the cold of the inarticulate actual world. And if something as grand as life once went beggaring to Shakespeare, then it's hardly surprising that so many playwrights and actors have also looked to him for inspiration. John Guare and Mel Shapiro found that the Two Gentlemen of Verona were still around in 1971, only they happened to be a black and Puerto Rican, just as West Side Story had flushed Romeo and Juliet out of Manhattan slums a decade earlier. Shakespeare's influence barely surfaces until the end of West Side Story, when it takes...
...Gentlemen of Verona has seldom figured prominently or popularly in the Shakespearean repertory. With the exception of the rube Launce, its characters aren't particularly distinctive, and a false resolution awkwardly forestalls a more probable and good-humored one. But the play's unevenness worked in favor of this musical adaptation. The writers deleted and redistributed Shakespeare's lines, sharing the eloquence more equably and getting things done with less dalliance. Guare heightened the farce and added intrigue to personalities by setting each character to a modern musical rhythm with lyrics to match, in idioms such as Motown, salsa...
...Gentlemen spares the obvious potential for social statements in the black and Puerto Rican casting, limiting trendiness to the score. Shakespeare's plot remains largely intact, with its orderly parallels between pairs of individuals. There are the skeptics towards love, Julia and Valentine, and those who use seductive wiles to break them, Proteus and Silvia. There are the two masters and the two servants, each couple bound in friendship though capable of deceit. And then there's the dog Crab, who qualifies for both categories. The mutt is not only ungrateful for the constant companionship of Launce, he even sullies...
Given that Shakespeare's delicate handling of indelicate subjects has burgeoned into blatant indelicacy these days, burlesque has surely become the right accent for romance. Guare and Shapiro's Two Gentlemen of Verona revels in the vulgarity of sex and the naivety of love; it treats the profounder pretensions of lovers and politicians and wealth with sarcasm. It teaches no lessons and believes in happy endings. It declaims old poetry and drives new music hard at you. It requires relaxed yet precise coordination which the production in Harvard Yard, directed by John Bard Manulis, pulls off with only minor hitches...
Tickets for last night's outdoor performance of "Two Gentlemen of Verona," which was rained out, will be honored for a rain-date performance on Monday...