Word: gildas
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...silk cushion, inventing their own rules and then ignoring them, cutting the boorish infidels down with gay, rapier wit. Thus it is with the merrily amoral ménage in Design for Living, a triangle with some complex emotional geometry. Otto (Frank Langella) and Leo (Raul Julia) are friends; Gilda (Jill Clayburgh) and Otto become lovers; Gilda dumps Otto for Leo; Gilda leaves them both for a stuffy art dealer; Otto and Leo liberate Gilda from genteel sobriety. In Coward's world the cabal of camaraderie must ever win out over the exclusivity of passion, and style consists...
...century New York City hotel ballroom instead of a 16th century Mantuan ducal palazzo; the Duke and his courtiers are not nobles but crime lords, and Rigoletto is a bartender, not a jester. The second scene takes place in a Little Italy tenement where Rigoletto has secreted his daughter, Gilda, and where she is wooed by the Duke, who sports a high school warmup jacket. The finale is set in a seedy, Hopperesque waterfront dive. When the Duke sings his famous La donna e mobile aria, in English, he first pops a coin in a jukebox that stands beneath...
...that forces audiences to rethink it and savor it anew. Renaissance vendettas can seem remote, "operatic," unreal, but transplanted to Mulberry Street in the 1950s, they take on a grimy, visceral immediacy. In the major roles, John Rawnsley as Rigoletto displays a rich, focused baritone, and Valerie Masterson as Gilda has a clear, secure high soprano. Tenor Arthur Davies' voice is a little light for the Duke, but he manages to make the character at once attractive and morally repugnant. As the trampy siren...
...happens; usually, that is the point. In Horton Foote's Courtship virtually all of the "action," except for one chaste kiss, occurs offstage and is relayed to the audience as a Texas family's gossip. The play's teen-age sisters might be called Rosie and Gilda; they are as irrelevant to their small town's melodramas as Hamlet's foppish courtiers were to the royal carnage. Life is a soap opera they will be able to experience only vicariously...
...E.S.T. Place: your living room or mine. During the mid-1970s, Saturday night meant one thing only for glassy-eyed millions of the TV generation: Saturday Night Live. In each installment, a guest host and the Not Ready for Prime Time Players (Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray et al.) teetered on the cutting edge of comedy chaos. The humor was topical, hip, manic, risky, urban and wildly uneven. It was guerrilla television and it radicalized American comedy...