Word: greekness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...highly stylized language, and make unfortunate attempts to naturalize it--leaving it stilted and often absurd. The blacks--played by about 15 members of Boston's New African Company -- are effective when overtly menacing, but otherwise confused and distracting, never successfully realizing the foreboding eerie simplicity of a Greek chorus...
Zorba is that triumph. Prince has the material this time and he goes to town. He has made the property (Nikos Kazantzakis' Zorba the Greek), already institutionalized by a successful movie...
...show, sustained through the entire evening, is set the moment the curtain rises. The entire cast, only nameless figures at this point, sits in a semi-circle that stretches across the stage. Some are talking; some are joking; some have musical instruments and are singing snatches of Greek songs. This is Greece...
...that matter, John Cunningham, playing the young intellectual who hires Zorba to run the mine he has inherited, does little to suggest that he is Greek (which in this version, unlike the film, he is). But like Miss Karnilova, he compensates handily. As Niko, the man Zorba teaches how to live, Cunningham works hard to make his characterization more than the dull stiff it easily could be. He is, of course, helped out by the writing. Joseph Stein, the author of the show's book, establishes Niko quickly in the second scene and never allows him to fade from view...
...product. Prince has woven just about all of the show's components into his unifying conception. Ronald Field's joyous choreography is so tightly linked to the staging, that it's hard to believe Prince did not devise the dances himself. Don Walker's orchestrations, a precise blend of Greek and Broadway instrumentation, flood the theatre with frenzies of rhythm, adding as much to the atmosphere as Boris Aronson's simplistically beautiful sets...