Word: hamming
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...cast's performance is the ribaldry Schwartz has injected. The greatest ham, and consequently the most enjoyable performer, is Walter Swap, who plays Hanswurst. He cavorts in five different disguises, and his impersonation of a crackly-voiced beggar woman in "I Beg of You" nearly steals the show. Sandra Robbins, as Columbina, sings the eighteenth century melodies beautifully, if a bit too softly, but she has trouble warming to the sex-ridden requirements of the twentieth-century script...
Machiavelli and the typical Jewish usurer convey little to a modern audience, however, and the play needs a touch of the ham to be saved from mediocrity. The actors play slapstick so well that the production's one weak moment is an off-spring of their own success. In the last act, Barabas gets caught in his own plot and sinks to a painful death in a "deep pit past recovery." His wile has betrayed him, and his snarling vengeance ("Damn'd Christians, dogs, and Turkish Infidels,") echoes across the stage. Having avoided the serious side of Barabas' treachery until...
Chocolate-covered ham is the prevailing flavor of Foxy, which borrows its name and some threads of plot from Ben Jonson's Volpone. Double-crossed by three rascally pals, Prospector Lahr gets his revenge by pretending that he is at death's door, with a fortune in nuggets to bestow. His greedy victims vie desperately with one another to show their love for Lahr. One of the sourdoughs, after snapping up a comely virgin for $33,000 on the Yukon's bullish bride market, even offers Bert the jus primae noctis. As for the gift, red-haired...
...Among grownups, as well, Calder at 65 is Europe's favorite U.S. sculptor. In 1927 he delighted Paris with his tiny abstract circus of wire-wound clowns. The son and grandson of more conventional sculptors, Calder has the blacksmith's instinctual understanding and fondness for metal. His ham fists twist, snip and shear sheet metal into subtle forms that others can only hope to achieve in clay or marble. His latest works of iron are so heavy that his Paris gallery had to reinforce its floor with girders for a one-man Calder show last month...
...avowed candidates: Goldwater, Rockefeller, Maine's Senator Margaret Chase Smith and Harold Stassen. Two New Hampshiremen are listed, presumably just to see their names in print: Norman Lepage, a Nashua accountant who also ran in the 1962 senatorial primary; and Wayne Green of Peterborough, publisher of a ham radio magazine, who filed for Vice President. Unlisted, but with backers busily courting write-in votes, are Richard Nixon and U.S. Ambassador to South Viet Nam Henry Cabot Lodge...