Word: harpo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...love Kaufman and Hart, and I love the thirties. But the Harpo production of You Can't Take It With You endows its characters with the fatal fruit of self-knowledge: it's a classic example of "camping." Instead of giving us the original and allowing the dislocation in time and space to provide the boffs, we are presented with a modern, hip conception of the thirties. The ingenue is not just "lovely, fresh, and young," as Messrs. K. and H. described her: Kent Wilson's Alice is a veritable Breck poster girl, a walking Palmolive ad, a cutie...
...always doing something, and some of the bits (Rheba scratching her head with a work while setting the table, Kolenkhov absently clipping threads from his cuffs with a cuticle scissors) are tremendously successful. The timing can have Marx Brothers accuracy (it can also be unbearably sluggish, something that the Harpo troupe might well improve during the summer Agassiz run). But the production is a 1title too cute, and some of the actors create dreadful characters that seem carved out of soap, so that finally the message of the play-a plea for leisure in a suicidal, capitalistic world-becomes lost...
...Harpo's production of Oedipus makes a similar statement about the bogus exaltation of human tragedy to cathartic spectacle, wherein great men fall from pinnacles in the all-seeing determinist universe of the Fates. Director Laurence Senelick has chosen the Seneca version over the traditional Sophocles "to remove the play from the realms of both Freudian psychology and aloof neo-classicism." This may also mean that he has chosen a play which, because of its gore and violence, leads to a denial that there is anything more in suffering than suffering; a denial that tragedy can be uplifting in transcending...
...YEARBOOK'S editors have relied heavily on interviewing this year to get across substantive issues, and the result should warn them against repeating the technique next year. Most of the interview texts are way too long-particularly a multi-page monster with Laurence Senelick, director of HARPO. The book opens with a few pages of comments by Adam Ulam, professor of Government, and Reuben A. Brower, professor of English, who are asked to compare today's students with their ancestors of the early sixties. Their replies produce little of interest, but some of Brower's remarks are worth looking over...
...walk-off is the bittersweet image by which, undoubtedly, Chaplin wishes to be remembered. But beyond his own films is a far more valid reason for remembrance. Since the '20s, international screen comedians have owed their art to him; Harry Langdon, Laurel and Hardy, Harpo Marx, Abbott and Costello, Jerry Lewis, Peter Sellers, Fernandel, Danny Kaye, Cantinflas, Jacques Tati ... all were born in a tip of the Chaplin chapeau...