Word: herschel
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...Bulldogs' remarkable seesaw began with preseason events both ridiculous and sublime. Dooley nearly lost six players because of disciplinary infractions. But he gained one player who has, almost singlehanded, put the Georgians on top once again: Herschel Walker, one of the flashiest running backs in the history of college football. The best news is that Walker is only a freshman...
This bastard son of Monty Python's Life of Brian had possibilities: Dudley Moore, fresh from his conquest of Bo Derek, plays Herschel, a comic biblical figure who never quite made it into the Bible. Instead he meets a fatherly slave (James Coco), a feisty pharaoh (Richard Pryor), a counterfeit beggar (David L. Lander), an inept angel of the Lord (Paul Sand), a show-bizzy Arab (Dom DeLuise) and an ornery young woman (Laraine Newman) who leaves Herschel to tryst with Goliath and is turned into a pillar of salt. Even in A.D. 1980, the wrath of God should...
Gemini is deeply personal, and the play's primary impact is on the emotions. Even surrounded by excessive babbling and posturing, the moments of genuine, unvarnished feeling have a lucidity that carries them effortlessly out of the mess. (I knew Herschel's gentle rhapsody on his life's passion, trolley cars, was important because it made me cry.) All those piled-up absurdities emit enough shocks of recognition to power a theaterful of electric chairs...
...Cronin's intelligence, feeling--those drunken arias!--comic timing, and, finally, beauty are every bit as elephantine as her frame. There is fine support from Kaye Kingston's ghoulishly tacky Lucille and Ann Kerry's fetching Judith, but the find of the evening is John Cassisi's heart-wrenching Herschel--his breath rushing to catch up with his voice, his voice fighting to keep up with his thoughts before people stop listening and go away, with the underlying sadness of a kid who knows he's fat and weird and feels compelled to be the first to point...
Peter Mark Schifter has directed with the breathless tenderness of a Herschel Weinberger, though with considerably more precision. He keeps the trolley cars on their respective tracks, accelerating entrances and exits so that a group of seven is, suddenly, two, and the sanctity of an emotional confrontation is inevitably, often repeatedly, violated by a hovering group of invaders. Schifter's meticulously timed staging allows us few moments to catch our breath, and leaves us dizzy and dazzled by the evening...