Word: hotspurs
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...Reinhardt plays Hotspur at too high a pitch, Impetuosity, excitement, and vigor would suffice but he gives us an overwrought, almost frantic, interpretation that lacks all subtlety. Hotspur's ineptness was matched by Franklin Cover's Owen Glendower. The splendid and famous interchange between the two--"I can call spirits from the vasty deep." "Why, so can I, or so can any man;/But will they come when you do call for them?"--has no life and no wit, save what is in the lines. Reinhardt as Pistol in the second part shows greater understanding of his role, and provides...
...theaters, tents and schoolrooms of every land, wherever the sun sets and curtains rise, Falstaff struts with his gorbellied wit, Bottom bumbles through the woods, and wide-eyed Ophelia trembles before Hamlet's abuse. Malvolio preens like a toad in yellow stockings. Hotspur wells blood. In soliloquy and song, in bantering bawdry and scalp-tingling rhetoric, in the kingliest English and in tender or rough translation, they speak to man from mankind's heart. Never in the nearly 400 years since their creator was born have Shakespeare's characters spoken to so many, or meant so much...
...turning point came with the emergence of the contrasting twin giants: John Gielgud, whose melodious, grief-numbed Hamlet was this generation's finest, and Laurence Olivier, whose body English makes him Shakespeare's Angry Young Man, forever Hotspur, whether he is a sinuously satanic Richard III, a black-as-thunder Macbeth, or a plangent patriot King, Henry V. Not far behind these triumphs are Maurice Evans' sterling-silver-tongued Richard II, Ralph Richardson's roguishly intelligent Falstaff and Michael Redgrave's mettlesome, love-ravished Antony. They are the leaders of today's functional Shakespeare...
Henry IV, Part I. The repertory group of Manhattan's Phoenix Theater has done so well with Falstaff, Hotspur, and Prince Hal that it has decided to do Part II when the present run ends April...
...against tankard humor, and is never for a moment a one-man show. But it is no less a virtue of the current production that Eric Berry's robustly nimble and resourceful Falstaff is by all odds the play's best-acted role. Donald Madden's Hotspur is properly dynamic too, though it substitutes mere energy for fire and dash. As Henry, Fritz Weaver makes a well-spoken tapestry King; only the Hal falls short, from too metronomic a speech and schoolboy...