Word: iambic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Mario is a poet too. A man of immigrant parents, soaked in the American dream since birth. Man of the melting pot with big hands and arms and mind, who crouches and sweeps and roars in political iambic pentameter and some free verse. A man still surprised that he is Governor of New York and talked about for President of the U.S. It is the stuff of song...
...character for asides to the camera, and the show may break completely from format on a whim. One of this season's episodes featured a seven-minute Gene Kellyesque dance number. Another was an elaborate parody of The Taming of the Shrew done in Elizabethan costume and mock iambic pentameter...
...farms out to a tyro. Appearing in the same scene with a child is the trial death; an actor is either upstaged or dragged down. Though one hates to badmouth someone who doesn'v yet have a complete set of teeth, Jason Harvey is really bad. He decants iambic as if he had taken elocution lessons from Alfred Hitchcock, and he can barely be understood past the eighth row. When there are at least a half-dozen undergraduate actors and actresses at Harvard who could have pulled off the role, Kilty's choice is worse than a crime...
...West End, can be seen as a new West Side Story. Mike (Rory Edwards), leader of a quintet of Hackney toughs, challenges a rival gang boss to one-on-one combat and just barely lives to tell the tale. Berkoffs twist: Mike and every other character speak in iambic pentameter. Will the rival boss kick Mike in the crown? "Balls! Were he Al Capone I'd pluck 'im down...
...with delightful melodies that are by turn jaunty and sweet. Harnessed to Lorenz Hart' witty and graceful lyrics, they pull the show along at an exhilarating clip, and in between numbers, George Abbott's book provides just the right mix of Shakespearean vaudeville and vaudevillian Shakespeare. Large chunks of iambic pentameter are carelessly tossed across the stage, only to be nimbly undercut by an outrageously topical reference or a wonderfully bad pun. And since its 1938 world premiere at the Shubert Theater, Boston, The Boys From Syracuse inspired quite a few more Shakespeare musicals, most notably Kiss Me, Kate...