Word: jackels
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Berlin circa 1928. The major "failing" involved is a missed opportunity to kill Hitler, or so the old man perceives it. The main action in the play, excitingly enough, rotates about the writing of the book, complemented by flashbacks. Erdelyi hires a young college student, well played by Paul Jackel, to assist him, and the two suffer through an alternately close and cold relationship. But just why the tone of the relationship varies so is never quite clear...
...other minor acting flukes, however--ones that might represent drawbacks in another play--here add to the characters' concreteness. While the play's fifth character, a guard played by Paul Jackel, for instance, seems awkward when he tries to enter into insulting repartee with the prisoners, this is exactly how guards sound. They try to act tough, but can never quite match the prisoners' cool--a logical enough phenomenon, since guards are often men with the same frustrated and violent temperament as prisoners, but without the nerve to try to make society pay for their disappointment. John Alden's Rocky...
...biggest disappointment is Reginald (Paul Jackel). In many ways, this role is the juiciest in the operetta; as a fleshly man who merely feigns ethereality, Reginald is the butt of most of Gilbert's jokes, and as the frustrated lover of the simple maiden Patience, he gets to sing many of his funniest lyrics. Jackel is far from incompetent: he has a loud, if not operatic, voice, ample stage presence and a talent for looking discomfited...
...part requires extraordinary control, an ability to comically etch the distinctions between the rogue as rogue and the rogue as aesthete through consistent variations of voice and gait. Jackel too often mixes the two; under Seltzer's direction, he relies overmuch on standard poses to suggest his aestheticism, his favorite involving arms exhibitionistically extended to each side and face open in a self-satisfied grin. In failing to differentiate sharply enough between the man who plays a part and the part that the man plays, Jackel not only forfeits many of the humorous possibilities of the role but mutes...
...Paul Jackel plays Curly and he's everything Curly should be: charming, on-key and curly. His character, like almost everyone in the play, is a little dumb. That's one of the central ingredients to Rodgers and Hammerstein's charm--the commonality of dumbness. Even the psychopathic villain Jud (most terrifyingly and affectingly played by an actor named Jerry Medanic) has his menace diluted by the dopey Frankenstein aspects to his character. Linda Anne Kirwan's Laurey didn't really make clear the sexual coming-out of the girl lead, but one senses that she wasn't directed with...