Word: jester
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...furry eyebrows still flutter like windshield wipers and the ever-present cigar is just as pungent as it was when Pierre Salinger served as John Kennedy's White House press secretary and a court jester to Camelot. One day this month Salinger, now 52, found himself conducting a press conference again, only this time his audience was a group of French businessmen: "The Concorde is a dinosaur ... There will be no candidate from the Kennedy clan in 1980 ... What do Americans think of France? They do not think about...
...neither cheap nor extravagant) is built around a leaning tower that suggests not so much Pisa but Babel and, at times, the land of Hansel and Gretel. At the start it represents the palace of the Duke of Mantua. For the second scene it becomes the house where the jester Rigoletto has hidden, or so he thinks, his daughter Gilda from a menacing outside world. And so on. The tower is, alas, not a very arrest ing centerpiece, especially against Designer Tanya Moiseiwitsch's eye-of-the-hurricane backdrops. Worse, it is shoved too close to the apron. Events...
While they are not perhaps so powerful as the two main leads, the rest of the cast is generally of an equally high caliber. As the Herald, Jonathan Prince provides the closest thing to sanity in the play; he is almost a Shakespearean jester, providing a sarcastic, witty window into the inmates' world. Prince is perfect in the role, pointing out the foibles of first, the inmates, then the director, never clearly on one side or the other. The four alcoholics who provide a musical Greek chorus to Marat's saga are also good in the not-quite-organized fashion...
FOOLS PROVIDE the tabloids with copy, the wise with confidence, and the timid with smug self-satisfaction; often symbolizing an era to a degree aesthetes are unwilling to admit. Harry Crosby would have made a superlative court jester. If ever an artist appropriated the spirit of his era it was Crosby. This golden-haired nephew of J.P. Morgan spent a lifetime scrambling after insight and sensations others had long since experienced; obsessed with material possessions and the construction of elaborate mythologies. Yet his diaries ruthlessly expose foibles, and paint portraits in the starkest tones...
...LESSER CHARACTERS, the Duke of Milan is almost guaranteed to make a hit. Paris K.C. Barclay presides over "Bring All the Boys Back Home" in robust and jazzy style, accompanied by his spry side-kick, Thurio (Stephen Hayes), who has been poured into a snazzy green and orange jester's outfit with token military trimmings. The transformation of Shakespeare's Duke into a war-mongering politician hasn't dated since the demise of the Vietnam war. Eglamour's singing voice tends to coast out of key, and the Chinese dragon he musters to his aid is lovely...