Word: karnilova
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...share the stage with some other people, among them Maria Karnilova. This is the first time in Miss Karnilova's career (which includes performances varied as a stripper in Gypsy and Tevye's wife in Fiddler on the Roof) that we see enough of her to leave the theatre satisfied. As Hortense, the French lady on the hill who lets Zorba share her bed, she becomes a vision of lonely fortitude in the face of life's injustice. In one scene, during a song that tells of the "pretty admirals" who kept company with her in the distant past...
...that matter, John Cunningham, playing the young intellectual who hires Zorba to run the mine he has inherited, does little to suggest that he is Greek (which in this version, unlike the film, he is). But like Miss Karnilova, he compensates handily. As Niko, the man Zorba teaches how to live, Cunningham works hard to make his characterization more than the dull stiff it easily could be. He is, of course, helped out by the writing. Joseph Stein, the author of the show's book, establishes Niko quickly in the second scene and never allows him to fade from view...
Mostel plays Tevye, a poor dairyman by trade and a Jewish cracker-barrel philosopher by bent. Tevye has five unmarried daughters on his hands, a strident wife (Maria Karnilova) at his elbow, and God's voice in his inner ear. He quivers before his wife and quips with his God. He plans to arrange his daughters' marriages in the time-honored way. They plead love. "Tradition," thunders Tevye, stabbing the air with an irate prophet's forefinger and then lowering his hand like a falling leaf, in wry self-mockery. The eldest daughter marries a tailor without...
...brunette beauty Michele Lee owes all her best lines to nature. Though only 19, she seems to have acquired the false vivacity and hackneyed mannerisms of generations of musicomedy ingenues. Swooping about the stage like a benign witch out of a child's storybook, fortyish ex-Ballerina Maria Karnilova, who plays a mate-hungry widow, is remarkably agile and refreshingly comic...
...gambols through the tango, the twist, and an agitated bit of neo-'20s dance nonsense called "the kangaroo." After his appearance in this wan swan song of the Broadway season, Cesare Siepi can always go back to the Met; Karnilova will dance again. In Rome's palmier days, the rest of Bravo Giovanni would have been thrown to the lions...