Word: leib
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...successful was the adaptation that it elbowed Beaumarchais' prose off the stage. In brushing away the encrustations of age and restoring the original to us. Epstein and Leib have unearthed no new themes; they have instead uncovered a wealth of satiric ornamentation, the angry undergrowth of the author's mind, that either was cut for the opera or lost its punch in Italian...
More than Mozart's the A.R.T.'s Figaro seems a document of the 1780s, a chronicle of crumbling deference, while remaining in many ways an autobiographical play. Leib has taken Figaro's lengthy monologue from the start of Beaumarchais' fifth act and distributed it as a series of prologues for each act. As Tony Shalhoub's Figaro recounts his life-history as a swashbuckler, gambler, poet, doctor, barber--an account filled with the sarcasm of a man hounded by a world he's sure is in the wrong--the audience recognizes the playwright behind his costume...
...MOST SUCCESSFUL aspect of this production is Leib's nimble translation. It animates potentially deadly 18th-century dialogue with a vigorous, almost athletic wit that each character seems to have borrowed from the author. Beaumarchais' language springs from that same period of transition which in England created a Samuel Johnson--classically balanced sentences informed with a nascent romantic sense of power and purpose. Leib delivers all the author's aphorisms and anecdotes in contemporary, but not vulgarly "updated," English; and a quick comparison between his version of Figaro's monologue and those of other translators--even that of such...
...trouble of being born, that's all! For the rest he's ordinary enough. Whereas I--by God! Lost among the obscure crowd, I've had to deploy more skill and cunning just to survive than it's taken to rule all of Spain for the last hundred years... (Leib...
...Leib's ear for dialogue is keen, his sense of timing acute...