Word: malvolio
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Michelle Pfeiffer, an Oscar nominee this year for Dangerous Liaisons, makes her stage debut as the grieving countess Olivia. Jeff Goldblum (The Fly) is her pettish steward Malvolio, John Amos (Roots) her drunken uncle Sir Toby Belch and Gregory Hines (The Cotton Club) Toby's companion in ribaldry, the jester Feste. Stephen Collins (Tattinger's) is the duke who desires Olivia, and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (The Color of Money) the girl-masquerading-as- a -pageboy sent to plead his case. Among other screen and stage stalwarts rounding out the troupe is Charlaine Woodard (Ain't Misbehavin') as the merrily scheming...
...gentrified aristocracy. Jack Aranson (Sir Toby Belch) and Francis Cuka (Maria) also provide the play with some of its most amusing--and bawdy--humor in their defiance of courtly propriety. And by far the most hilarious performance of the evening is Joseph Costa's portrayal of the cantakeorous Malvolio, whose vanity and self-importance trap him into--among other ludicrously comic gestures--adorning himself in yellow stockings...
...plot's unique balance of flexibility and limitation that catches the directorial imagination. Mixups in identity, women disguised as men, love triangles, and rowdy servants can be portrayed any number of ways, but identical twins have to look alike, and whether the characters dress in down jackets or loincloths, Malvolio must somehow appear in yellow stockings...
...details need to be tampered with. All the modernizations are properly minimal, though an anachronism or two grates on the nerves--nobody holds bear-baitings in a Hollywood garden. The romantic setting proves its appropriateness most triumphantly in the discovery of a way to get away with Malvolio's yellow stockings (an imaginative coup too tunny to reveal...
...GENERAL EASE pays off by letting every character expand from comic stereotype to reality, exploiting, to the full the scope and potential of Samuels's approach--not to mention the richness of the play itself. An unfunny Malvolio is inconceivable, but the part can easily become unbelievable or grotesque. Christopher Randolph, without sacrificing any comic content, somehow makes his Malvolio heartwrenching as well...