Word: malvolios
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...priggish majordomo Malvolio is the play's pivotal role. He is, along with Shylock, one of Shakespeare's two great comic butts. Malvolio was modeled on Sir William Knollys, Queen Elizabeth's puritanical and much ridiculed comptroller. Both Malvolio and Shylock were so richly written, however, that later ages have often found the roles sympathetic and even tragic. Both offer much leeway to directors and actors. Here, Philip Kerr '63 offers a thoroughly dour and self-inflated misfit who deserves the gulling he gets. In this production, not only is he imprisoned in a dark cell as a lunatic...
...Abduction from the Seraglio is early Mozart at its best. It's got a whole set of funny, likeable characters, from a sublime but fatuous talking pasha to a ridiculous, ferociously villainous guard who gives up his schemes with a malediction worthy of Malvolio or President Nixon. And it's got some remarkable music, from its opening serenade--Mozart had just got married when he wrote the opera, its heroine is named after his wife--to a sextet (I think) at the end that's so reconciling and beautiful and so on it makes everything Mozart wrote later on seem...
...comic scenes delight in visual as well as verbal madness. Heads pop wildly from behind a screen of evergreens during Malvolio's undoing and Sir Andrew Aguecheek mouthes Sir Toby Belch's speech simultaneously from the opposite end of the stage. Even the propmen are carried away, hamming it up as they wander in to change scenes...
Such airs, though, are drunken sport for Sir Toby Belch and company as they plot to entangle the most self-righteous courtier ever created. "Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?" thunders Sir Toby to puritanical Malvolio, who, for his pains, ends up locked up and abused as a madman...
...bull-headed, red-nosed, raucous Sir Toby Belch, dominates the comic scenes, but his presence is well supported by Linda Dobb's sharp Maria and Locke Bowman's fussy Sir Andrew. Sunny Tufts carries off the difficult part of Viola with grace and Mark Daniels as a quivering chinned Malvolio is inspired...