Word: mariani
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...most seniors (successful preprofessionals excluded) commencement means cutting their immediate ties with Cambridge and entering the world for which Harvard prepared them. However, seniors Sarah McClusky and Lorenzo Mariani will spend the summer with six other undergraduates running an experimental theater at the Loeb...
BECAUSE the moral is the message in War and Peace, the other actors must struggle especially hard to bring their characters to life. Most successful are Lorenzo Mariani as Andrei and Heitzi Epstein as his sister Maria. With the gradual opening of his clenched fists and the slow crumbling of his waxen face, Mariani marks each stage in the deterioration of a man who loses everything--from the reforms he sponsored to the women he loved--and now stands "before the abyss." Mariani's concentrated physical control is so complete that, in the last scene his entire body writhes...
...central problem with Lorenzo Mariani's direction is his mishandling of an obviously talented cast. Both Jonathan Epstein as Morell and Jonathan Emerson as Marchbanks deliver perfectly consistent, self-contained performances; unfortunately, the two characterizations are completely out of synch with each other. Epstein's Parson Morell partakes of the tragic stature of Pastor Manders in Ibsen's Ghosts, a part Epstein played last year. It is a moving, sympathetic portrayal, but its naturalism stands in uneasy contrast to Emerson's frenetic, histrionic, almost self-parodying Marchbanks. As the timid poet, Emerson shrinks, flinches and mugs...
...greater sense of what Shaw is about. Cynthia Cardon is just right as Prossy, Morell's secretary and admirer, snapping out her consonants, as Shaw once suggested she should, with a "ten pound gun hammer spring." Thomas Champion, as Burgess, Candida's father, has a laudable Cockney accent, and Mariani himself oozes idolatrous servility as the cleric Lexy. One of the most successful scenes in the production is the comic encounter between Prossy, Burgess and Marchbanks; in this run-in with characters who have the outlines of caricature, Marchbanks' own exaggerated mannerisms find their proper context...
...Mariani's inability to establish a suitable context for the action as a whole which is precisely this production's main failing. The set is too dowdy to help much; and the contrast in acting styles is matched by sometimes inappropriate shifts in mood. The extremely dark lighting in the last scene is overly somber for the revelatory nature of the action, while many of Marchbanks' scenes descend too far into farce. The proper Shavian mix of irony and humor, tragedy and comedy remains elusive...