Word: merchant
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...sense, p.r. is an old and simple human and political instinct. A warrior king leading an army, a cardinal campaigning for the papacy, a politician running for election, a merchant preparing a deal, a woman looking for a husband-all are involved in public relations. Yet only lately, and only in America, has p.r. grown into a distinct, elaborate skill...
...last few years for stage directors, especially young ones, to pick up a classic that is generally conceded to be a light comedy and so stage it that it comes out a "dark" or "black" comedy. This is precisely what Michael Kahn, aged 29, has done with The Merchant of Venice now in view at the American Shakespeare Festival...
Much of the responsibility here falls on Shakespeare. For Merchant is a pretty silly play, a widely uneven play, an inadequately controlled play, a poorly shaped play. This is not to say that it isn't a good play when seen in the context of all plays, but just that, within the oeuvre of Shakespeare himself, it falls qualipatively well down in the bottom half of his output. No matter what approach one brings to the work, there is a shift of tone between the first four acts and the fifth. The material for a black-comedy interpretation is undeniably...
Gulf or no gulf, I am grateful to Kahn for essaying this experiment. And I am particularly glad he did it with this play. For of all Shakespeare's works Merchant is the best known and, for some reason, the most popular. Everybody has read it in secondary school. It's a work everyone feels comfortable with (if not comfortable about); he knows its ups and downs, twists and turns, nooks and crannies. The play is like a well-worn glove. And now again we put it on confidently -- and the glove pinches; it's no longer what we thought...
...note part of two arched Venetian foot-bridges, both of gold. A short masque takes place on stage, but we are put somewhat ill-at-ease by the dissonant musical score provided by Richard Peaslee (a far cry from the pleasant harmonies Virgil Thomson composed for the Festival's Merchant of exactly ten years...