Word: mintz
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...humor--this particular facet of Weller's play becomes the mainstay of the Dunster production. David Alpert gives a skillful and sophisticated performance as the roguish Mike who masterminds the comic scenes. His sidekick, played by Andy Berger, is a lackluster second fiddle. Andrea Gordon as Ruth and Nikki Mintz as Kathy speak their lines self-consciously, sounding unnatural saying "fuck" and "shit"; it's as though the Jackson twins have bedded down with the entire high school football team...
...Hamlet plot has always been an archetypal sources for playwrights. As diverse writers as Goethe (Clavigo), Chekhov (Seagull), W.S. Gilbert (who wrote a play let in which Rosencrantz and Ophelia are secret lovers). Philip LaZebnik '75 (whose Mad About Mintz not only parodies Hamlet but is riddled with themes of death), and Paris Barclay '78 (whose ambitious though now moribund production of Niccolo & The Prince featured Hamlet as a major--character), all have pirated shamelessly from Shakespeare...
...Your Dukes and Mad About Mintz. The Edelin trial is over, but there seem to be more farces in town than ever. The choice between these two is clear tradeoff between immediate gratification and helping out a good cause. Put Up Your Dukes is excellent--clearly the best Pudding Show in the last three years and possibly longer. It's everything it should be, with a very funny script that dips from fairly sophisticated Intellectual humor to suggestive double entendre. Mad About Mintz is undergoing some cuts which should make its first act tighter, but what's chiefly interesting about...
...ABOUT MINTZ--as you've probably heard by now-is about the efforts of a hard-sell promotional team to peddle the words of a third-rate writer. It would be easy--and it wouldn't be a million miles away from the truth--to say that Mad About Mintz is self-descriptive, that it has been hyped to the point where its (very real) virtues are disappointing. It's still worth seeing, but of expecting two and a half hours of pleasant whimsy, not non-stop genius...
LaZabnik's earlier work, The Teeth of Mons Herbert, was much weirder than this. The jokes were more obscure, but you got the sense he had a truly original sense of humor. Maybe Mad About Mintz is something of a commercialization of his talents, an attempt to bring the LaZebnik wit to a wider audience than the Lowell JCR. His parodies of Hamlet and Paradise Lost count on only as much knowledge of these works as the casual reader of Bartlett's could be expected to have. The move to Agassiz has made LaZebnik's theater less intimate, more like...