Word: miserable
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...MISER. Robert Symonds gives his best performance yet with the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater as the mock hero of Moliere's comedy. Skittering about like a bespectacled magpie, his Harpagon is a sprite of the cashbox, a stringy-haired witch of usury. To see him is a pleasure. To see him undone is a delight...
...MISER. Robert Symonds gives his best performance yet with the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater as the mock hero of Moliere's comedy. Skittering about like a bespectacled magpie, his Harpagon is a sprite of the cashbox, a stringy-haired witch of usury. To see him is a pleasure. To see him undone is a delight...
When a tragic hero is blinded, he assumes the grandeur of Oedipus; when a comic hero is blinded, he becomes as ludicrous as a mole. Moliere, the most serious writer of comedy who ever lived, took just such a blind mole and made him the mock hero of The Miser. Harpagon (Robert Symonds) has a singular obsession-money. Like most obsessions, it is not magnificent but malignant. It allows the great 17th century French dramatist to make a central moral point-that a sin is called deadly because it deadens. Harpagon is blind to his children's hope...
Nobby foreheads and fishlike smiles of a large group of busts portraying the politicians of the Louis Philippe government dominate the exhibit. Here Daumier's style stands out. Pinching the features into blobs and twists, he skillfully expresses a particular miser or nearsighted fool. Originally molded in unbaked clay and painted as studies for satirical lithographic portraits, these small caricatures look like papier mache puppet heads. Four of the 36 original brown heads are exhibited here for the first time in the United States. The other 32 politicians appear at the Fogg in bronze or terra cotta casts...
...countries in hopes of eluding an increase in taxes and a decrease in the franc's value. It is too easy for self-righteous Americans to condemn this behavior. Anybody who has not seen his own fortunes dissipated by recurrent invasions, inflations and devaluations cannot fully understand the miser mentality of many Frenchmen and other Europeans...