Word: moli
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...site will be filled with modern monoliths-a more formal cultural center, a trade center, a hotel, and a Metro station, at an estimated cost of $80 million. One-quarter of the acreage will become a park to set off 16th century St.-Eustache, scene of Molière's baptism and Mirabeau's funeral (when the church was temporarily a revolutionary "temple of agriculture") and where butchers once hung sides of mutton along the exterior wall. President Georges Pompidou will undoubtedly approve the council decision. A museum of contemporary art planned for the renewed area happens...
This is not a comedy that will incur the enthusiasm of devotees of Aristophanes, Molière, or even Neil Simon. To laugh at How the Other Half Loves is a little like making a midnight raid on the refrigerator, half ashamed but sneakingly satisfied...
...Molière was a foe of zealotry, and an apostle of moderation. He regarded the extremist as society's sickest man. Each of his better plays is a kind of psychosocial profile of a man with a raging obsession, a feverishly disordered imagination. He may be a hypocrite, a miser, a misanthrope. In Molière's view, such a man is as mad as a man who claims to be Napoleon; the only cure is a cascade of laughter and the bracing tonic of common sense...
This cure is abundantly present in a splendid Broadway revival of The School for Wives. The 309-year-old play bubbles with caustic merriment. A large debt of thanks is due Richard Wilbur's deftly idiomatic verse translation. Rendered into pedantic English, Molière's rhyming couplets can drone on with a perishing cumulative monotony. Wilbur makes the meters dance, and the players follow...
...with horns on the brain, Brian Bedford is a comic marvel. His face is an ever-changing panorama of unholy glee, bottomless despair, and a sour-pickle sneer. With an unbroken, intuitive authority, he leads the way to the vital intersection of Molière's genius, the place where la vie tragique meets la vie triviale. The ultimate humanity of Molière is that he can make an audience laugh at a man's folly, then make the audience feel how that foolish man suffers, and finally make us all realize just who that suffering fool...