Word: oafish
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...been training in vaudeville for years; maybe the mechanicals don't laugh hard enough at those gay old parochial Elizabethan jokes abous syphilis and sonnets, but their sense of timing and horseplay is just superb. Terry Malick's Bottom, who "gleeks on occasion" with wonderfully oafish conceit, and Philip Traci's absurdly studied Quince are the true leaders of this lot, and a grining David Riggs makes an enchanting Thisby in the interlude...
...their parents gradually lost their minds. Then last season adults began to notice something called Rocky and His Friends, which was new and actually amusing. Rocky, a squirrel, was uncute enough, but it was one of his friends that particularly attracted attention-a blanket-eared, wall eyed, stupid-looking, oafish moose. This moose-whose mother in a flash of lyricism had named him Bullwinkle-made it so big with the big people that he now has his own show in prime evening time...
None of the secondary parts require such virtuosity, but each of the minor actors has his own excellence. Jacques Charon, as a dim-witted, oafish servant manages to steal a scene even from Hirsch; Michel Aumont, an old miser, and Rene Camoin, an old wheezer, are unsurpassable; Micheline Boudet, believed to be an Egyptian gypsy (but in reality a long lost daughter of the old wheezer) has one scene all to herself, a scene which slowly and carefully raises the level of the audience's laughter from smiles to belly-laughs, one of the greatest scenes in the play...