Word: oberon
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...continues with episode after episode of the amusement of the quicksilver characters at the expense of the slower ones. There is, for example, the scene where Tytania (Judith Kellock) quite forgets her previously regal hauteur and sings passionate love to the donkey-headed weaver Bottom. She and her husband, Oberon, have fallen out because Tytania refuses to surrender her favorite page-boy to him. The vengeful Oberon schemes as Tytania sleeps unaware on a flowery river bank. He sends Puck in search of an aphrodisiac flower which will make the Queen fall in love with the first creature she sees...
...Oberon, played by Hohn Heseltine, has an amazing voice. There is a strange paradox to Britten's characterization of the role--the King of the Fairies has to have a high voice that contrasts with the voices of the humans. Heseltine manages to avoid the pitfall of sounding like a choir-boy. He sounds unearthly and commanding at the same time...
...bombed in there," fretted Burt Reynolds after 500 guests of 20th Century-Fox had left a pre-supper screening of the musical in which he stars with Bogdanovich's live-in true love, Cybill Shepherd. The Hollywood elite, including Liza Minnelli, Gene Hackman, Gregory Peck, Roy Rogers, Merle Oberon and Valerie Perrine, adjourned for veal and ambrosiana amid the opulent sets used in the film. Shepherd, perhaps sensing the dour mood of the crowd, made good her getaway. "I've got another party to go to," she announced as the first dinner guests arrived, then vanished, leaving...
...revenge. A couple of centuries before, William Shakespeare had said the same thing, only better, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, a sensual, even savage, account of the lunacy of love. Four sexually infatuated Athenians make fools of themselves and try to murder one another, while jealous Oberon casts a spell on unfaithful Titania that leads her to bed down with an ass. With characteristic perversity, Shakespeare presented this demonic fantasy as an ode to nature, one of his loveliest flights of lyric poetry...
Cheap laughs won in this easy way merely emphasize Shakespeare's use of characters as megaphones. His words are what matter, and of the cast only Oberon (George Hearn) and Titania (Kathleen Widdoes) can get their tongues round blank verse. This raises an overdue point. William Shakespeare has done a lot for Joseph Papp. Surely, Papp could return the compliment and insist that actors be given voice lessons when he mounts a Shakespeare play at one of the seven Manhattan theaters under his dominion. Gina Mallet