Word: panza
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...production of Philadelphia Here I Come, the overlapping ambiguity between the two characters who play the schizophrenic selves of one person made for a rich interplay. Melvoin has consciously chosen to differentiate very clearly the two main characters in Rosencrantz. Jeff Rubin as Rosencrantz plays a good Yiddish Sancho Panza character who alternates between dawdling silliness and self-indignant outrages over nothing. But our comic response is much more problematic towards Guildenstern (Steve O'Donnell), played as a brooding almost Hamlet-like character who utters Stoppard's lines dripping with metaphysical existentialisms as if they were completely serious and without...
...living. It might wryly be regarded as one of those periodic efforts to save the ailing theater. The god Dionysus (Larry Blyden) resolves to go down to Hades and bring back Euripides. In the Shevelove version, Bernard Shaw substitutes. As his companion, Dionysus takes along his obese, grumbling Sancho Panza-like servant Xanthias (Michael Vale). They have their slapstick encounters, not only with the cranky Charon, who speaks like a movie gold prospector, but with enticing houris, underworld strong-arm men, termagants, drunks and, finally, the haughty, unamused Pluto (Jerome Dempsey), god of the underworld. It seems that Shakespeare sits...
...implacable innocent. The innocent who confounds authority, the sophistry of law and the mindless brutalities of bureaucracy with sheer simplicity and obdurate truth. In the endless flux of empires, ideologies and wars, he is the irreducible survivor. Such a one was Voltaire's Candide, Cervantes' Sancho Panza, Joseph Heller's Yossarian-and Jaroslav HaŠek's Good Soldier Švejk...
Masters and servants share a paradoxical equality and intimacy in several works of Western literature and drama. Think of Lear and his Fool, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and, in this rarely presented play of Moliere's, Don Juan and Sganarelle. The masters are in the grip of some consuming passion or obsession; the servants try to sober them up with an occasional cold splash of common sense...
Sophia Loren is a ravishing Dulcinea, but she seems to be playing a kind of high-stepping variation on Two Wom en. James Coco is soundly defeated by the role of Sancho Panza. The score by Composer Mitch Leigh and Lyricist Joe Darion contains the inescapable ballad The Impossible Dream, surely the most mercilessly lachrymose hymn to empty-headed optimism since Carousel's You'll Never Walk Alone. One expects to learn at any moment that it will be come the national anthem of some newly emerging nation...