Word: picassos
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...conversation between Dante and Magellan about sailing around the wold or under it, and so on. So along comes Steve Martin who went to school before teachers were this nice, and he decides to write a fictional meeting between two of the 20th century's most formative figures, Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein, not knowing that the entire premise would be his best joke for young audiences...
Instead of letting himself be remembered for his great comedy, Martin has taken on the tough project of writing a quasi-compendious retrospective of scientific and artistic thought since 1904. In Martin's debut as a playwright, Picasso at the Lapin Agile, Albert Einstein (played by Thomas Derrah) shows up at the famous Montmartre bohemian artists' hang-out the Lapin Agile. While working out theorems and waiting for his date to show up, Einstein meets Picasso (Bill Camp) who stumbles in hoping to be noticed and admired. At first distant and confrontational, the two great minds turn their sparring into...
...real and reputedly a patron of the Lapin Agile), pompous, self-important and fake when it comes to anything but buying and selling, lights up the stage with every appearance. Leslie Beatty as Germaine, the waitress, is sassy and direct and knows how to handle piggish men such as Picasso...
Meanwhile, Martin's unoriginal characters are just that, unoriginal, and worse, they are the leads. Einstein is fabulously entertaining--and charming--as the Frasier Crane of physics, always having to put up with inferior intellects, but even modernizing Einstein cannot shake him from his stereotypes. Picasso could not be more repulsive, but we already knew that anyway. His legendary misogyny is not lost on Martin or his scrip;, unfortunately there was on way to make it funny either. I kept wondering why Picasso gets his name in the title rather than Einstein. Not only is he the biggest drag...
...with gender issues. Fair enough, but the study of it certainly does, and it was towards this theme that the exchange had progressed, not Einstein's contortion; it is not without reason that there has been no female Einstein to date. Also perplexing is the exploration of Picasso's despicable character at surprising depth as if it were more important than his art, while Einstein's ideas, as opposed to his person, are given full stage...