Word: proteus
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...obvious potential for social statements in the black and Puerto Rican casting, limiting trendiness to the score. Shakespeare's plot remains largely intact, with its orderly parallels between pairs of individuals. There are the skeptics towards love, Julia and Valentine, and those who use seductive wiles to break them, Proteus and Silvia. There are the two masters and the two servants, each couple bound in friendship though capable of deceit. And then there's the dog Crab, who qualifies for both categories. The mutt is not only ungrateful for the constant companionship of Launce, he even sullies the courtship between...
WHERE THE MUSICAL DIVERGES from Shakespeare, the difference seems less like a change than a clever exploitation of submerged meaning in the original. In the adapted version, Proteus doesn't merely leave Julia's affection in the lurch, he leaves her pregnant, too. A vehement argument sung in four-part disharmony ensues on the desirability and proper emotional upbringing of illegitimate children. While Shakespeare doesn't wrangle over issues as pragmatic as pregnancy in this play, you wonder if he didn't have more on his mind than Julia's male disguise when he put these words in her mouth...
Still, Audrey Rose seems sophisticated compared with Demon Seed. The trouble here starts with a computer scientist (Fritz Weaver) who is just too good at his job. Down at work he has created a superbrain named Proteus. At home, he has wired up a system that takes care of most of the household chores. This leaves Julie Christie, as his wife, bored and offended to the point of asking for a divorce, especially now that their child has died of leukemia. Weaver departs, but Proteus, unknown to him, has developed a capacity to think without the aid of programmers. Inevitably...
...posited that all of human knowledge has been fed into Proteus, but it seems to be fixated on two authors. One is Sade. How else explain the frequency with which it contrives to place its loved one in variously humiliating bondage scenes? The other is surely Kahlil Gibran, from whom it has obviously borrowed its sententious prose style. In the end, Proteus manages to get itself destroyed-too big for its breeches as it were. But not before it effects a kind of reincarnation: the child Christie conceives looks exactly like the one she lost to cancer. There are enough...
...Homer's Proteus was more than a quick-change artist. Once pinned down-and the problem was in the pinning-he would revert to his original shape and utter prophecies. So with Picasso; and some of the deepest and most durable work he produced was made when he was, if not pinned down, at least constrained by shared responsibility. Thus his co-invention, with Braque, of Cubism: that system of anchoring and interlocking forms in space that proved to be the first workable (though less systematic) alternative to Renaissance perspective in modern...