Word: ricans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...those with even less chance. The eager, almost fanatical youngsters of Puerto Rico, where youth baseball has been uncorrupted by the small-time ambitions of fat Little League coaches, all hope to follow their idol, Roberto Clemente, with a pathetic fervor. Pathetic because, for all their talent, Puerto Ricans make it only if they are stars; white owners do not like many Puerto Rican bench jockeys...
...once went beggaring to Shakespeare, then it's hardly surprising that so many playwrights and actors have also looked to him for inspiration. John Guare and Mel Shapiro found that the Two Gentlemen of Verona were still around in 1971, only they happened to be a black and Puerto Rican, just as West Side Story had flushed Romeo and Juliet out of Manhattan slums a decade earlier. Shakespeare's influence barely surfaces until the end of West Side Story, when it takes the form of a tragic denoument that is a cloying mistake. But Guare and Shapiro's adaptation gamely...
...Gentlemen spares the 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...
...treacherous Proteus with appropriately self-centered determination. At times he comes on to himself a little bit too strongly, wiping out the supporting cast through sheer force of neglect. But he displays admirable versatility, tripping with facility from the Spanish pronunciation and non-verbal cries of his Puerto Rican phrases to the controlled and conversational command of Shakespearean verse...
...from the rest of the cast with Elizabethan integrity. Her singing is competent, her spoken Spanish sassy, but her forte lies in the elegant enunciation of Shakespeare's lines with a pleasing hint of an English accent. Her waiting-woman Lucetta (Annie Fine) has the only vaguely Puerto Rican visage of the lot and sings with stern indignation about "The Land of Betrayal." Judy Banks as Silvia dances with enough seductive verve to convince you that indeed she "wouldn't know a spiritual relationship...