Word: rosencrantzes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ROSENCRANTZ AND Guildenstern Are Dead is a play about death in more ways than one. Proceeding at the pace of a funeral dirge, its funniest lines are shrouded in sepulchral solemnity, while its supposedly climactic soliloquies are greeted, by a flurry of unsolicited chuckles. When Rosencrantz, after discovering Hamlet's forged letter ordering the pair's execution, sighs woefully, "To tell you the truth, I'm relieved," most of the audience chortles in agreement...
...London and Broadway hit that catapulted an obscure Tom Stoppard to fame and chic respectability, Rosencrantz focuses on the bewildering world of the two minor characters in Hamlet and their hellish and condemned existence in a play they do not understand. A madcap Danish prince reels drunkenly in and out, a tossed coin falls on "heads" 92 times in a roll, distracted characters enter and exit without explanation...
...Melvoin's superb fall 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...
...Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. Perhaps no plat has passed so quickly into the standard repertoire as Tom Stoppard's early masterpiece. If you've never seen it, you own yourself a treat, like the first time you read Lewis Carroll or Evelyn Waugh. R & G is an actor's showcase, and if the eponymous reads are any good-you should laugh from the beginning until the surprisingly, tender conclusion. The play is about two characters in search of a language and contains the most brilliant wordplay on the English stage (always rich in wordplay) since Shakespeare or at least Wilde...
Playwright Paul Foster is not a newcomer to the stage. His Tom Paine (1968) enjoyed substantial popularity off-Broadway, particularly with younger audiences, thanks in part to Tom O'Horgan's flamboyant staging. In Marcus Brutus, Foster has followed Tom Stoppard's lead in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Just as R. & G. used Hamlet for its substructure, Marcus Brutus uses Julius Caesar...