Word: rosencrantzes
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...Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. So far, this has proved to be the most durable play to be written in the sixties. Like Shakespeare, it manages to be both an actor's and an audience's play at the same time. R & G really isn't about anything, except maybe words and appearance and reality, and some other things that would sound like the gamut of modern drama cliches if they weren't so funny onstage. It should really be taken in like a dose of laughing gas--without thinking about anything, just relaxing yourself into a body-wide grin. This...
...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...
...Hamlet plot has always been an archetypal sources for playwrights. As diverse writers as Goethe (Clavigo), Chekhov (Seagull), W.S. Gilbert (who wrote a play let in which Rosencrantz and Ophelia are secret lovers). Philip LaZebnik '75 (whose Mad About Mintz not only parodies Hamlet but is riddled with themes of death), and Paris Barclay '78 (whose ambitious though now moribund production of Niccolo & The Prince featured Hamlet as a major--character), all have pirated shamelessly from Shakespeare...
Though a production bordering on the tedious, the Loeb's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead--a mere pilferage from Hamlet of 250 lines--is certainly no crime, and often redeemed by Stoppard's scattered touches of antic lunacy...