Word: scapino
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Dale has accomplished his goal, but he is emphatically not a little bloke onstage. Currently starring in Scapino (TIME, June 3), he is the spring season's biggest sensation - over, under, beside, beneath, across, atop and flat on his back upon the Broadway stage. Tall and lanky, he seems endowed with a flamingo's limbs - concave knees; one-legged, plumb-line balance; flapping, winglike arms. Playing the duplicitous Neapolitan servant Scapino involves at least as much acrobatics as acting. At one point he keels over from the edge of a 10-ft. platform, grabs onto a hanging rope...
...SCAPINO...
French farce is customarily associated with the bedroom. There are no bedrooms in Scapino, but the evening is filled with sheer comic bedlam anyway. The Young Vic presented this Molière farce earlier in the season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It has returned in a hands-across-the-sea gesture to aid the financially beleaguered Circle in the Square Joseph E. Levine Theater. Scapino should prove to be just the right box office tonic...
...title role, Jim Dale is the traditional wily scamp of a servant. He is sassy, resourceful and clever, the sort of endearing rogue who puts his fat, pompous and moneyed betters in their places. At the behest of two lovelorn sons with two miserly fathers, Scapino engineers an endless repertory of deceptions with a blazing battery of slapstick. Whether mimicking the two dunderheaded old fossils, or mulcting them, or pretend-hiding them in sacks and flailing the daylights out of them with a cloth truncheon shaped like an oversize bologna, there is no stopping Scapino. Eventually caught...
...both in and out of the interior sequences. The actors have an easy relaxed sense of comedy that keeps the more obvious jokes from becoming slick. Especially funny are Sue Cole (Columbine, the Nag) playing a Dolly Levi style matchmaker with a touch of Mae West, and Steve Peterman (Scapino, the Acrobat) is a funky Snake in the Garden of Eden. Joe Gurman, as Harlequin, the Manager, is burdened with more than his fair share of heavyweight lines, although a lighter, more self-amused interpretation might have camoflauged some of the script's moralizing. Producer-director Paul Harrison...