Word: schmidts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...reading of The Jew of Malta is to Marlowe's play as as the film Dr. Strangelove is to the book from which it came, Red Alert. Quite correctly wary of a straight interpretation of the script, and obviously goaded on by a receptive audience, Dean Gitter, director Paul Schmidt, and an excellent cast, turn the tragi-comedy into a masterful and highly enjoyable farce...
...first sign of what modern minds have wrought comes in the opening moments. In a short prologue, Machiavelli (played by Schmidt) introduces Gitter as Barabas, the wily Jew. An appearance by the "odious" Italian was usually enough to terrify Elizabethans for the evening. But let Schmidt merely change one word in the script, let him say "I come not to read a lecture here in Cambridge," and Presto! The audence laughs and the fun begins...
...highlighting the plays ribaldry and underplaying Barabas' vengeful character, Schmidt chose the proper touch, for The Jew of Malta was quite distinctly written for an Elizabethan audience. When Marlowe so immediately linked Barabas with Machiavelli, he captured both the notoriety of The Prince and the legend of the Jew in England. Barabas was a complete steretoype, done with all of Marlowe's unbelievable extravagance. Sacrificing even his daughter to his lust for money and revenge, Barabas embodied such a total immorality that the Elizabethans could only have flinched in fear of his craft...
...rest of the cast, as well as Schmidt's direction and David Levine's lighting, is equally as deft. David Rittenhouse, playing Ferneze, the Governor of Malta, and Francis Gitter as the Jew's daughter, display a remarkable intensity in their more straight-forward roles. Charles Degelman, who plays the scheming Turkish slave Ithamore, could have looked evil just by raising his eyebrows and shifting his huge jaw into a sneer. Only Neal Johnston as Pilia-borza seemed amateurish, but that was as much due to his Ralph Guglielmi accent as to his performance...
...what the contradictory script calls for, a kind of shrinking oak. Rainmaker Robert Horton lacks the magical potency to make an audience believe in belief, and Agnes De Mille's dances are tired shoeings from her too-familiar rodeography. Only the wistfully melodic score by Broadway newcomers Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones has what the show is parched for-heart...