Word: servants
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...version, is a little less cutesy. To begin with, there's a major shift in mood: Figaro is not straight comedy, which The Barber certainly is. Instead, it is a fairly cynical look at marriage (the four-years-later episode of Count Almaviva and Rosina's romance), the master-servant relationship (the Count repays Figaro's first act help by demanding the droit du signeur of Figaro's bride), all made more complicated than necessary by intrigues and mishaps. The cast manages generally to overcome the mood-change by keeping the tone as lighthearted as possible and by stressing funny...
...Marriage of Figaro," two eighteenth-century French comedies. Both were written by Beaumarchais, who was somewhat of a shady character; in addition to play-writing, he smuggled French guns to American revolutionaries. "The Marriage" was quite daring for its time, since it contained a speech by the servant Figaro that lamented and raged against the privileges of the nobility--some say it hastened the onset of the French Revolution. You don't want to miss something that may have contributed to the overthrow of a monarchy, do you? Figaro plays tonight, tomorrow night and Saturday; tickets available at the Loeb...
...while." Unlike most Harvard productions, where auditions are individual and private, Havergal chose to let everyone perform in front of everyone else. "It was in a lit house where everybody wanted you to fail because they wanted your part," Jon S. Goerner '78, who plays the servant Figaro, says. "You feel terribly guilty if you went there with 40 people and you were the only one who made it. But I loved it," he adds...
...plays gives the whole show a fascinating irony. The first play was lighter-hearted, and ended happily with the Count marrying the girl, Rosina. But in the second play, the situation changes--the Count, the hero of the first part, is trying to make off with his servant Figaro's intended bride. In the first play the servant had an alliance with the master; here he plots against his master. That was a revolutionary thing to do in France in 1784. And the audience's attitude during the first play is that we love the Count as a young buck...
...often the cast plays for laughs instead. Daniel Terris as De Flores--the misshapen servant to the heroine, and villain of the play--mars what might have been a superb overall performance by childishly pouting in his early scenes. De Flores lusts after his mistress Beatrice (Anne Montgomery) and offers to kill the husband her father intends for her. She accepts and her complicity in this crime draws her into a whirlpool of moral corruption...