Word: shakespeareans
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Shakespearean Actors...
...sinister tough into their otherwise straight-forward characters, rather complacently consigning a poor maiden to eternal shame. Don Pedro's brother, Don John (Ian Lithgow), on the other hand, is interpreted as a buffoon. He is a Peter Ustinov-style villain, bumbling and ineffectual. The comic actors take the Shakespearean "rude mechanical" to the limit. Dogberry and Verges (Tom Giordano) revel in the slapstick. So, too, do Borachio and Conrade--at times at the expense of the darker, more thoughtful side of the play...
...About Nothing is a comedy in that it has a happy ending. But like all Shakespeare's comedies, it is not just good clean fun: it is tragedy narrowly averted. When Hero dies and comes to life again, Shilling takes the easy way out in dealing with the forced Shakespearean resolution--she lets the audience laugh...
Moreover, his art -- another Shakespearean parallel -- always testifies to the fact that when a great artist breaks the mold, the result still pays homage to the mold itself. There can hardly be a more intensely moving portrait of a woman's naked body than his Bathsheba with King David's Letter (1654). At root it is a Titianesque conception, heir to those sumptuous Venetian nudes; but Rembrandt avoids idealism, suffuses the real imperfect body with thought and a sense of moral reflection, re-creates the structure of flesh in terms of an amazing directness of "rough" brush marks. We think...
...idea that rivalry between British and American Macbeths could stir their New York City partisans to murderous riot seems almost unimaginably quaint. But in his witty and poignant evocation of the madness of 1849, TWO SHAKESPEAREAN ACTORS, playwright Richard Nelson slyly suggests parallels to our era's battles over supposed Eurocentric cultural imperialism. The play's underlying debate: Is art universal, or does it belong exclusively to its nation of origin? Nelson touches on these matters in glittering moments rather than digging in with Shavian relentlessness. He focuses on three actors: William Charles Macready (Brian Bedford), the English Macbeth...