Word: slapstickers
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...School fixation or not, there's no unity at all to 'the production--the tenuous Watergate connection, for example, is milked for all it's worth so that everything's thrown in. Sometimes the scatter-shot technique worked--there was a sense of absurdity and a liberal sprinkling of slapstick that occasionally legitimized the mess. Some of the music--especially when the score departed from the safe, cliched, quasi-forties style--like Laura Shapiro's mediocre "Onion," was completely out of context. The song could have been in any show, and should have been in none...
...only failing in this excellent production of Pinafore is the gimmickry. During the Lord Admiral's attempt to woo Josephine, director Lindsay Davis inserts some unnecessary slapstick which detracts from the Gilbert humor. Dick Deadeye (Phillip Baas) does not wear the usual eyepatch but sports instead a "dead eye" which, from the balcony, looks like a wart. He is also equipped with a hook for a left hand...
...actors handle the slapstick humor with great dexterity, but despite these generally competent performances, the play's humor--which is all it really has to offer--comes off lamely. The depths to which this humor repeatedly falls is demonstrated in a conversation between the nymphomaniac Mrs. Prentice, and the inspecting psychiatrist, Dr. Rance. After Mrs. Prentice informs the Doctor that a pageboy in a local hotel tried to rape her, he asks her if the boy succeeded. She replies in the negative and the doctor responds "Well, the service in those hotels is terrible...
CHARLIE CHAPLIN made life hard for all the other silent comedians. He matched them, laugh for laugh, with slapstick as clever and inventive as anyone's. He could string gags together, then top off the series with a clincher timed just right. So could all the other great comics--but Chaplin left all competitors far behind because on top of all the slapstick he was the most spirited and sympathetic character on the screen. His comedies affect me in an obscure way. I laugh, as at any good comedy, but then I feel a delicate warmth spreading all across...
...immensely popular comedies. In nearly all of them, he was concerned with the troubles of his time, and the concern he felt explains how his comedies could be so full of pathos even while they were funny. He felt a greater range of emotion than he needed for his slapstick roles, but deeper and deeper feeling gradually found its way into his work...