Word: stagings
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...loud, like a minuet turned to disco level. There is also a strange mish-mash of modern and antique costuming that, despite its cuteness, is distracting. And though designer Tamar Zimmerman constructed an adequately elegant sitting-room for the only set, her lighting often darkens half the stage, shadowing actors at key moments...
...Schmeiser also shows potential as Rosetta Stone, a character fashioned in the mold of Gracie Allen. Her Pillsbury doughgirl face--complete with apple cheeks and black current eyes--and boop-boop-eedoo voice beg for a part like this. But her performance is too forced; she mugs about the stage all but saying I'm being cute and this is a laugh line." But the more she tries to be cute, the more she fails to bring any dimension into Sellon's vapid stereotype...
Some of the chintziness achieves its intended comic proportions. The evil priestess ties our heroes to stakes, threatening them with sacrifice to vicious alligators. But small, adorably wiggly plastic things are tossed out on stage, and for once Sellon doesn't ruin it for himself and us--the actors respond as though these are, indeed, vicious creatures. If this attitude had prevailed, Thebes Like Us might have been the enjoyably silly evening...
...with vocal agility but no sense of style--begins lamenting her parting with husband Einstein. But she, Eisenstein, and Alfred the mad Italian tenor keep breaking out of the mock tragic music into a perky little waltz, as if to tip the audience off that nothing happening on the stage is terribly important...
...ballroom of the second act, too--famous for Orlofsky's aria "Chacun a son gout" as well as some of Strauss's best dances--the waltz should be king. Even though the Lowell performers cut much of Strauss's music, deliver the rest on a distinctly un-Viennese stage, and have to work on the less-than-ballroom-size Lowell dias, they can't help unleashing the waltzes by the end of the act, and a little of the Wienerblut seeps...