Word: stoppards
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...London and Broadway hit that catapulted an obscure Tom Stoppard to fame and chic respectability, Rosencrantz focuses on the bewildering world of the two minor characters in Hamlet and their hellish and condemned existence in a play they do not understand. A madcap Danish prince reels drunkenly in and out, a tossed coin falls on "heads" 92 times in a roll, distracted characters enter and exit without explanation...
...main characters in Rosencrantz. Jeff Rubin as Rosencrantz plays a good Yiddish Sancho Panza character who alternates between dawdling silliness and self-indignant outrages over nothing. But our comic response is much more problematic towards Guildenstern (Steve O'Donnell), played as a brooding almost Hamlet-like character who utters Stoppard's lines dripping with metaphysical existentialisms as if they were completely serious and without a hint of self-parody. Stoppard had meant the pair to be anonymous, not-too-bright. Everyman figures, but as played here the frequent confusion between the pair's names becomes a rather superficial joke routine...
...brilliant duo when let loose. And in a word-spitting duel like the Questions Game (where each must retort with a question), the verbal fireworks are dazzling. Chris Minkowski, a properly regal Claudius, looks like he's still savoring his triumph as last fall's production of Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound. The mimed deaths of the Tragedians, choreography by David Fechtor, resemble the last writhing gasps of fish drowning in air, and coordinate well with the heavy rope-netting...
Though a production bordering on the tedious, the Loeb's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead--a mere pilferage from Hamlet of 250 lines--is certainly no crime, and often redeemed by Stoppard's scattered touches of antic lunacy...
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. Perhaps no plat has passed so quickly into the standard repertoire as Tom Stoppard's early masterpiece. If you've never seen it, you own yourself a treat, like the first time you read Lewis Carroll or Evelyn Waugh. R & G is an actor's showcase, and if the eponymous reads are any good-you should laugh from the beginning until the surprisingly, tender conclusion. The play is about two characters in search of a language and contains the most brilliant wordplay on the English stage (always rich in wordplay) since Shakespeare or at least Wilde...