Word: tales
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Voltaire's tale of innocence and catastrophe prances through the theater as if it were the wide, exuberantly evil world itself. Mark Baker's puppylike Candide and his beloved Cunegonde (Maureen Brennan) begin in the radiant sweetness of their Westphalia, instructed of course in Dr. Pangloss's invincible doctrine that this is the best of all possible worlds. What follows in Voltaire's gleeful vision is a string of unmitigated but somehow good-natured disasters-banishment, war, scourging, mass slaughter, piracy, the Spanish Inquisition, slavery, concubinage-until at last the wanderers come to El Dorado. Leading...
...that involve several of the other actors, a version which more often than not is exasperatingly broken by frequent explanatory comments. Isabella, for example, a beautiful alluring woman who always played the Beloved, writes her memoirs from what is an acceptable fairytale vantage point, heaven. Her happiness assured, the tale raises no great anxieties and the recounting of a gruesome and cruel death loses its cutting edge. She is the last to speak, pronouncing judgments on her fellow players which the reader must either accept or remain unsatisfied by denying. Isabella died in labor as the other Glorious Ones made...
...required to beg the whole question of literary interpretation and retreat to the view that since Shakespeare's audience was Christian, we can safely assume the play does not mean what it says. Kermode was not so cautious when he edited his brilliant Signet edition of The Winter's Tale. Perhaps now that he's installed in a plush Cambridge professorship, his old sense of adventure will reappear. Harry Levin's general introduction to the book avoids the reductionism of setting up any simple frameworks of "Shakespeare's development" or "Shakespeare's world-view" and displays his usual vast range...
Arms from George III. Richard Tregaskis' "biography" is therefore a blend of the fanciful and the factual. But it makes a fascinating tale that hurtles home like one of its hero's long spears. Kahekili, the warlord who was probably Kamehameha's real father, attempted to have the infant killed because of a threatening prophecy. Later, other princes were awed when the stripling moved a huge stone that mature warriors could not budge. Kamehameha began as a not-so-noble savage who brained and impaled foes in combat, conquered cousins, uncles and dear...
...takes only a song or two to establish that the curious idea works in a delightful way. Mrs. Mowatt's cautionary tale has the pretentious Mrs. Tiffany bankrupting her husband with her ostentation and trying to marry off her daughter to a phony French count. The women, playing all roles - male and female - except for Count Jolimaitre (Ty McConnell), perform with just the right note of light camp. They all but twirl hypothetical mustaches. The songs by Don Pippin and Steve Brown have a rollicking charm. When Mrs. Tiffany (Mary Jo Catlett) embarks on her fantasy of "My daughter...