Word: tales
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Carlo Gozzi in revolt against the realistic naturalism of contemporary theater, is a feast of the imagination with the technique and logic of the commedia dell'arte, Italy's native improvisational comedy. The third Gozzi production directed this year by Andrei Serban. The King Stag is a fairy tale set in the oriental kingdom of Serendippo where the good king Deramo is looking in vain for a worthy wife. His trusted but treacherous minister. Tartaglia, tries to insinuate his own daughter, Clarice, into the king's affections to distract the king from the beautiful Angela whom Tartaglia wants for himself...
Like any great fairy tale, The King Stag includes not only sweetness and beauty but suffering and evil as well; the texture of daily life exaggerated in imagination. And for all the bewitching "superficiality" of the beautiful, masked characters, the play champions the spititual truth which magic and appearances sometimes hide; the beauty of Deramo's soul that shines even from within the grotesque, old man, and the ugliness of Tartaglia's soul that even Deramo's majestic form cannot conceal from the heart of Angela...
Honore Lachailles (Louis Jourdan) narrates the lyrical tale of a (play)boy and his love. To go out with Gaston is to enter the society gossip columns in this Paris as surely as to share drinks with Rona Barret is to bare one's private life in the Hollywood of today. For the Gaston's and Honore's of the world to drive a spurned love into attempting suicide means entree into the choicest of Parisian circles. Girls: they bore Gaston. "It's either...
...saddens me to write of Gigi thus. The show, she was my first musical love. But though this year the label remains the same, the bottle in which this Parisian tale sings out, belies a performance a pale cousin of its once spectacular self. Gigis past was like sipping fine champagne into dreamy glee, but this Gigi seems somehow like a hangover: I know it should have been fun, but now it all seems too foggy; only this time I really don't think I want to remember...
...Hoffman's large cast and its machinations remain credible and, even in the comic passages, are never overdrawn. But the author is more than an adroit tale spinner; it is character, not accident or circumstance, that brings his central figures to grief. In the process, he merges Chicago myth, legend and history with poignant private truth. This journalist, at least, had not only a novel but a genuine novelist...