Word: tartaglia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Another woman, Angela, has won Deramo's heart and Tartaglia...
...Tartaglia (Richard Grusin), the prime minister, is one of those delicious villains. Sweeping down on his victims, spreading out his insect-like cape, Tartaglia plots his revenge on Deramo and his possession of Angela...
Everything about The King Stag is enchanting. The Forest of Miracoli, where Deramo goes hunting with Tartaglia, is filled with parrots whose gorgeous plummage creates a fluttering rainbow swirling in the air. Clever back-lighting on a pale skrim projects a prancing menagerie of lions and tigers and bears. A poor of light, lit from below the stage, suggests a woodland stream around which the overhead-lighting throws a sun-dappled forest floor. The fragile nobility of the two stags, with their breathtakingly lovely coats of the palest pastel, steal the forest show...
...costumes, worth the price of admission in themselves, are a cross between commedia dell'arte and Oriental styles, corresponding to no known time or place. Some, like Tartaglia's shimmering, black, bat-winged cape, are sumptuous and frightening. Truffaldino, the simple-minded bird catcher, on the other hand, looks hilariously like Big Bird with a truffle-shaped head. The characters' exotic masks, with their fixed and staring eyes, give even the humans in King Stag an entrancing and surreal beauty. When the characters speak from bodies not their own, as when Tartaglia inhabits Deramo's body to deceive Angela...
...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...