Word: timoner
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Brian Bedford, the Shakespearean veteran who won a Tony nomination last year for Timon of Athens, has the central role in both plays. In the first, School for Husbands, he's the overprotective guardian of a young woman (Patricia Dunnock) whom he intends to marry. She, however, has other plans-namely, getting the guardian to unwittingly bring her together with the younger fellow she really loves. Bedford, wearing long Ben Franklin locks and mugging dryly to the audience, helps overcome the sense that these are stock characters whom Moliere would develop more fully in later works...
...Goldberg), giddy Banzai (Cheech Marin) and idiotic Ed (Jim Cummings), who says little but is happy to chew voraciously on his own leg. The hero's helpers, who save Simba in the desert and teach him their live-for-today philosophy, Hakuna matata -- Swahili for "What, me worry?" -- are Timon (Nathan Lane), a streetwitty meerkat, and the lumbering wart-hog Pumbaa (Ernie Sabella). They chew beetles...
...eccentric, this staging of Timon is a vast improvement over what preceded it: in the first season a murky, static staging of The Crucible, a labored, lumpen version of a Feydeau bedroom farce and a rendition of Ibsen's The Master Builder about which even Randall, who directed, can't find anything good to say; in the much improved second season, an intelligent, revisionist reading of The Seagull, a solid (and Tony-nominated) Saint Joan and the George Abbott comedy Three Men on a Horse, with Randall supremely skillful if utterly miscast as a husband...
Whatever the strengths of Timon, NAT is not remotely worthy of comparison with London's Royal National and Royal Shakespeare companies or Canada's Shaw and Stratford festivals. If Timon is a great leap forward, Randall's next vehicle, The Government Inspector, could be a big jump back. He plays the title role, a naif of 23 -- an age Randall reached half a century ago. The irrepressible farceur says with a mildly manic laugh, "I'd like to be acting every night of my life. That's why I formed this theater." His tone sobering, he adds, "In a noncommercial...
Obsessed as he is, Randall insists he will someday relinquish the reins. He says he is looking, not too urgently, for a successor. The odds are against his building an institution that can last. But Timon finally makes the case that perhaps there is an institution that should last...