Word: toad
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Yelping Dogs. Richard is a hunchbacked Renaissance Stalin with a monstrous thirst for power. He terrorizes less by his inveterate plots than by his malignantly charged presence, mesmerizing those whom he would murder. Called "a bottled spider" and a "bunch-backed toad," he is nonetheless poisonously fascinating. Nowhere is this more apparent than when he woos and wins the Lady Anne over the coffin of her husband, whom he has murdered. A scene that seems logically inconceivable becomes psychologically astute as Richard, who has never wept, weeps; who has never knelt, kneels. With the reckless audacity of his passion...
Surprisingly enough for a House production, it is the technical side of the show which does most to sustain the humor. Suzy Colgate's makeup is animalian without being grotesque. Toad's mouth and eyes are precisely that (though some credit must be given to the natural bent of Sansone's mouth); evil animals properly wear black masks. Electa Kane's costume are rich, correct (though her triumph--a weasel disguised as a notebook-paper-eared hare--is rightfully neither) and show off brightly under Steve Nightingale's clean, clear lighting which even does wonders for the slightly unsettling coloration...
...cast's movements are also a bit too tense and rigid. Even a Toad can be graceful. But Sansone isn't. Some of the scenes between the natty, restrained Water-rat and the eager, gliding Mole are pleasantly graceful; in smaller parts, Phillipa Lord as Phoebe and Dan Smith and Bob Gage as a horse and his rear end are funny without obviously pushing for laughs...
...show's most disturbing gracelessness is Director Gage's blocking. Given a spacious stage, fine lighting and colorful costumes he seems to have taken care to crowd bodies in small spaces and to compose lopsided stage pictures. In lieu of pacing riot scenes--the court-room scene and Toad's return to Toad Hall -- Gage throws his entire cast together for ten-second lumps of chaos, the quickest starting and fastest ending mob actions you've ever seen...
...theatrical grace is hard to come by at Harvard; its omission in the Lowell production is not a mortal sin. And one touch in Toad of Toad Hall would seem to show that God may be smiling on the play. When Mole enters Badger's digs she myopically surveys the huge Lowell House chandelier and murmurs an impressed, "Oh I say," After an infinitude of blithely ignorant House productions it is good to see a cast aware that a couple of tons of glass and wire may come plummeting down on them any minute...