Word: verona
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...from the cold of the inarticulate actual world. And if something as grand as life once went beggaring to Shakespeare, then it's hardly surprising that so many playwrights and actors have also looked to him for inspiration. John Guare and Mel Shapiro found that the Two Gentlemen of Verona were still around in 1971, only they happened to be a black and Puerto Rican, just as West Side Story had flushed Romeo and Juliet out of Manhattan slums a decade earlier. Shakespeare's influence barely surfaces until the end of West Side Story, when it takes the form...
...Gentlemen of Verona has seldom figured prominently or popularly in the Shakespearean repertory. With the exception of the rube Launce, its characters aren't particularly distinctive, and a false resolution awkwardly forestalls a more probable and good-humored one. But the play's unevenness worked in favor of this musical adaptation. The writers deleted and redistributed Shakespeare's lines, sharing the eloquence more equably and getting things done with less dalliance. Guare heightened the farce and added intrigue to personalities by setting each character to a modern musical rhythm with lyrics to match, in idioms such as Motown, salsa...
...Gentlemen of Verona launches itself with the chorus, "What would you like to do with your life?" And the bemused response, "That's a very interesting question, nobody's ever asked me that question," rebounds from the skip ropes, skateboards and yoyos of the final dizzying crowd--apprenticed to life, no questions asked...
Given that Shakespeare's delicate handling of indelicate subjects has burgeoned into blatant indelicacy these days, burlesque has surely become the right accent for romance. Guare and Shapiro's Two Gentlemen of Verona revels in the vulgarity of sex and the naivety of love; it treats the profounder pretensions of lovers and politicians and wealth with sarcasm. It teaches no lessons and believes in happy endings. It declaims old poetry and drives new music hard at you. It requires relaxed yet precise coordination which the production in Harvard Yard, directed by John Bard Manulis, pulls off with only minor hitches...
...smooth choreography of the Citizens of Verona and Milan and the alert timing and confident sound of the orchestra provides the back-drop for a demanding variety of song and dance numbers parceled out among a handful of actors. The isolated soliloquies and duologues of Shakespeare's play carry over into frequent solo and duo performances of Guare's lurics. The music does not make operatic claims on the actors' voices, but its idiosyncratic Spanish and soul-based timing can be tricky. What with the generous amplification, no one is under much strain...