Word: zorba
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Someone forgot to tell Producer-Director Harold Prince that Zorba isn't Jewish. Prince could not resist the temptation to try to fashion a sequel to his own Fiddler on the Roof, thinly camouflaged with a Greek accent. The resulting musical play is sleek, professional and synthetic, a brassy bit of Broad-wayana that is as far from the Mediterranean basin as is Shubert Alley...
...Zorba--A flashy, technical tour de force, also a candidate for best serious musical of the decade. At the SCHUBERT, 265 Tremont...
Regrettably Zorba's music does not always reach the level of Prince's craftsmanship. John Kander and Fred Ebb, the composer and lyricist respectively, have still failed to produce the great score that their Flora the Red Menace and Cabaret hinted was on the way. While many of the numbers have uncommonly fine melodies and all are at least a notch above average musically, sometimes they add little to dramatic values clearly evident in the book and staging. Neither of Zorba's solos tell us much we don't already know about the character at the time of the songs...
...despite these loopholes (no doubt to be remedied during the Boston run), Zorba stands as a nearly finished product. Prince has woven just about all of the show's components into his unifying conception. Ronald Field's joyous choreography is so tightly linked to the staging, that it's hard to believe Prince did not devise the dances himself. Don Walker's orchestrations, a precise blend of Greek and Broadway instrumentation, flood the theatre with frenzies of rhythm, adding as much to the atmosphere as Boris Aronson's simplistically beautiful sets...
...while producer Harold Prince's knack for bringing together the right artists to execute his Zorba tells much of his showmanship, it is his own artists as director that contributes most to his triumph. After a long dry spell since the heyday of Jerome Robbins, Prince has come to remind us what the serious musical is all about...