Word: commedia
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This year the La Jolla roster has included a commedia dell'arte farce, The Three Cuckolds, starring Mime Bill Irwin; Shout Up a Morning, a musical based on the work of Jazzman Cannonball Adderley that went on to a limited run at the Kennedy Center in Washington; and the U.S. premiere of Odon von Horvath's Figaro Gets a Divorce, a work of protest written in 1937 in Nazi Germany. Currently playing are Gillette, a comic adventure set in a Wyoming boomtown, and a modern version of the Greek tragedy Ajax, directed by Peter Sellars and imported from Sellars...
...King Stag, written in 1762 by Carlo Gozzi in revolt against the realistic naturalism of contemporary theater, is a feast of the imagination with the technique and logic of the commedia dell'arte, Italy's native improvisational comedy. The third Gozzi production directed this year by Andrei Serban. The King Stag is a fairy tale set in the oriental kingdom of Serendippo where the good king Deramo is looking in vain for a worthy wife. His trusted but treacherous minister. Tartaglia, tries to insinuate his own daughter, Clarice, into the king's affections to distract the king from the beautiful...
...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...
Like Serban, Strehler introduces anachronisms into his production - the commedia dell'arte for the comic duo of Trinculo and Stephano, for example, and a hint of Peking opera mannerism for Ariel - but they effectively underscore the contrasts between the spirit and human worlds, making the confrontation even more pointed. This is a Tempest of clarity, strength and purpose - exactly what was lacking in the Royal Opera's Turandot. The cross-cultural irony is inescapable: the English company presenting the Italian opera had failed, but the Italians staging an English classic had made a glorious success...
Galas. Or: The Life and Hard Times of Maria Callas. Leave it to off-off-Broadway's Charles Ludlam-playwright, producer, director and, in the title role, every inch a diva-to put the art back into commedia dell'arte...