Word: mosteller
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Geography of Africa, on which I got a comfortable C, maybe even a C+. I lived in the Lampoon building with Fred Gywnne '50, the actor, who'd had trouble with his "gut" course. Someone gave us a rabbit and it had run of the Great Hall. Zero Mostel, the great moon-faced actor, came to have dinner one night and he put his face down at table-height and he and the rabbit stared at each other for a few minutes. I remember that very distinctly...
...characters are animated by timeless urges. His prose is startlingly specific about ancient life and Judea's harsh, terrible beauty. Unlike many authors of biblical fiction, he blends his research smoothly into his narrative and adds a leavening pinch of humor. Musa is like a preincarnation of Zero Mostel, especially when he orders flunkies to push a dead donkey over a cliff. Awaiting a sign from God, a surprised and unquestioning Jesus watches the carcass plunge past his cave opening...
Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart called their script "a scenario for vaudevillians." Zaks' triumph is to pay homage to the days of Yiddish slapstick while using actors too young to have played the Catskills. Luckily, he has Nathan Lane as Pseudolus, the role created by Zero Mostel. Though only 40 and only Irish, Lane is the mystic repository of the ancients' physical gag bag. A double take is concrete poetry when he does it, and a pratfall a plie. He also elevates some of his more plebeian colleagues. Mark Linn-Baker, no natural farceur, is at first uneasy...
Sipping tea in his Broadway dressing room last week, Lane, 40, was subdued and a little weary, his voice only occasionally rising to his patented pitch of whiny sarcasm. (Asked about working in the shadow of original Forum star Zero Mostel, he replies with a tart "Who?") Lane grew up in a working-class Irish-American family in Jersey City, New Jersey, where he regularly starred in the plays at St. Peter's Prep. In New York he started building his theater resume, appearing in flops (the Doug Henning musical Merlin) and a few prestige successes (a revival of Noel...
...peak in the early 1960s, Ionesco attracted such collaborators as Jean-Louis Barrault, who magically staged A Stroll in the Air; Laurence Olivier and Zero Mostel, who both played the lead in Rhinoceros (with Mostel winning a Tony Award on Broadway); and Alec Guinness, who starred in Exit the King, a Lear-like portrait of the inevitability of death. Ionesco was hailed as someone who might bridge the gap between literature and entertainment. Instead, his work grew more remote and austere, and his audiences dwindled. His last play, Journeys Among the Dead, was withdrawn before opening in New York City...