Word: pagliacci
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...Fellini journey, reality is only a pebble in the shoe. He turns the world into his circus and, in a liberated, quasi-documentary style, resurrects some of history's great pagliacci with their cornucopia of practical jokes, smashed hats, pulled chairs, popping balloons and squirting flowers. Fellini's pretense is to restore the icons of his youth for the pleasure of today's children, but beyond the easy delights is a philosophy clearly aimed at adults...
There is a group of relatively new playwrights who might, if they chose, call themselves Pagliacci Incorporated. They are terribly blue about U.S. values and the state of the universe, but they clown around and tell lots of jokes, some of them quite funny, to soothe their philosophically broken hearts. They are seventh-rate Schopenhauers posing as third-rate Neil Simons...
Horovitz, like his fellow members of Pagliacci Incorporated, always seems on the verge of saying something of size and substance but never gets past the verge. When a playwright says nothing that is fresh, deep, strange, poetic or startling about the business of being human, the frustrating irrelevance of the evening seems to cancel out the apparent signs of theatrical promise. Indeed, a shrine might be erected to all of these fledgling dramatists, and their patron saint would be Our Lady of Perpetual Promise...
Savoring Keaton's films, the late James Agee once wrote: "Barring only the best of Chaplin, they seem to me the most wonderful comedies ever made." The comparison is inescapable; the two geniuses dominated silent comedy. The difference in their styles was marked: Chaplin, the gothic Pagliacci, wore his art upon his sleeve. Much as he wanted laughter, he craved significance more. Keaton was too busy with sight gags to realize that he was a major surrealist...
Artists come off differently under photographic inspection. Tenor Jon Vickers is a powerful stage actor, but he seems meek and calculated in Carmen and I Pagliacci. Raina Kabaivanska, a bland personality at the Met, emerges as a film actress of subtlety and range. Best of all is the Hamburg Opera's leading lady, American Arlene Saunders, who illuminates her roles with humor, and warm, emotional singing...