Word: commedia
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...basic weapon--mimic ability--carried the show. On top of which, the CIA as usual was technically flawless. The set it put together, even forgetting the incredibly short notice it had for last night's performance, was remarkable. So were the uniformly clever and colorful costumes. This being a commedia dell'arte with updated themes and references, it required character masks, and these were wonderfully expressive...
Last night's performance derived loosely from an 18th century commedia by Carlo Goldoni, reset to an anti-Vietnam theme. Yet that theme was so consciously overplayed, so heavily milked, so loudly belabored, that it was hard to believe it could have meant much to an audience so obviously in agreement with...
...Museum of Art in California includes a veritable gallery of Shahn's recent enthusiasms (see color opposite). The sparkling poster for the Festival of Two Worlds at Spoleto, executed at the request of Composer Gian Carlo Menotti, shows a dashing harlequin of the Italian Renaissance theater's commedia dell' arte...
...blame on the playwright. For A Midsummer Night's Dream was the finest comedy in the English language until Shakespeare himself surpassed it in Twelfth Night. It is undeniably true that Dream is an unusually eclectic work, drawing its material from Plautus, Plutarch, Ovid, Apuleius, Chaucer, French romance, Italian commedia dell'arte, a couple of earlier English plays, popular folklore, and even Scot's nonfiction treatise The Discoverie of Witchcraft. But Shakespeare worked everything up into a fresh plot of his own -- or, rather, a skillfully unified interlocking set of three plots -- involving four classes of people from supernatural beings...
...screen treatments, including one with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Sr., a long-running road-company revival with the Lunts, and a Broadway musical adaptation (Cole Porter's Kiss Me Kate). Zeffirelli has refurbished the oft-told tale by styling it with the brio of the 16th century commedia dell'arte. Moreover, his casting seems to be a case of art's imitating life: Elizabeth Taylor as the sharp-tongued tigress, Kate, and Richard Burton as her hard-nosed trainer, Petruchio...