Word: commedia
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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...style, too, had been spontaneously requested by the audience. What's more, they could have done it in any style from Euripides to the Reader's Digest. For Nichols and May, getting ready for their first Broadway show after years in nightclubs, are essentially modern practitioners of commedia dell'arte, the spontaneous comedy of Renaissance Italy in which strolling players improvised their skits and lampooned their...
...crayon-blue eyes and round, astonished mouth suggesting that he finds the world just a little too much to cope with. Elaine is a dark-eyed Columbine of many moods who wears her immemorial, feminine wisdom a little uncomfortably, like an ill-fitting evening dress. Just as the commedia players ridiculed the braggarts and poltroons, cuckolds and scheming Don Juans, Mike and Elaine act out caricatures of their own time and place-the phony intellectual, the lecherous boss and his confused secretary, the little man at the mercy of the distant, unreachable, untouchable telephone operator. In An Evening with Mike...
Between their act and the performers themselves there is an intriguing interplay, putting in question what is real and what is theatrical, in a way that suggests one of their favorite models, Italian Playwright Luigi Pirandello, himself something of a modern commedia dell' artist. Is Mike's nervous blinking, audiences usually want to know, part of the act or is it real? (It is real but less pronounced offstage.) Are Elaine's black dresses only a stage device? (It is not; Elaine never wears anything but black.) Some signs of tension underlying the humor suggest that Mike...