Word: costard
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Uphoff also ably maintains the balance between the literal Elizabethan text and the modern preppie kindergarten created in this production. For example, it makes perfect sense in this version that the two main courtiers, Berowne and Rosaline, would flirt while playing basketball and that the swain Costard would listen to a Walkman while he worked. The chaotic profusion of toys (everything from a Mr. Potato Head to a Rubiks Cube gets used in the course of the production) only heightens the artificiality of the perfect kingdom Navarre and his friends are trying to establish...
...brighter note are Jacob Broder as Costard and Francesca Delbanco as Boyet, the Princess' chamberlain. Costard is a classic Shakespearean clown who counteracts the pretentious nobility by his own plain speaking. Broder's enthusiasm is infectious and he gets more laughs than anyone else in the show. Broder even pulls off a rather contrived time warp joke that could easily have flopped. Boyet is one of the few mature characters in the play and Uphoff (who doubles as her own costume designer) stresses this by contrasting Boyet's formal suits with the other women's hippie attire. Delbanco does...
...Halley, Jr. should learn how to slur. His excruciatingly enunciated diction gets very tiring play after play, and seems inappropriate for the low comic role of Costard. The same self-indulgence that drove Kilty to play Don Armado marks his performance...
Even before the Norman conquest in 1066, Saxon tribes in England cut their silver pennies into two. The halfpenny (pronounced hay-penny) was first minted in 1279. It went on to become a symbol of penuriousness. In Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, Costard insults an acquaintance for his "halfpenny purse of wit." Now, because of inflation, the tiny (approximately ⅝in.) coin costs more to make than its value of 6?. Last week the Chancellor of the Exchequer said that the halfpenny will not be recognized as legal tender after this year...
Dandied Breed. The second part features Patricia McBride and Jean-Pierre Bonnefous as a couple of turn-of-the-century footlight entertainers who dance to old music-hall songs. Their act is based on the antics of a dandied breed of street hawkers known as costermongers (after the costard apple). It is frail, bathetic stuff, yet touching for the loneliness Balanchine suggests...