Word: forests
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...performers, she plays woman or man with equal ardor, courtly fixture or cottager with equal ease. Karen MacDonald's Celia matches Jones movement for movement with a perfectly synchronized body and a beautifully tuned voice. But the most ingratiating of the performances is Gerry Bamman's Jaques, a tall forest roamer in a grass toga, unfazed by even the most outrageous of Belgrader's devices, with a pouting, resonant voice that undoubtedly reminded more than one member of the audience of Tony Randall. Bored, not spiteful, puzzled rather than offended by the folly around him, he delivers the set-piece...
Shakespeare's design for As You Like It is one of his most transparent: a sketchy framework of undeveloped plot hangs at both ends of the play as an excuse to get the characters into the forest of Arden, where the complex interplay of nearallegorical characters assumes the aspect, at times, of a philosophical inquiry. A banished duke holds court over a pastoral golden age in the forest; his men pluck the lute, sing, and sleep while Jaques the melancholiac provides counterpoint to their contentment. Into their hermetically enchanted realm bound a pair of lovers, whose parabolic approaches give Shakespeare...
...exclusively to the play's formal frame, tapping on some rotting beams and occasionally taking ax to them. His chosen weapon is extravagant caricature: never was the difference between court and greenwood so violently underscored. Where a straight production might present an orderly, ceremonious court and a rustically relaxed forest, Belgrader gives neither. His court is a Louis XIV anachronism, the women nearly immobile in skirts like giant hat-boxes, the men waving white kerchiefs and gloves to punctuate their mincing. Arden is a small businessman's Hawaii vacation-dream; the Duke and his entourage wear leis and grass skirts...
Embodied on stage, this selective vision of pastoral proves hilarious. Take Belgrader's constant play on the so-called "pathetic fallacy"--the idea that nature responds to human emotion. Five young girls clad in fake-looking foliage represent the whispering forest, and their carefully timed reactions provide some of the show's funniest moments: dozing off during the recitation of tiresome love poetry, moaning and panting as the handsome Orlando passes among them, leaning over as if to puke during an especially noxious dance number from the cow-girl Audrey. They are funny in themselves, and funny for their ludicrously...
SUDDENLY, without transition or explanation, two trails in the forest of The Great Santini meet, and the audience finds itself five miles above land in the cockpit of Meechum's airplane during a training run. The film has run out of steam on race relations, and so abruptly resumes its portrayal of the problems encountered by a warrior without a war. Meechum, reminding himself several times that he is the Great Santini, runs into engine trouble while he has departed from his flight plan to do some aerodynamic acrobatics, and he dies in the crash--ostensibly because he stays with...