Season's Best Acting Done at City Center in Foreign Tongues
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE By Joseph ? Shipley Season's Best Acting Done at City Center in Foreign Tongues The Comedie Francaise. In Repertory. Presented by S. Hurok by arrangement with the French Government....
...A WEEKLY HAS TROUBLE these days keeping tabs on Broadway...
...The servants help trick the old men...
...But of course all ends well, with the scamp Scapin forgiven as the old men see their sons happily married— and the audience sees the best ensemble acting since the previous visit of the Comedie Francaise...
...His company reminded me of the ragtag and bobtail a Broadway star used to assemble for support on a tour of the hinterland...
...every player is a star, yet blends into the ensemble...
...Robert Hirsch as Scapin leads the group with abounding vigor and zest in the jest...
...Of his plays, we are shown L'Impromptu de Versailles with Les Fourberies de Scapili, and Tartuffe...
...The scenery was beatnik, but Grundgens played Mephistopheles as a suave jester and Antje Weisberger achieved a measure of pathos in her final scene as Gretchen...
...Since the company grew out of the delight Louis XIV took in Moliere, it is fitting that the great comedian's work opens the season...
...If you've forgotten your high school French, you can rent a transistor earphone that will give you a running translation...
...Before the French, there was a brief invasion from Germany, with Gustaf Grundgens of the Hamburg Schauspielhaus in Goethe's Faust...
...Racine's tragic Britannicus and Feydeau's bedroom farce Le Dindon complete the schedule...
...Georges Descrieres as Moliere dominates the piece, but a dozen or so players have their deft moments...
...L'Impromptu de Versailles is supposedly a rehearsal of a play the King has ordered on a week's notice...
...It is a playgoer's duty to see Faust at least once...
...The rest of the company also keeps the audience's hands warm with applause...
...If she's still around, it's more refreshing to listen to the songs and lively chat of Elsa Lanchester, the veteran trouper and wife of Charles Laughton...
...At the City Center...
...It has some shallow laughs in its story of two brothers trying to be "bums" together, but it would have had more substance had it been thoroughly translated from the Yiddish...
...And now a show about Little Boy Blue (Come Blow Your Horn) may triple the record...
...Two old fathers plan their sons' marriages, but the sons have already found girls for themselves...
...however, the girls turn out to be the very ones their fathers want for them...
...Immediately after one play that had a run of a single night came another that ran twice as long...
...Scapin is a valet in Moliere's version of a Roman comedy...
...The world's oldest repertory company maintains its great tradition...
...In one amusing scene, one of the girls bubbles over with laughter as she tells old Argante of the prank that has been played, while he shrivels in silent rage when he realizes he has been the victim...
...The best acting of the year has been in foreign tongues at the City Center...
...Both were about Russia, but that's not why they closed...
...Or go over to see the English version of the French Irma La Douce, which gets my vote as the best musical of the year...
...Whether he is teasing the young masters, tricking the old or persuading old Argante to hide from imaginary enemies in a sack while Scapin himself howls for help as he pummels the sack, Hirsch plays with a light assurance and a commanding surge...
...But you'll see a superb company—the Comedie Francaise— in masterpieces of the French theater...
...On this routine basis, Moliere builds the trickery of Scapin into a mountain of mirth...
...but it is a playgoer's delight to see the Comedie Francaise as often as he can...
...He does not accept the opportunity the King has given him to strike back at the envious authors who have been satirizing him, but sets his future course with the remark that the best answer to one's critics is to write a good play...
...Moliere discusses with his cast the nobles they are to represent and slips in some brilliant satire on the gallants and ladies of the court...
Vol. 44 • March 1961 • No. 11
