Tuesday, March 16, 2010

The Servant of Two Masters at Yale Rep

How do you get away with staging an eighteenth-century commedia dell’arte farce in twenty-first century America?

Apparently, if you’re Yale Rep, you get away with it quite well.

Great adaptation. Great cast. Excellent music (and musicians). And, as usual (with one recent exception), a wonderful set. Speaking of the contrast with that exception, as plodding and pedestrian as the marionette work was in Compulsion, The Servant of Two Masters included charming, magical puppetry of another sort, first with fireflies, later with butterflies, that were just bits of stage business handled deftly by the ensemble, with no special program credits and no awkward self-consciousness.

What a delightful evening! Life got you down? Go. Enjoy. Forget your troubles.

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