Charles Marowitz

Contains personal observations culled from a variety of periodical sources including The New York Times, The L.A.Times, American Theatre Magazine, The Guardian (UK), The Sunday Times (UK), The Observer (UK) and London Times (UK) about some of the most seminal and outstanding performances that took place in the 1990s and the artists that were more prominent during that period.

A Critic's Cultural Scrapbook from the 1990s

Stage Dust

The Shrew

Michael Valenti

THE STORY: Orville, an impecunious woodchopper, and his wife, Marti, have a lovingly belligerent relationship. But after a particularly violent row, Marti decides to wreak a revenge on her wayward husband. When Valmoth and Lucien, two upper-class g

Quack

THE STORY: I despise Hamlet. He is a slob, a talker, an analyser, a rationalizer. Like the parlour liberal or the paralysed intellectual, he can describe every facet of a problem, yet never pull his finger out. Considering the play imprisoned by

The Marowitz Hamlet

Disparaged as potboilers and disdained as "mere entertainment", boulevard comedies are traditionally given short shrift by critics -- although audiences have warmed to them for over two hundred years. These are the comedies and farces about infidelity, mistaken identity, and misguided amours that have no "redeeming social value". They simply make people laugh. In France, they have been the mainstay of the commercial theatre for over a century and often when "high art" emptied the playhouses, these comedies have played to Standing Room Only. In freely translating three of these perennial comedies, Charles Marowitz has demonstrated that fifty million Frenchmen can't be wrong. There is brilliance and buoyancy in these works and Marowitz has given them a face-lift, a shot of adrenaline, and a new lease-on-life. The volume contains Henry Becque's La Parisienne, the grand-daddy of all triangular comedies, Stark Naked, one of Feydeau's more outrageous affronts against the bourgeoisie, and Quack, a musical-vaudeville based on Moliere's The Doctor in Spite of Himself with music by Michael Valenti. All in brand-new translations and adaptations.

Charles Marowitz

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