Boulevard Comedies Free Adaptations of Becque, Feydeau, and Moliere

9781575252100

1575252104

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.