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The widow

Posted by: Michael_Portantiere 01:01 pm EDT 05/10/15
In reply to: Zorba as "a play with music" (spoilers) - mikem 11:16 am EDT 05/10/15

I didn't know the show very well before seeing the Encores! production on Friday, and there were several plot points in the book that I found to be highly unpalatable. Yes, the way Zorba takes all that money from Niko, supposedly to buy supplies to get the mine going again, and then spends most of it on women and booze, definitely makes him seem like a creepy, sponging user. And the fact that Niko is only mildly upset by this, and gets over it very quickly, struck me as extremely weird.

Also, I couldn't understand why the townspeople are so horribly mean and insulting to the widow -- especially in the first act of the show, before the young man's suicide (which, of course, she's not responsible for anyway). According to the Wikipedia entry on the film of ZORBA, the Widow "is incessantly teased by the townspeople for not remarrying, especially to a young, local boy who is madly in love with her." Really? That makes the townspeople seem overtly vicious, a does the scene of the scavengers gathering to ransack Hortense's home as soon as she dies.

In these and other moments, I think the book goes way, way overboard in stressing the dark side of life and humanity. But I do love the score :-)


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re: The widow - haiku review

Posted by: Damselfly0 12:25 am EDT 05/11/15
In reply to: The widow - Michael_Portantiere 01:01 pm EDT 05/10/15

The treatment of the Widow in the show (and Hortense) is really hard to swallow - never having seen the show before, I was horrified. A friend of mine writes Haiku Reviews of shows, and hers for Zorba was one of my favorites:


Life is what you do
Unless you are a woman
Then you're just murdered.


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re: The widow

Posted by: mikem 07:56 pm EDT 05/10/15
In reply to: The widow - Michael_Portantiere 01:01 pm EDT 05/10/15

Having seen Zorba and The King and I, I remembered that The King and I was (?is) banned in Thailand for being offensive. But Zorba IMO portrays Cretans much worse than anyone comes off in The King and I.


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