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| Blackstone
Audiobooks
presents F. Murray Abraham • John Glover
• Sam Gray • Mara Hobel • Nicholas Kepros • Sonja Lanzener •
Brian Murray • Jeremiah Sullivan
with music by |
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| translated,
produced & directed by
Yuri Rasovsky |
music
conducted by
Steven Ovitsky |
| This
production was made possible in part by The National Endowment for the Humanities |
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Molière's last play is a sparkling satire on the medical profession written, ironically, in the final days of the playwright's life. Doctors and patients alike come under scrutiny when Argan, the hypochondriac, decides that his daughter must marry a physician so that he will always have a doctor around. The Imaginary Invalid was almost certainly commissioned by Louis XIV for the great royal carnival of 1673. Like all carnival theatre, it is, at heart, a celebration of human folly, always teetering on the verge of anarchy and absurdity. The play's greatest scene, a musical masque in which Argan is finally initiated as a physician, is a pageant in praise of foolishness -- as the actors sing to the rhythm beaten out by druggists with mortars and pestles.
F. Murray Abraham
Prior to Abraham's bravura, Oscar-winning performance as Salieri in Milos Forman's acclaimed film "Amadeus" (1984), he had appeared on TV and in film mostly in bit-parts and small roles and was probably most often recognized by the public as a talking leaf from Fruit of the Loom TV commercials. His most memorable pre-"Amadeus" screen role was as the drug lord hung from a helicopter as Al Pacino looks on in Brian De Palma's remake of "Scarface" (1983). After "Amadeus", the actor appeared as a monk in "The Name of the Rose" (1986), had an unbilled role as D.A. Abe Weiss in the prodigious misfire "The Bonfire of the Vanities" (1990), and was Wolf Sr, a hunter of the homeless, in the urban fantasy film "Surviving the Game" (1994). Abraham later played gangsters like Arnold Rothstein, the man who fixed the 1919 World Series, in "Mobsters" (1991), and Al Capone in "Dillinger and Capone" (1995). He was also seen as the leader of the Greek Chorus in Woody Allen's "Mighty Aphrodite" (1995). His stage work of the same era included the vaunted Mike Nichols' production of "Waiting for Godot" (1988) opposite Robin Williams and Steve Martin.
The Imaginary Invalid as seen by Honoré Daumier
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Conductor Steven A. Ovitsky is Executive Director of the Sante Fe Chamber Music Festival. He has served as President and Executive Director of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, Vice President and General Manager of the Minnesota Orchestra, and Artistic Director and General Manager of the Grant Park Music Festival in Chicago. He is an active French Horn player, and a teacher and lecturer on Jewish Music. With Rasovsky, he co-produced a radio production of Gershwin's Of Thee I Sing, and supervised the music for The Dybbuk and the University of Chicago's mini-series Bastille. |
SEVEN
CLASSIC PLAYS MAIN PAGE
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