TWO MANY BOSSES
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The show takes Carlo Goldoni’s 18th-century comedy The Servant of Two Masters and transports the action to New York’s Little Italy in the 1950s. The plot involves the classic commedia dell’arte elements of mistaken identity, crossdress masquerade, sexual confusion, and class conflict. Beatrice, the daughter of a powerful Mafia don, comes to the U.S. from Sicily in search of her lover Florindo, who is on the lam after having killed Beatrice’s brother in an argument. To evade detection, Beatrice disguises herself as her dead brother–and so finds herself having to deal with her brother’s fiancee, Clarice. While hunting for Florindo and trying to postpone marrying Clarice, Beatrice hires a servant–a Harlequinesque clown here called Johnny Linotro; the rascally, money-hungry Johnny then hires himself out as a bodyguard to Florindo as well. While trying to keep his two bosses–who, of course, are looking for each other–from discovering his duplicity, Johnny enters his own romantic entanglement with the saucy serving girl Lucia, who is the plaything of Clarice’s father, Pantalone.
In Goldoni’s original, this convoluted plot serves mainly as a hook for extended clowning–athletic acrobatics, silly wordplay, and a great deal of rude and noisy slapstick. (A fairly traditional version of The Servant of Two Masters was nicely staged at Lifeline Theatre earlier this season by commedia dell’arte expert John Szostek.) In translating Goldoni into a modern idiom, librettist Dan LaMorte (who directs with Dale Calandra) has lost hold of the material; instead of anarchic absurdity, we merely get messy confusion. Almost none of the intended comedy routines work; they’re flat and obvious, cliched rather than classic in their predictability, and they lack the semblance of spontaneity essential to good comedy (and certainly to good commedia). The single exception is a running gag about Clarice’s suitor Fabio, a would-be pop star in the Frankie Valli mold who travels in the company of three backup singers: every time Fabio faces a crisis, his buddies chime in with a doo-wop harmony for the occasion.
