Shylock

Dustin Hoffman received mixed reviews today after his British stage debut as Shylock in Shakespeare's play, "The Merchant of Venice." While the production won cheers Thursday night from a celebrity-studded first-night audience at London's Phoenix Theater, critic Irving Wardle wrote in The Times of London today: "All the clamorous hype and slavering expectation is a poor preparation for the modest Shylock who arrived on the Phoenix stage last...

Newly named Kennedy Center honoree Dustin Hoffman is probably best-known for movie roles that include Benjamin Braddock in "The Graduate," Carl Bernstein in "All the President's Men" and Michael Dorsey/Dorothy Michaels in "Tootsie. " But his roots are in the theater, and he has occasionally returned to the stage. But before he became one of Hollywood's leading anti-heroes in '60s and '70s films, he spent two years at the Pasadena Playhouse's College of Theater Arts, where he met and befriended fellow student Gene Hackman.

According to Hirsch Goldberg in "Just Because They're Jewish," Shakespeare borrowed the story line (of the young lovers persecuted by an evil moneylender) from an ancient Roman text. In the original version, the young lovers were pagan, and Shylock was--you guessed it--a Christian. Updating the play for his Christian audiences, Shakespeare naturally "did the right thing" and turned the lovers into Christians and made Shylock a Jew--probably because there weren't any Jews around to complain about defamation of character, having been expelled from England in the 13th Century.

The "N-word" has become so emotionally charged that its casual use can end a career, as radio shrink Laura Schlessinger discovered the hard way last year. But that doesn't mean it's a good idea to excise it from classic literature for fear of offending modern sensibilities. Alan Gribben, an English professor at Auburn University, is working with NewSouth Books in Alabama to publish a joint edition of Mark Twain's classics, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer," in which the word "nigger" ?

Shylock is, in his vengefulness and inhumanity, far more like the Christians in this play than like the other Jews portrayed, his daughter Jessica and his kindly friend Tubal. All we know about his dead wife, Leah, is that she loved him as he loved her. So far as the text indicates, Shylock turned to murderous treachery and premeditated revenge not out of any innate Jewish tendency to evil but in clear reaction to the dehumanizing brutality of his Christian persecutors. W. S. MARKS Associate professor of English UC Santa Barbara

In his profile of Portia de Rossi ["De Rossi on 'Ted' and Ellen and Babies," March 15], Scott Collins writes: "But De Rossi, born 36 years ago in Australia as Amanda Rogers (she chose her stage name -- Portia is the heiress who begs Shylock for mercy in "The Merchant of Venice" -- as a teenager) . . . " I'm not sure if it's been awhile since he read or watched "The Merchant of Venice," but he could just as well have described Portia as "the heiress who cross-dresses as a man in order to act as the lawyer in Shylock's trial and saves the day by hoisting him on his own linguistic petard."

'Ours is clearly an educational project, and not the version people usually think about.' For its first three years, Orange Coast College's annual Shakespeare productions stirred nary a ripple of controversy. But then, "All's Well That Ends Well," "Henry IV--Part I" and, especially, last year's production of "Hamlet" are more likely to produce scholarly debates than societal clashes.

The biggest disappointment at the Saturday opening of the Grove Shakespeare Festival's "The Merchant of Venice" was the sparseness of the audience--not much more than 50% of capacity at the Festival Amphitheatre in Garden Grove for a season inaugural production that deserves much, much better. It is one of the clearest and best acted of Grove stagings, rigorously simple in its aesthetics, from the acting to the geometrically clean lines of Don Llewellyn's set, David C.

As "Cheers" closes up the bar this spring at the end of the current television season, Bebe Neuwirth, the Emmy and Tony winner who plays the uptight Lilith on the hit television show, has a new role. She will star as the sultry, uninhibited Lola in the Old Globe Theatre's production of the 1955 baseball musical "Damn Yankees" during the company's six-play Festival '93. The festival, which runs from June 30-Nov.

H ey, check this out. Suddenly the Bard is bad. Bad, as in cool: Picture Shakespeare with hair gel, in pastels and pushed-up sleeves. Last season, Cal State Fullerton updated "Romeo and Juliet" with punk and heavy metal trimmings; now Orange Coast College and Saddleback College are staging productions of Shakespeare that, while remaining faithful to his words, deliberately blur the time frame. There is a message to this madness. It illustrates the relevance of Shakespeare to modern life.

— Al Pacino's Shylock is the talk of New York at the moment, at least when the conversation turns away from the insufferable heat wave. His performance in the Public Theater's production of Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice" (running in rep with Michael Greif's staging of "The Winter's Tale") marks a return to form for the actor, who just received an Emmy nomination for his portrayal of Jack Kevorkian in the HBO film "You Don't Know Jack." It's also the most intriguing element in veteran director Daniel Sullivan's handling of a play that is as curiously compelling as it is notoriously troubling.

In his profile of Portia de Rossi ["De Rossi on 'Ted' and Ellen and Babies," March 15], Scott Collins writes: "But De Rossi, born 36 years ago in Australia as Amanda Rogers (she chose her stage name -- Portia is the heiress who begs Shylock for mercy in "The Merchant of Venice" -- as a teenager) . . . " I'm not sure if it's been awhile since he read or watched "The Merchant of Venice," but he could just as well have described Portia as "the heiress who cross-dresses as a man in order to act as the lawyer in Shylock's trial and saves the day by hoisting him on his own linguistic petard."

"This is a waltz," explains our narrator and protagonist, a compulsively wisecracking Lithuanian Jewish immigrant named Matt Friedman, as he prepares us and himself for the giddy, nerve-racking steps of courtship. With disarming, understated eloquence, Matt risks everything in "Talley's Folly," Lanford Wilson's sweetly moving two-character romance set against a backdrop of post-World War II social upheaval.

Talk about chutzpah. Where other networks and studios have been scurrying to delete movie and TV references to the World Trade Center in an effort to avoid adding to our trauma, A&E kicks off a new series tonight by asking us to wallow in it. Not the Sept. 11 attacks on the New York landmark, but rather the earlier terrorist bombing on Feb. 26, 1993. Yes, that's the subject of the first installment of "Minute by Minute" (10 p.m.

Shylock was a tough one for actor Gareth Armstrong. While rehearsing the controversial role of the Jewish money lender for an English production of "The Merchant of Venice," Armstrong had trouble finding something in the character to warm up to. "You have to like the character you're playing," Armstrong says, explaining the challenge faced by an actor cast as a villain. "You don't have to think he's right, but you have to find an empathy with him."

"A Pound of Flesh," writer-director Todd Alcott's new modern-language adaptation of Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice," makes a seriously intentioned but uneven debut at the Heliotrope Theatre. Replete with trendy slang ("Portia--there is no substitute") and four-letter expletives, Alcott's most significant accomplishment is nailing the Bard's condemnation of hypocrisy in no uncertain terms.

"A Pound of Flesh," writer-director Todd Alcott's new modern-language adaptation of Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice," makes a seriously intentioned but uneven debut at the Heliotrope Theatre. Replete with trendy slang ("Portia--there is no substitute") and four-letter expletives, Alcott's most significant accomplishment is nailing the Bard's condemnation of hypocrisy in no uncertain terms.

Of all the tragic figures Shakespeare created, Shylock in "The Merchant of Venice" has leaped out of the theater into reality with the greatest vengeance. His "pound of flesh" has through the centuries taken on a monstrous symbolism for anti-Semites who saw in him validation of their prejudices.

Noted classical actor Alan Mandell, who was to star as Shylock in Shakespeare Orange County's upcoming production of "The Merchant of Venice," has withdrawn from the show because of the recent death of his wife. "He called me and said he just couldn't go on," SOC artistic director Thomas F. Bradac said Tuesday, noting that rehearsal had just begun. "The company feels deeply sorry that Alan won't be with us this summer."