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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Volpone, whom Ben Jonson claimed to have invented in five weeks in 1606, is the kind of con man who would steal your stove, then come back for the smoke. A harbinger of the rise of both capitalism and individualism, he has proved to be one of the theatre's most durable messengers of a third ism: cynicism. For Volpone, a man who can't see a belt without hitting below it, Homo sapiens is Homo sap. Pretending to be heirless and at death's door, he uses the legend of his wealth to extort all sorts of capital from the greedy souls around him. A connoisseur of the craven, he gets a sadistic thrill not just from grand larceny but from grand humiliation: he doesn't want wealth alone; he wants to watch its power corrupt.
In our current climate of avarice, the director Arthur Penn and the playwright Larry Gelbart decided to crank up their 1976 Broadway fun machine "Sly Fox," based on "Volpone" (at the Barrymore), to see if it would still fly. They installed a new comic engine--the puckish Richard Dreyfuss as Foxwell J. Sly--and several new sparkplugs, including Bronson Pinchot as Lawyer Craven, Peter Scolari as the Chief of Police, and Professor Irwin Corey as the Court...
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