Peter Weiss: Marat/ De Sade 3.75 ips CDG 312 tape stereo 4 Track

Great Theatre Series / Caedmon 3-play Complete Bradway Original Cast Recording Produced for the theatre Society By Caedmon Records, inc. The David Merrick Presentation Of The Royal Shakespeare Company in... The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade Condition as seen in photos. Photos are of actual item. Box has an itemized number written on it from where previous owner must have used to catalog titles. We took a special picture to show the number. Tape looks to be intact and appears playable but we do not have the equipment to test it so we can not guarantee its sound quality. Because of that, this vintage tape recording is sold as vintage memorabilia. This item is not returnable. We do take photos so that you can see the condition of the box and reel. We just do not have the equipment to check for sound quality so therefore selling this title "as is"  Mental asylums may not yet be fashionable vacation spots, but they are choice locales for musicals seeking to excavate damaged souls. This curious canon includes not only John Doyle's recent production of Sweeney Todd and Anne Bogart's 1984 NYU version of South Pacific, set inside the mental ward of a Veterans Administration hospital, but also the granddaddy of all crazy-house musicals, Marat/Sade. With a provocative text by Peter Weiss and a score by Richard Peaslee that's derivative of Kurt Weill, Marat/Sade (as its lengthy title is commonly abbreviated) arrives at its milieu not by dramatic reinvention but historical fact: The Marquis de Sade did indeed stage theatrical spectacles while at the asylum of Charenton. It's not such a stretch to think he might have even engaged a subject as tantalizing as the Jacobin revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat, whose watery death was famously committed to canvas by Jacques-Louis David. Weiss' script, which poses the questions that revolutions and demagogues beg, is a study in dichotomies, pitting Marat's views on equality versus Sade's on subservience, the grander political ends of the asylum director Coulmier against Sade's more personal motivations, the inmates' compulsion toward community against their devolution to solitary baseness. But while Weiss packs his prison like a pressure cooker full of aerosols, it's always been Peter Brook's legendary staging that made Marat/Sade an event. Much owes to Brook's own dichotomous approach, which famously blended the script's Brechtian songs of commentary with an Artaudian assault to the senses. Few productions stray from Brook's impressive imprimatur, and a couple of well-conceived touches aside (particularly Troy Hourie's set design, which features a chain-link fence that traps the cast among the audience — and the audience among the cast), the Classical Theatre of Harlem largely hews to Brook's iconic visuals. What the theatre hasn't carried through is the deceptively subtle balance that Brook maintained among the elements warring both within the script and the staging. Director Christopher McElroen never lends Marat/Sade the control that would reward its chaos. Moments meant to threaten gravely or even temporarily shatter the play within the play don't register here, where separate realities combine into a lulling din. Also confused is the production's relationship to the audience, who are implicated by the set and occasional jets from a water hose but whose role McElroen never decides. The cast is a mixed bag, but if Nathan Hinton struggles to register even the slightest flicker of revolutionary fire as Marat, T. Ryder Smith is a splendidly chilly Sade.