By JAN HERMAN<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If there’s an ideology in “Lysistrata,” the antiwar play by Aristophanes, it’s the idea that a comedy 2,400 years old can still make us laugh — even when the double entendres and smutty jokes are delivered in Greek to an English-speaking audience of contemporary New Yorkers who not so long ago\u00a0had Rudy Giuliani as mayor.
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If Giuliani were still in office, there’s no telling what he might have done to ban\u00a0a theatrical cast of horny women from making risqu\u00e9 references to thick cocks and leather dildoes,\u00a0and hornier men from making anguished, comical displays of their monumental hard-ons. But judging\u00a0from the reception the other night at City Center<\/font><\/b><\/a>, where “Lysistrata” is being performed by the National Theatre of Greece<\/font><\/b><\/a> (through Sunday), our censorious former mayor would have found it impossible to convince the As staged by director Kostas Tsianos (who also translated the ancient Greek text), this “Lysistrata” had the flavor of a rollicking, tuneful musical comedy. Both ethnic and authentic, it’s by far the best production of the play that I’ve ever seen. With the help of engaging music, colorful costumes, and especially striking choreography, Tsianos transforms the Greek chorus from its usual role of reflective, collective commentator into a vivid, earthy, individualized carnival of peasant soldiers and housewives. Their seamlessly woven songs and dances have an effortless, genuine quality. In a director’s note, Tsianos writes about the Dionysian rites, fertility ceremonies and improvised phallic songs from which Aristophanes’s play originated. The production itself turns out to be a successful echo, however distant, of those origins. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
audience that the production was anything other than classy, pleasurable, vibrant and, yes, timeless entertainment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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