New Plays: The Pirate of Life Walks the Plank

Someone forgot to tell Producer-Director Harold Prince that Zorba isn't Jewish. Prince could not resist the temptation to try to fashion a sequel to his own Fiddler on the Roof, thinly camouflaged with a Greek accent. The resulting musical play is sleek, professional and synthetic, a brassy bit of Broad-wayana that is as far from the Mediterranean basin as is Shubert Alley.

Quite apart from its total inability to reflect the intellectual nuances of the Kazantzakis novel, Zorba the Greek, the musical is infinitely inferior, point for point, to the 1964 Michael Cacoyannis...

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