“Trinculo” – 1974

Review Excerpts

“A TRUE ‘TEMPEST’ OF HUMANITY AND WIT….The Shakespeare Festival tends, understandably enough, to dram the very best of our actors….And when the casting comes off, the results can be memorable. The Feste-like Randy Kim is quite the Trinculo of my experience.” Clive Barnes, NEW YORK TIMES (2/11/1974)

“SHAKESPEARE’S GREAT FAREWELL….In particular, Randy Kim, that delightful young Oriental actor, was charming as the scatter-brained Trinculo.”
               –Richard Watts, NEW YORK POST (2/11/1974)

“’TEMPEST’ IN A TEAPOT….Two actors in minor roles, Randy Kim and Richard Ramos, were brilliant exceptions to the surrounding inadequacies. As the jester and drunken butler, the pair were marvelously comic and vital.”
               –William Glover, ASSOCIATED PRESS

“Randy Kim as a weepy Trinculo and Richard Ramos as a preposterously lordly Stephano make their low-comedy scenes funnier than I would have thought possible.”
               –Julius Novick, SUNDAY NEW YORK TIMES (2/17/1974)

“PEARLS AMONG THE PITS….The jewels of the Lincoln Center production are its clowns,Randy Kim as a white-face jester and Richard Ramos as the drunken butler. Their scenes of carousing and impotent plotting are so engrossing and funny, they’d grace any ’Tempest.’ Where Ramos bristles in an alcoholic haze, Kim pierces his clowning with sadness and punctuates it with superb timing.”
               –Dick Brukenfeld, VILLAGE VOICE (2/21/1974)

“All the performances in the Lincoln Center revival are satisfactory, but there are two I admire specially….I thought Sam Waterston was brilliant. And in the small part of Trinculo, the scatter-brained comic servant, Randy Kim, a young Oriental actor whom I’ve admired since I first saw him in something called, ‘The Chickencoop Chinaman” in the title role and later as, of all things, Engels in ‘The Karl Marx Story.’ I’ve long been an ardent fan of his.”
               –Richard Watts, NEW YORK POST (2/23/1974) 

“O BOLD NEW PROSPERO!….But funniest of all is Randy Kim (formerly the Chickencoop Chinaman and the captive Japanese of ‘Baba Goya’), whose Trinculo is nothing short of inspired. The late Wolcott Gibbs, whose boredom with Shakespearean clowns is well documented, never had the luck to see Mr. Kim’s Trinculo—a limp, sobbing, terrified rag doll in chalky clown makeup, who, once he has recovered, becomes the spirit of mischief itself.”
               –Edith Oliver, NEW YORKER MAGAZINE (2/25/1974)

“BECALMED….Done by clods on a small arena stage meant for experiments, The Tempest becomes imprisoned in a tinny teapot….To start with the few merits….There are even two accomplished performances. Richard Ramos is a funny…Stepahno. And Randy Kim—even with extraneous commedia dell-arte makeup and swathed in Medusan headgear and patchwork quilts—manages to bring enough genuine puzzlement and precise comic timing to his Trinculo to equip a thousand lovable clowns.”
               –John Simon, NEW YORK MAGAZINE (2/25/1974)