| re: On The Twentieth Century 1978 vs 2015 - Thoughts? | |
| Last Edit: AlanScott 10:25 am EDT 11/02/24 | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 10:19 am EDT 11/02/24 | |
| In reply to: On The Twentieth Century 1978 vs 2015 - Thoughts? - BudApp935 09:15 am EDT 10/31/24 | |
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| I generally try to be nice here, but this post may test my resolve on this. But especially given your request, I will try — I would have anyway — but I fear a tiny bit that I may not succeed. I saw the original production nine times. The first time was with Kahn, the other eight were with Kaye. I thought the show played much, much better with Kaye. In fact, I feel that Kaye, at least for the first six months of her run, gave the best female musical-comedy performance I've ever seen. (I'm differentiating musical comedy from musical play or musical drama here.) Perhaps because of the combination of the extreme physicality of the staging and the difficulties of the score, I think perhaps the strain of performing the leading roles eight times a week for months caused both Cullum and Kaye to be less effective, albeit in different ways, later in the run. But sometimes I wonder if it had more to do with the show playing to smaller audiences after around six months, audiences that were less responsive (comedy profits from full houses), which also may have affected the performances. When I saw it near the end of the run with a surprisingly full house at one Sunday matinee, it played very well again, even with Kevin Kline gone, much better than it had played the previous October or November, and that time was with Kline. I then returned for the closing performance. But every other time I saw it, it played very well and audiences seemed very enthusiastic, although perhaps a bit less so the first time with Kahn. I can’t say that I especially remember the audience response that time, although I remember my feelings quite well. I think the audience response was reasonably enthusiastic but not generally ecstatic. Obviously I liked the show a lot, at least once Kaye took over. I think the production was quite brilliant in just about every way. Unlike Musicals54, who responded below, I thought Imogene Coca was marvelously endearing and funny, really sort of miraculous. I greatly disliked the Roundabout revival. This probably had mostly to do with Scott Ellis's direction and the changes made to the script, for which Ellis must also be held responsible, even though he didn’t write them. (There was one funny new exchange involving Jim Walton, but otherwise the changes were not helps.) For example, Letitia Primrose was cut from the title song and her first brief scene with Conductor Flanagan was cut. Was this because Mary Louise Wilson was frail? I can understand that might be the reason she was cut from the title song but I can’t see why that would be a reason for cutting her from with the scene with Conductor Flanagan. Anyway, I think those cuts were the reason why I twice read people online wondering if this was the real Mrs. Primrose or a madwoman who was an imposter. Those two cut appearances leave no doubt this is the real Mrs. Primrose. I think the cast was full of extremely talented people (of that there can be little question), but some were miscast and some were misdirected. Some staging and production choices seemed to me extremely misguided, with at least one of them downright inept. The design was the least of the problems. In fact, I didn't think it was a problem at all. The Roundabout could not possibly afford something on the scale of the original, and I think the design was quite good enough, if certainly not as spectacular as the original. I think Peter Gallagher is a great actor. He was a superb Sky Masterson in a production that I thought was overrated. He was the main saving grace of that production for me. And he was the best Edmund Tyrone I've ever seen. But he was just wrong for Oscar Jaffee. Not actively bad, of course. I don't think it's possible for Peter Gallagher to give an actively bad performance. He's too good and too grounded an actor, but he is perhaps not so right for certain types of characters in certain types of period pieces. Kristin Chenoweth threw everything, including the kitchen sink, into her relentlessly manic performance. I felt she was just running wild in 1,427 directions. You sometimes hear the term "created a character" about a performance. Sometimes you hear that an actor didn't create a character. It's not a term I use a lot, but i would use it about Chenoweth's performance, in that I didn’t think she created a character. There just seemed lots of bits of shtick that didn’t add up to a character, except for her Mildred Plotka, who did seem a character but the wrong character. If Peter Gallagher is always a grounded actor, Kristin Chenoweth seemed ungrounded here. She has often been quite terrific (my experience seeing her and finding her very funny goes back to Scapin at the Roundabout a few months before Steel Pier), but I thought she wasn’t here. Mary Louise Wilson’s performance was widely criticized performance on the chat boards, and I do understand why. She was very frail and the staging for her was therefore very limited, and she got a few lyric lines wrong at the performance I saw. But she created a character who made sense. I love her, but when I heard she was cast, I thought she would prove to be completely wrong for the role. I was wrong. I also liked Jim Walton. I think Michael McGrath was a wonderful actor and that Mark Linn-Baker is a good one, but both gave very low-key performances and seemed almost indistinguishable from each other, including having similar builds. In the original production and in almost every other production I’ve seen, the actors who were cast as Owen and Oliver were contrasting physical tapes and played the characters as temperamental opposites. Of course, in the complete rewrite of “The Legacy” lyric that was used in the Roundabout production, they were referred to as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, so I guess that’s how someone thought they should be cast. Things don’t always have to be done as they were originally to be effective, but choices that are less interesting are less effective. Speaking of the rewrite of “The Legacy,” this is from a New York Times article on it: ”Then there was the 'Ramona' issue. Today’s audiences are unlikely to understand a reference to that 1928 song, or to get any of the other early-20th-century show business details — like the 1900 Broadway production ‘Floradora’ — that are scattered throughout 'The Legacy.'” It seemed that was the reason Amanda Green and Ellis thought it should be rewritten or at least part of the reason. I am pretty sure that relatively few people who saw the original production knew the song ”Ramona” or could have told you much, if anything, about Florodora, to spell the title correctly. (Admittedly, the title is also misspelled in the published script.) Even in 1978. I would bet that many audience members did not know who Henry Irving was or what Abie's Irish Rose was. I think getting every reference in any specific way was never necessary nor, I would think, expected. Oscar is a dinosaur. It didn’t help that the new lyric was not very good and sometimes didn’t sit very well on the music. I think Amanda Green is a talented writer, but this rewrite was a mistake. Getting back to production choices and the cast, there was nothing really wrong with what Andy Karl did, but he didn’t seem very period and he didn’t seem to me to evoke any particular 1930s Hollywood actor type. He certainly was not remotely as funny as Kevin Kline or even replacement Nicholas Wyman, who wasn’t terribly physically right for the role but still got big laughs. Again, Karl is a very good actor and his performance was perfectly pleasant but he did not seem especially right for the role. If Ellis did anything much to help him give a performance more right for the role, it didn’t especially show. Going to a smaller role but a performance that was unfortunately typical of the things that were wrong with the production, the woman who played Imelda Thornton sounded like a middle-class woman from Queens rather than a great if over-the-hill stage star of the 1920s or 1930s. Again, I’m not blaming the actress. It must be what Ellis wanted for reasons that make no sense to me. There were times when it seemed like Ellis thought the show was something in the vein of Hellzapoppin’. There was all the bizarre business with the clock during “She’s a Nut.” It’s like he thought the show was meant to be surreal nonsense. But Hal Prince said he liked the production so what do I know? On a final note, I should add that I have liked some of Scott Ellis’s productions. |
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