| re: "Mr. DeMille, Im Ready For My Close-up." | |
| Last Edit: lordofspeech 11:29 am EST 11/12/24 | |
| Posted by: lordofspeech 11:28 am EST 11/12/24 | |
| In reply to: re: "Mr. DeMille, Im Ready For My Close-up." - Chromolume 09:49 am EST 11/12/24 | |
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| The performances are so different. Swanson’s character is an oddity, seemingly inured from actual human feeling, and the rejection and frustrated sexuality is never allowed to be expressed. She is impossibly alone, with her only possible deliverance being a return to fame and performance. Plus she seems like an affected old lady. (One cannot, from the film, appreciate that she is sexy, or sexual, or desiring Joe, even though Swanson was a sex-goddess in real life.). The show was a horror show. Nicole is like a Cher. Impossibly gorgeous and thrilling regardless of age. There’s no ‘there’ there to her hurt and having been cast out by the studio. And her vocal pyrotechnics are astonishing. Nicole’s Norma is, quite simply, performing songs in a very chic arena. Is there a story? Not really. The show is a Cher concert. Betty Buckley was able to do something with Norma starting from the first song (mourning her dead chimpanzee). We saw how lonely she was, how starved for affection, how refined she was emotionally. The pain in her voice was irresistible. The show was about a woman breaking apart. So: One was an oddball gorgon Nicole is a version of Cher, sleek and powerful, with not a problem in her world. Buckley was an enormous broken heart; you wanted to reach out and heal her, and, in her play, Joe was just a crass creep. I didn’t see Patti. She probably had it all. I didn’t see Glen Close, but I’m sure she had the correct affect for it. And Close is enormously sympathetic onstage (in a way she rarely is on film). I did hear that her singing was limited sometimes. |
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