I saw the original THIS IS CINERAMA® twice during its initial run in the mid-50s. In the 70s it was being revieved at the Ziegfeld in NYC... imagine my surprise and disappointment when I discovered this was being shown in regular one screen 70 millimeter and NOT in Cinerama®!
***
Friday night we attended the latest Drama Department presentation THE DOWNTOWN PLAYS. This was supposed to be 9 ten-minute plays by nine contemporary playwrights, but most of them ignored the ten-minute limit, and the main fault of the evening was its length when most of the plays could have easily been tightened up. The highlight of the evening was Jackie Hoffman in a monologue by Paul Rudnick about a mother at her first PFLAG meeting. This was truly hilarious. The low point --- and really only play I didn’t care for --- was Wendy Wasserstein’s version of a Greek myth as told by a rabbi to the accompaniment of 50’s rock records. It was funny but had no real point and ended the evening on a less than perfect note. Celebrity “hosts” for the evening were Kitty Hart (looking great at 94 and talking about the stamp being issues in honor of Moss’s centennial) and Tovah Feldshuh who managed to get in several Golda stories.
Saturday afternoon was GREENWILLOW at Mufti. Very well performed, the show is one of those great scores, mediocre book pieces. Regarding the book, I find a play with a man who travels all over the world and returns to his wife every few years just to get her pregnant before he leaves again offensive (not to mention the wife whose self-esteem is so low that he permits it). The main thrust of the play involves his son who won’t marry his true love because he feels he is cursed to be like his father. What’s more, there are so many side incidents the main story often gets lost in calf baptisms, dueling priests and other things. That said, the score is so wonderful that you don’t care how stupid the plot is and is sung to perfection here. With only 30 hours of rehearsal for the entire show, some of the choral singing sounds as if they had worked on it for months. By all means get the CD (although the original cast’s Anthony Perkins cannot compare with Mufti’s Machota), as the glorious Loesser music can be enjoyed better without the inane book.
Musicals Tonight’s latest offering was MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, in a production that they seemed to have put together themselves (though Hugh Wheeler is credited with the book). Every song from the film is used (except “You and I”), but the remainder of the score takes a couple of numbers from the 1960s strictly-for-stock version, others from the 1989 Broadway version, plus two songs Martin and Blane wrote for the 1963 remake of BEST FOOT FORWARD. The book is word for word the screenplay (not by Hugh Wheeler) with the only additional dialogue being the lead-ins to the songs not in the film. A cast of twenty did a fine job with the material. But it was the most unnecessary show I’ve seen in a long time… especially with the movie now available in a beautifully restored DVD. Who needs Heather Parcells (an excellent singer who I would like to see in something else) when you can watch Judy Garland in one of her finest performances.
