Good morning, all! My date to hear my new arrangements for the Men's Chorus has been cancelled today, so I'm staying in - except for the walk - and finishing up some work on my desk. I stayed up until 1 am last night watching the post-debate discussions, and I need to finish up some things. I'm still waiting for a go-ahead or requests for changes to THE STUDENT PRINCE medley, and that's got me on hold.
DR George, Joe Orton is one of my favorite playwrights because of his outrageous wit, insane plotting, and inner rage. I believe his plays are the funniest things written since Noel Coward's best comedies, and his style calls for the easy repartee of Oscar Wilde cmbined with the violence and rablood of a violent film: when one of the robbers in LOOT tells Truscott "You have got me bloodied and on the floor" and the shootings occur at the end of WHAT THE BUTLER SAW, the blood should be realistic.
Orton's not easy to perform: of the 7 or 8 different productions of WHAT THE BUTLER SAW that I've seen, only the 1973 Wiliamstown Theatre production with John Glover, David Dukes, and Lynn Milgrim came the closest to being an ideal representation of the show's style. There's a not-too-good film of LOOT with Lee Remick as the killer nurse, and you might want to track it down on VHS, and a rather good film of ENTERTAINING MR SLOAN with the late, great Beryl Reid. The film bio of John Lahr's book PRICK UP YOUR EARS is very interesting and goes into detail the tribulations of the original disastrous London-bound production of LOOT, which couldn't make it into London, and how another director took the script and made it a success.
I saw John Tillinger's Broadway production with Alec Baldwin and Zeljko Ivanek as the robbers, but I thought he miscast Joe Maher and Charles Keating and they should have switched roles. Charles was too sly to play McLeavyand would have been better as the corrupt police inspector.
There are grrat lines in LOOT:
"Total extermination has done nothing to silence her slanderous togue."
"What a thing to happen to a man who's been kissed by the pope!"