Hello, all! Well, STAR; when I was in grad school I saw the complete print, loved about half, mostly the first part, and hated about the same amout, esepcially the over-the-top "Saga of Jenny" performed too elaborately in a setting never to be seen on any stage, with no attempt to tie the number to either its upstaging of Danny Kaye or Liza Elliot in her editor attire deciding on a circus cover. I loved the early music hall-Andre Charlot moments quite a lot, though. I later had in my apartment a gigantic poster for "Those Were The Happy Times," which seemed to be a drastic cut-edit job to make the film more palatable, and which I hope never to see.
On another musical note, I took my goddaughter this morning to see THE PRINCE AND ME, which is really an updated version of THE STUDENT PRINCE without Norma Shearer or Sigmund Romberg. The film jumped the shark about a third into it because uninformed director Martha Coolidge and her uninformed crew have no concept of Wisconsin weather in late November; a Thanksgiving weekend race had all the principals and extras dressed in T-shirts and light jackets, confusing Thanksgiving with Labor Day. If she and her crew don't give a damn about reality, even in a fairy tale, why should her audience?
This reminded me, Dear Friend BK, when you were talking about the clueless director of the MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG revival you recorded and her allowing touchtone phones onstage in a scene that took place when phones still were dialed! I've worked with her since and she's still clueless!
