Profile for yfs

The original production resulted, I believe, in a double LP, which I think I have in my basement, so the score was never entirely "lost." I remember seeing it at the downtown Circle in the Square and thinking that it wasn't in the same category as a few of Carmines's other shows, but it was pretty great. Can't wait to re-encounter it. PROMENADE at Encores! Off-Center a few years ago was incredible, and I wish it had been re-recorded. And there's tons more to revisit. He was an off-Broadway ge...

I do it without guilt. If I'm having a lousy enough time I know there are better things to do with the rest of the afternoon or evening. And as a producer I have had a gentleman approach me at intermission and tell me how unhappy he was with act one. I advised him to leave and find something he wanted to do more, as the second act was more of the same. It was a show I was very proud of, but he didn't like it. So it goes.

I described it as an interview, but it was not formal (I was invited rot his office) and it was never published.

I haven't read the article but in my one interview with Hal Prince he was very vocal about how much Love Life meant to him and how influential it had been on his thinking once he became a director.

The article is a parody. No author credits, no theater listed, and a declaration that "75% of the audience" collapsed after Shirley's big number because the performance was a benefit for diabetics. It was tweaking the then-current craze for nostalgia. Not listed on IBDB or anywhere else. It was never meant to be taken seriously.

You seem to miss the point of what Encores is all about and has been for a very long time. These are not concerts with narrators, they are concert productions that allow audiences to witness (and hopefully enjoy) the shows themselves, warts and all. Mack & Mabel is hardly the worst book they've ever dealt with. That might be 70, Girls, 70 or A Tree Grows in Brooklyn or Cabin in the Sky. But many of us actually revel in seeing what it was, not trying to make it into something else. We wanna kn...

What's changed is the contract -- which, like all other theatrical contracts, is re-negotiated every few years. This is hardly the first Encores in which the actors didn't carry books. There is a note in the Playbill saying that it is a concert production in which the actors "may" be carrying books".

This production is pretty close to the original book. There have been many small revisions, but anyone who saw the original in '74 (as I did) would probably be hard-put to identify them. Some of the narration is new, and a few telling individual lines have been added. They all add up to a modest attempt to improve the believability of the romance, but they'e not earth-shattering. The Keystone Kop ballet was in the original but cut before Broadway, restored for the production at Paper Mill Pla...

Will it have to be retitled THE MOST HAPPY PERSON? Or maybe THE MOST UNHAPPY PERSON?

I'm not a young person, but one of the advantages of that is that I am about the only person I know who saw the production of ARTURO UI that Christopher Plummer did in the '60s with a score of live incidental music by...Jule Styne. Tony Richardson directed, David Merrick produced, the cast was stuffed with great vaudevillians, some of whom had been in the original GUYS AND DOLLS, and it was simply spectacular in every way. It got bad reviews and ran a week. What I'd give to see that one again...

Umm...FALSETTOLAND. Full stop. End of story.

Peter Marks pretty much nails it I think. A tiresome (though sometimes effective) display of style over substance with a few really good songs. Not for me, I'm afraid.

In the case of "Senator Joe" it was the only show in my memory to have its plastics up on two marquees at once -- right across the street from each other -- the Virginia (now the Wilson) and the Simon. The producer, Adela Holzer, couldn't post a bond to Jujamcyn, which owned the Wilson, and so made a deal for the Simon with the Nederlanders and moved across the street. By April of the following year she was incarcerated at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women. I think she's still...

But...Karen Morrow, great as she is, was never a big star. So how was that?

I agree with everything you're saying. I think it's bold and throws down some big and really interesting questions in a very theatrical gesture. I just think the play that emerges is pretty bad and undisciplined. Doesn't mean he won't write better ones.

I wonder if there are folks who have seen it and disliked it as much as I did who just don't want to say so. I found it almost intolerably dull, confused and self-indulgent. A very young writer's attempt to do something big and scary but with very little to really offer that's genuinely insightful and a great deal of patience for saying variations on the same thing over and over again. I realize it's virtual heresy to say so, but this isn't a good play -- and is barely even a play at all. But...

It al depends on you setting a time frame for your question. In 1927-28, the year SHOW BOAT opened, there were over 200 Broadway openings and I assume many more shows were running simultaneously than we have now. But for the last 5 years, you might be right.

Some interesting posts on the TB board from folks who loved it at NYTW and hated it at the National. I saw it in London last week -- my first-ever encounter with it -- and was mystified by all the enthusiasm on this board. What I saw was interminable, ugly, obvious, miscast and unbelievably pretentious. If this is what's coming, I'd temper my enthusiasm at least until you get a look at it. And while I don't like to predict awards, it's hard for me to picture Brooks Ashmanskas losing the best ...

Just_John said: "I saw it this afternoon and I loved it. I had seen the broadway revival over ten times and don’t think it was as strong as that, but with more rehearsal it could have been. It ran two hours and twenty minutes. It’s suppsoed to be one hour and 40 minutes."I've seen a lot of productions, including the original, the revival, and his one, and a few around the country. None of them was an hour and 40 minutes. The show has, in my experience, always run just over two hours (which is...

wonkit said: "I am reading the play before seeing it. Is it as clunky in performance as on the page? There are a lot of "clever" paraphrases of Shakespeare, for example, but that could either work or fail miserably. Is there music? It seems like a speakeasy atmosphere and the text does suggest there may be background tunes. I guess I am trying to imagine how the production gets the audience involved, and whether any of the humor is being conveyed."There should ideally be music, and Ui is, whe...