PROMISES Hmm...

I had mixed feelings seeing PROMISES PROMISES, but my opinion is very different from my expectations and what I have heard and read.
I saw the original, but it was, like 40 years ago.
I remember the dancing, Jerry Orbach's voice and presence, Marian Mercer's brilliant underplaying and that waif, Jill O'Hara.
It's a strange musical, the score is half brilliant and half WTF?
My biggest suprise was that I really liked Kristen Chenoweth in this show. A part of it was that she was the one lead who can really sing and handle the difficult score and has true stage skills.
I thought she did the dramatic songs very well, A HOUSE... was actually very simple and moving, and she does NOT sing it to a chair. SAY A LITTLE PRAYER was fine but I didn't understand why the other women were in the number when she wasn't a member of the secretary group.
And she moved me.
I did have trouble with her hair, the girl gets drunk, swallows a handfull of pills, walks the town for hours than sleeps and wakes up with perky hair, naw.
And the blue Christmas dress is unflattering.
But I liked her a lot, mudh more than I thought I would.
Sean Hayes is likable and funny, but he didn't control the stage for me, and he does well singing the small stuff and some nice harmony work with Kristen, but most of the time his voice was very weak and he had no voice left when his 11 OClock title number came around, he totally went for a safe note at the end and missed it and just cut off, leaving the set change all to itself.
Tony Goldwyn was way at sea, Came off way too nice and destroyed one of my favorite songs, WANTING THINGS. And i didn't need to see all his women to get the song.
Rob Ashford confounds me, how did he get to helm such a major revival as this? I liked some of the choreography but it had no through style, the dancers, as usual on his shows are all top notch and great to watch.
Dick Latessa picks up every scene he is in, and Katie Finneran is smashing as Marge, Simon wrote a classic two scene stealing role here and I may have admired Mercer's underplaying more, but Finneran nails every laugh and her timing is impecable.
In two smaller roles Brian O'Brien is menacing as Karl and Helen Anker is letter perfect as Miss Olsen. And they both dance their asses off when called upon.
It will be interesting to see how critics and audiences take to this production.

you would really think they could pay attention to detail with the hair thing as you say. i totally agree. that would stick out to me. in the original how was it done? would they have time to faux mess it and get it back via wig or what have you

a lot of people did not see the original, reardless of whether they were born yet or not :0

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Updated On: 4/21/10 at 08:36 AM

Quick question to you guys who've been to the show:
which seat do you think is better : J6 (left orchestra) or A1 (front row, left mezzanine) ?

THANKS!

Updated On: 4/21/10 at 10:51 AM

I was blessed with having seen Christine Baranski's genius take on Marge McDugall in the 1997 Encores! Concert Series production and have been blessed with an audio of this to remind me over and over (and over) how sensational she was... so her performance remains fresh in my mind today as it was back in 1997.

Having seen the current revival this past weekend I can personally say I HATED Katie Finneran's take on the role. My bf, who just discovered PROMISES, PROMISES and is devouring everything he can find on the show, hated Katie's take even more than I did.

The audience unfortunately never had the pleasure of seeing Baranski's version so they simply ADORED Katie. Their first (and most likely... only) exposure to the role will be Katie's, so they'll never see the role played by a true comic gem. Baranski just made each line reading her own -- it was something to experience... her and Martin Short. Katie's line readings are by-the-book and you can see her waiting for her next line. Boring, boring, boring. I also hate that she's again using the same voice she used for Brooke in the 2001 Broadway Revival of NOISES OFF. I guess she finds this to be her 'funny' voice. It wasn't and isn't.

Missed opportunity, I say... even though she'll most likely win her 2nd Tony Award for this.

Thanks sowren1020!

I hate those huge theaters...

CurtainPullDowner

Question? Did you remember to take your notebook with you while jotting down every single thing that did not appeal to you and pick it apart as if you were the Director or a Theater Critic?

Seems your post was a little over the top in the dissing mode. You seemed to go into this show with negativity and not objective at all.

If you came out of the theater the same way you went into the theater, then you really did not like it at all to begin with. But, we all have our choices in life.

Alot of people who have seen the show have really great reviews on it and well, I guess you see it differently.

BTW - Some posters on this thread are simply going along to get along with the thread author.

I think LindaT's post wins "Most Obnoxious of the Day." Please bring out the tiara!

I don't mind taking criticism of my opinions at all.
But LindaTNo1, I go see a lot of Theatre and I am not a critic,
and I don't need a notepad to remember whaat I liked and disliked.
I went into PROMISES with mixed feelings.
It is one of those shows that people talk about but few have actually seen and I was very young when I saw the Original, but several songs on OBCR are among my favs. And several I find weird and confusing.
It's interesting that, if you don't count BACK TO BACHARACH this was the only Broadway score by David and Bacharach. The show was a big hit in it's time and was influencial to even Sondheim.
In it's way it was the AMERICAN IDIOT of it's time, but it had a book by Simon based on a movie script by the Masters, Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond.
I read the comments on the boards and most that I read said Hayes was the discovery here and as I stated he is very likeable and very funny, those are compliments. Most of the incarnations on this role, Martin Short and Jason Alexander are comedians first and singers second. Jerry Orbach was a singer/actor who created many musical leading man roles and also many revivals, this is not an easy score or role to play and he was up to the task. Listen to his HALF AS BIG... and PROMISES.. on CD.
It's important that his story (and the singing of the score) take center stage, and Hayes didn't do that for me, and I am a big fan of his TV work.
Chenoweth was the discovery here, because I agreed with the naysayers that this did not seem like a good fit for her, but she proved me wrong. She made sense of all the songs given her because she took the stage and acted and sang them. Of the two inserts A HOUSE worked better.
I thought the dancers were wonderful and the Orchestra voices were delicious.
I would see this show again.
I was moved by the Simon/Wilder/Diamond story and Hayes and Chenoweth make an interesting pair of misfits hooking up.
I have also admired some of Tony Goldwyn's work but there are many Singer Actors who could do the scene work and then get to WANTING THINGS and show his irony by Singing the S*HIT out of it and take his acting moment. Why didn't they cast Kudish, he's plu-perfect for this role, as are both the covers of the role.

I agree in any other season Finneran would be the front runner for supporting Tony, but there is a spirited Actress in ALNM that may be wonderfully unbeatable.

I personally don't like the arrangements to Turkey Lurkey. It's similar but not quite. Dance break is "off" to these ears.

It's the same orchestrations. What has happened is that they have cut the hell out of them. Half of the overture is missing and they have shoehorned in "Say A Little Prayer."

That overture is pretty famous. Kids have hummed that thing for ages. You shouldn't just cut it to pieces because overtures are passee.

They are passe because nowadays, they are usually crap. This one was masterful. It was written by two of the greatest musicians of their time. It worked. Play the piece the way it was written and it will still work today.

They would never do that to Oklahoma and they certainly didn't cut the hell out of the South Pacific overture.

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No, actually, the show was written by three men. Let's get real. Most shows are. Burt wrote the tunes and Harold Wheeler wrote the dance arrangements and then Jonathon Tunick wrote the orchestrations.

Most composers get all the credit but on this site, we're educated enough to understand that the show would never have reached the heights it did without the amazing scoring, done by guys at the height of their careers and powers.

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Bacharach wrote a lead sheet for each song which is usually one staff for the melody and some sort of rhythmic accompaniment. Granted, he's a great pianist so his hand in might have been more extensive than most but I've spent a great deal of time examining the original composition work of many of the great composers of Broadway and that's about all they usually do, especially if, when they are writing the show, the are one of the most in-demand composers in the world at the top of their career.

Richard Rodgers did single staff melodies for his compositions and great arrangers and orchestrators like Hans Spialek and Phillip J. Lang and Robert Russell Bennett did the heavy lifting. Most of what you hear played in "Rhapsody in Blue" came from the mind and hands of Ferdinand Grofe, not George Gershwin.

Let's get real. Composition is only one element - the most important obviously - that goes into what we hear onstage and I refuse to diminish the work of the other great musicians and composers who collaborate on a score.

My job in the film business is to come up the original ideas for motion pictures. Without the ideas that I come up with after months of starring at the ceiling, none of the three films I'm presently working on would even exist, but after me, there is a long line of writers who get hired to flesh things out, fill in the gaps, add additional elements to the characters I create and turn my clunky first drafts into the smooth duck **** that we crank out here in the studio system.

I think understand collaboration inherently and I can say that creating the music for a Broadway show is a very similar process.

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allofmylife, i am not debating the contributions of Mr. Tunick or Mr. Wheeler to the overall PROMISES, PROMISES score but the score was WRITTEN by Burt Bacharach hence the credits: MUSIC BY Burt Bacharach, ORCHESTRATIONS by Jonathan Tunick and DANCE ARRANGEMENTS by Harold Wheeler.

The orchestrations and dance arrangements were all built on the music Bacharach composed. He is the writer of the music. You don't see the orchestrator or arrangers of Sondheim's shows getting credit for composing the music. The music Tunick and Wheeler orchestrated and arranged was written by Burt Bacharach. Let's "get real"...what is soooo difficult to comprehend about that.

Updated On: 4/22/10 at 03:53 AM