Two By Two- Page 2

[After Eight]

Posted: 2/17/13 at 10:14am

"Basically MUFTIs are like Encores, but they only put on flops from the past that they feel deserve to be seen again."

They've put on I Love My Wife, Fanny, Wish You Were Here, Plain and Fancy, Best Foot Forward..... all hits, as was the upcoming Silk Stockings.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 2/17/13 at 10:37am

It was standard Borscht Belt humor to refer to Old Testament characters in the Yiddishkeit humor of 20th-century European-Jewish immigrant experience. For instance, Jacob might say to one of his brothers: "You think you have problems? Oy vey! I've got TWO wives!"

Odets employed the same schtick, only with a more literate quality. It was done to place the story in a familiar setting and give the family saga resonance. In the musical, it was coarsened and lost all cleverness. It seemed to have been done for cheap, burlesque-level humor.

I actually had read The Flowering Peach before I went to see Two by Two, so I was prepared for the Odetsian twists. I loved the mythology he made up about the Gitka. I thought it was magical. In the musical, it became stupid.

I didn't see the show until late in the run, and I was up in balcony, and Danny Kaye's ad-libbing and improvising were so irritating that the distaste left in my mouth about him made me unable to enjoy watching him for the rest of his life. (And I had grown up a lover of his Hans Christian Anderson movie!)

Even now, when I see one of his tour de force early films, I remember the labored schticklach of Two by Two, and I am no longer amused. I saw it at the end of the run and I remember him wit a cast on his foot and not a wheelchair. (But perhaps I am misremembering.)

I remember enjoying Marilyn Cooper, but not to the degree that I did the next year in the revival of On the Town. I do not remember liking Madeleine Kahn, which is shocking to me, since I later came to worship her particular style of humor. And I remember "I Do Not Know a Day I Did Not Love You," because my Italian-tenor voice teacher had me sing it in his failed attempt to make me into a Jewish/Italian tenor.

I was only 14 and unaware of the Richard Rodgers comments or much of the gossip about what was going on, but I remember having a distinct impression--and this from the balcony!--that the rest of the cast loathed him.

I certainly left the theater feeling that way--and that had never happened to me at the theater.

But...it was also the year of Company, which changed the way I looked at musicals, the way I looked at life even.

CORRECTED

Updated On: 2/17/13 at 10:37 AM

[After Eight]

Posted: 2/17/13 at 10:54am

"I remember enjoying Madeleine Kahn, but not to the degree that I did the next year in the revival of On the Town."

She wasn't in it.

Are you thinking of Bernadette Peters?

[PalJoey]

Posted: 2/17/13 at 11:37am

Actually I had them backwards--not enough coffee!--it was Marilyn Cooper I saw a year later in On the Town!

She was playing Lucy Schmeeler and understudying Bernadette, who had a terrible cold and decided she could not make it through "I Can Cook Too."

So just as the song was about to start, Bernadette stopped the show and told us that she was going to have her Marilyn Cooper come out and take over the character for the length of the song and then go back to being Lucy Schmeeler.

So I saw Marilyn Cooper do a tremendous "I can Cook Too," take a bow and then Bernadette resumed playing the part. (Including singing her part in the gorgeous quartet "Some Other Time.")

[GavestonPS]

Posted: 2/18/13 at 12:28am

Gaveston, very funny, but of course we keep track in antiquity of who was and was not a Jew.

Thanks, henrik, for recognizing what was entirely a joke.

Personally, I find the idea of Yiddish preceding Hebrew pretty funny myself. I'm sorry to hear Pal Joey's report that it was handled crudely in the musical.

[goldenboy]

Posted: 2/18/13 at 12:29pm

Saw the original with Danny Kaye. Don't remember if he was in a wheelchair or not. It was one of the first Broadway Musicals I don't remember liking very much. The cast did seem to smile with egg on their face while Danny Kaye clowned around. The music was okay. Even the cast album was something I didn't listen to much. You never forgot you were watching an "entertainment." which just wasn't very entertaining. Was the Mufti version any better?