Word: acte
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...television's Starship Enterprise is reassembled to beat back the menace. All of your old favorites will appear on the silver screen. A slightly grayer and heavier William Shatner portrays the ever-courageous and feisty Captain James T. Kirk, Leonard Nimoy puts on his ears for the Mr. Spock act and DeForest Kelly dons the stethoscope as Dr. McCoy. This has real potential to be the next Rocky Horror Picture Show...
...then came Act...
...course, The Royal Family moments of emotional excess aren't its best, and the Loeb cast is strong precisely where the script is strong: situational comedy. The first act drags a bit, but both second and third build to those frenzied, crowded scenes into which Kaufman is always tossing one more character. Both Cantor and Sam Samuels as Wolfe, the family's agent, have a knack for comic timing, and Wilber drops off-hand insults like time-bombs. Jeffrey Horwitz and Mario Aieta, as the men in the actress's lives who are forever barred from understanding their calling, receive...
...patches of the script off the actors' hands, but chose not to, using dull blocking and an entirely static--though lavish--set. The only evidence of a director's hand in the production at all, in fact, is the presence of a pianist (Jeffrey Halpern) on stage before each act, playing show tunes and Gershwin with flair but without much point...
...LESS PASSIVE director might have chosen to make more of The Royal Family; in this production, nothing transcends simple comedy except Fanny's Act II monologue--a magical evocation of the scene backstage before curtain time, which Wilber uses to cast a spell over the house. In this case, passivity unintentionally pays off--the Loeb Royal Family doesn't pin any more significance on the slightly dated script than it can support. Three hours of good comedy remain, without any mirror tricks but without too much pretense, as well...