Word: agassiz
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...film version of Forum even played simultaneously with the Grant-in-Aid rendering. Anything Goes comes off the same list, but it's been infrequently produced, and its score more heard-of-than heard. (Actually the score to Anything Goes isn't all that's being heard at Agassiz: several songs, including "It's Delovely" and "Friendship" are interpolated from other Porter shows...
...Agassiz the book occasionally takes it in the ear. First of all, the extra songs (an innovation borrowed from the recent off-Broadway revival) are preceeded and followed by predictably awkward transitions. Also it helps not at all that each musical number, when the dancing is over, has gone on so long you forget whatever plot-point led into it. Worse yet, director Porter and his company are plainly more comfortable when the music is playing than when it's not; when there's no dancing, no orchestra, and no flashy movement, everything falls a little flat...
...Lindsay-Crouse book--which throws just the right number of exotic characters on board a ship called the American--demands to be played with a certain minimal degree of dryness, not to mention subtlety. There aren't any blatantly inadequate performances in the Agassiz production, nor any blatantly wrong ones, but the general tendency is to over-act in a big way. Lines which should be dropped lightly are hurled down like Galileo's cannon balls until you can't distinguish one impact from the next...
Just listening to Anything Goes from a loud, live orchestra more than compensates for the excesses of the Agassiz production. Following the lyrics word-for-word, which Peter Larson's chorus unexpectedly makes possible, is doubly satisfying. Last night's audience applauded only at "And though by all the birdies in the boughs he/is informed that his efforts are perfectly lousy." But the great lyrics in Anything Goes are legion...
...advance notices were not misleading. The production of Patience which opened at Agassiz last night is an uninterrupted delectation and a conclusive bah to those niggards who tell us Patience is not top-drawer Gilbert and Sullivan...