Word: ballyhooing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...perfect combination of James Dean and the boy next door, Paul Rudd graciously greeted me with a big handshake and a warm smile just before curtain call on New Year's Eve. At the Helen Hayes Theatre on Broadway, Rudd was starring in The Last Night of Ballyhoo, a touching Alfred Uhry drama that gracefully blends stirring romance, witty one-liners and meaningful reflection in the story of a Southern family grappling with their American-Jewish identity in the 1930s. Personable and startlingly down to earth, Rudd is the rare exception in ego-dominated Hollywood...
...Last Night of Ballyhoo Alfred Uhry's comedy-drama could have been written in the 1950s, but that doesn't make its old-fashioned virtues any less appealing. The story of a Jewish family in Atlanta in 1939 has a keen sense of its milieu, raises tough issues of Jewish anti-Semitism and goes for honest sentiment, not sentimentality...
...especially grating moment involves a little exchange between Cap'n Andy, the proprietor of the Cotton Blossom, and the wise slave Queenie in which the latter, in response to Andy's grumbling that the balcony seats aren't selling, asks him "What about colored folks?" and launches into a ballyhoo aimed exclusively at said "colored folks." However, both Gretha Boston, who won a Tony award for her performance as Queenie, and Andre Solomon-Glover as Queenie's husband Joe, establish considerable presence that prevents their characters from being altogether marginalized. Toward this end as well, Joe's (and the show...
Hollywood has been good to Alfred Uhry. His first play, Driving Miss Daisy, was turned into an enormously popular movie, which won him an Oscar. His second, The Last Night of Ballyhoo, which just opened on Broadway, seems made to order for the movies as well: an old-fashioned family comedy-drama, set in Atlanta in 1939, on the eve of the premiere of Gone With the Wind. But it's a wonderful play on its own terms--richer, more textured than the rather schematic Miss Daisy, its originality rising subtly out of familiar elements...
...socially awkward young Jewish woman, back home in Atlanta after an aborted semester at the University of Michigan. In between decorating the Christmas tree and ogling the Hollywood celebrities in town, she is trying to get a date for the big event of the Jewish social year, known as Ballyhoo. Reacting in various ways to her travails are her widowed mother; the unmarried uncle and widowed aunt who live with them; and her prettier, more socially assured cousin, home from Wellesley...