Word: banalized
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Joan's "inner life" offered more opportunity for soliloquy in her cell than for dramatic movement. The limply worded libretto, by Queens College Music Professor Joseph Machlis, was not only static but too often banal. And the music, well-made but often weak where it needed strength, was more effective at setting moods than delivering powerful operatic punches...
...over with all the dead seaweed known to musicomedy. The show gets no farther on sex than it does on spooks, and on murder it gets nowhere at all. More crucially, it doesn't get far on its music, either: Composer Ellstein's score is just agreeably banal, and the Bullock lyrics are not much fun even when clever. As for the gifted cast, Valerie Bettis is used monotonously, Vivienne Segal rather shabbily, and Stuart Erwin too seldom. Tamiris' choreography gives the show and the ghosts their happiest break...
...some extent. The Cardinal is an outright, often vigorous pro-church tract that ploddingly touches on nearly everything from birth control to Author Robinson's view of the church's view on separation of church and state. But the author has included so many banal fictional tricks that both tract and story quickly reach a sustained level of stupendous boredom...
...songs, studded with lines like "Now that I have found you," all sound the same and all sound banal. Jack Cole's wriggly, exotic dances are all much the same too, and elaborately meaningless, but they are sometimes decidedly clever. The skits and satiric ditties vary enormously. Many need the ax, many others the pruning knife, and even the best could use manicure scissors. But there are funny things in a take-off of a book-and-author luncheon, the plight of a man who has sworn off cigarettes, and a parody of a sentimental French chanteuse. Assisting-usually...
...real British middle-class world of John Wallis seen through numerous flashbacks. Neither exploration is wholly successful. Wallis' purgatory, with its concentration-camp pall and forced pleasure-resort atmosphere is skillfully but too obviously contrived. Wallis' real-life experience, with its high quota of banal woman trouble, comes close to being boring...