Word: boated
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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SMALL MINDS THINK ALIKE. It's as if Hollywood had just one huge brainstorming session for all its summer movies. Someone says, "I took a boat ride last week. Let's have a climactic boat chase." Speed 2 ends with one, and so, for no maritime reason, does Face/Off...
Drabinsky has had plenty of theatrical ideas in the past few years, some of them good (a lavish revival of Show Boat), some to be regarded warily (Parade, his next planned musical, is about Leo Frank, the Jewish factory worker who was lynched in Atlanta in 1915 after being convicted of murdering a 13-year-old girl), but nearly all commanding attention. Ragtime is getting an extraordinary transcontinental buildup. The show is already a big hit in Toronto, and a second company has just opened in Los Angeles. By the time the show marches to Broadway in December, there will...
...spectacular visuals almost succeed in masking the inherent weaknesses of the play. Almost, but not quite. Dating from 1927, "Show-boat" is really a nostalgia piece, and as such it has its problems. The plot is hopelessly old-fashioned, with an anticlimactic "happy ending" that seems both clumsy and artificial. The characters remain for the most part one-dimensional; the most interesting ones simply sink out of sight, into oblivion or irrelevance. The love story never really works; even the early scenes between Ravenal and Magnolia have an unavoidably mechanical feel, and the romantic duet that concludes...
...sheer extravagance of the production is bound to win over most, if not all, viewers. The multilayered set is a marvel; with a few turns, the Cotton Blossom shifts between views of the cabin windows, the boat's prow and box office, a kitchen pantry, the interior theater and the upper deck where the young lovers, Gaylord Ravenal and Magnolia Hawks, hold their trysts. The second act is set in turn-of-the-century Chicago, the centerpiece being the Palmer House Hotel. But here, too, the set undergoes a series of eye-popping transformations, conjuring up scenes as divergent...
...manages to convey the girl's radiant innocence winsomely, as well as her later, more subdued dignity as an abandoned wife. Real-life husband-wife team Kirby and Beverly Ward almost steal the show as the husband-wife comic team of Frank and Ellie who leave the show-boat for a gig in the Trocadero. And Elizabeth Mary O'Neill does steal the show, if only briefly, as Magnolia's daughter Kim: her Charleston, near the very end of the show, is a terrific eyeful with a lot of pizazz--the best-choreographed and quite possibly the best scene...