Word: broadway
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Jerry Herman, who built his reputation as the composer and lyricist of Hello, Dolly and Mame, argues that in the theater, "the strongest single force you could have is a larger-than-life lady on the stage." That chivalric premise is supported by two current Broadway delights, Bernadette Peters' act-long vocal solo in Song & Dance and Lily Tomlin's one-woman show, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. The same nothing-like-a-dame thinking underlies Jerry's Girls, a retrospective pastiche of Herman's work, featuring Dorothy Loudon, Leslie Uggams, Chita Rivera and eight...
...Rivera, who could dance the telephone book entertainingly, more or less does just that in some tired, ordinary routines. For those who like Las Vegas spectaculars or TV variety hours, Girls may prove entertaining. But when compared with the 1977 Side by Side by Sondheim, a revue by another Broadway stalwart, Stephen Sondheim, it lacks texture, narrative and perception of human nature...
DIED. Anne Baxter, 62, throaty-voiced actress whose stage and screen career, from her 1936 Broadway debut in Seen but Not Heard to her current role as TV's Hotel owner, embraced heartland innocence and brittle sophistication; after a stroke; in New York City. Baxter, the granddaughter of Architect Frank Lloyd Wright, won an Oscar as best supporting actress for The Razor's Edge (1946) and was nominated for her scheming ingenue Eve Harrington in All About Eve (1950); 20 years later she played Margo Channing, the aging star against whom Eve schemed, in Applause, a Broadway musical based...
...familiar themes of unspoken sexual obsession, middle-class hypocrisy and the crushing burden of guilty secrets. It also contains some of his wittiest portraits of pomp and vanity. Fans of the book will look in vain for more than vague resemblances in the amiable musical version that opened on Broadway last week. Composer- Author Rupert Holmes has framed Drood within a Victorian music-hall pastiche, and the actors play both Dickens' characters and the rowdy, self- mocking buskers of a troupe nearly as atrocious as the Crummles company in Nicholas Nickleby. Much of the rambling tale survives...
...Dickens' novel breaks off. The audience then votes to select the murderer and therefore the ending. This do-it- yourself detection has been honed since last summer's tryout by Director Wilford Leach and Choreographer Graciela Daniele, the team that made a zonked- out Pirates of Penzance a 1981 Broadway triumph. Fully half of Holmes' songs are instantly hummable, notably the sweet Perfect Strangers and the plucky Don't Quit While You're Ahead. The show's style calls for singing and charm more than acting. That is just what it gets from Jazz Great Cleo Laine and Broadway Veterans...