Word: broadway
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Whoever thought arms control could be a hoot? But this two-hander, based on the Geneva stroll of Soviet and U.S. negotiators, is Broadway's funniest new comedy...
Onstage physical stresses can be as fierce as any endured on the football field or basketball court. Actor Mark Frawley, late of Broadway's Starlight Express, had to barrel-jump over five people in the show's opening number. "You're wearing two 4-lb. skates and a costume weighing 25 lbs.," he notes. "In order to clear the people, I had to get my speed up to 35 m.p.h. It was a knee killer." Musicians face peril as well. Pinched nerves and muscle cramps caused by repetitive hand motions are common. Violinists suffer everything from fiddler's neck rash...
...being either dogged and dull or archly ironic and malicious. But Playwright Lee Blessing has brought it off. His A Walk in the Woods is a work of passion and power with the ring of political truth. It is not only the best of the few dramas to reach Broadway this season, it is also the funniest comedy...
...Yale production stressed the dichotomy between Old World awareness of the burdens of the past and New World faith in the perfectibility of man. This is downplayed by the Broadway cast. So is the Soviet's seductive charm in comparison with his American colleague's priggishness. Sam Waterston makes the U.S. delegate appealing even when he is obsessive. This gifted but erratic actor hits a career high with a scene in which he reveals the personal strain of feeling responsible for the fate of mankind. As the Soviet, Robert Prosky has most of the more poetic speeches, but he looks...
...machinery still works. Sixty years after The Front Page hit Broadway, the Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur farce retains its manic energy and toxic bite. Gags still pinwheel out of the plot -- the one about a managing editor trying to scoop the world on a big story while keeping his ace reporter from deserting him to get married. And, as three previous movie incarnations have proved, The Front Page turns briskly whether the reporter is a man (Pat O'Brien in 1931, Jack Lemmon in 1974) or the boss's ex-wife (Rosalind Russell | in the 1940 His Girl Friday...