Word: broca
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Winding up its pre-Broadway tour is King of Hearts, which we found fairly entertaining. Adapted from De Broca's classic film, this musical version lacks Alan Bates and Genevieve Bujold, but contains a few good production numbers...
Director Ron Field, scriptwriter Joe Stein and song team Peter Link and Jacob Brackman '65 were faced with a difficult problem in adapting Philippe de Broca's wonderful film about World War One in a town suddenly overrun by loonies. It's a tough act to follow, and on the whole the film still comes out ahead. But the musical version remains enjoyable; certainly it is diverting...
There remains a sense of futility in searching for thematic depth in usually vapid musicals, but in this case the apparent wishy-washiness of the implicit message, if there is any, becomes rather annoying--but not until well after you leave the theater. De Broca's film contained both a muted anti-war message and an eloquent statement contrasting the so-called crazies in the asylum with the real crazies in uniform, who kill each other in a quest for peace. Who's really crazy, and all that. Neither of these implicit themes comes through clearly in the musical version...
...Brackman is back in Boston--for the first time since 1969, when Life sent him here to cover the Harvard strike of that spring--and he is, as he desires, back into show business. He wrote the lyrics for King of Hearts, the musical version of Phillipe de Broca's Cambridge cult film which opens this week in Boston, moving to New York in the middle of October. When we met for an interview at Bartley's Burger Cottage last week, he was relaxed--although he did chain-smoke--open, friendly, and above all, interesting. Not to mention funny...
Dear Inspector--A delightful, if not too deep, French film about a female detective, a big-ass murder case, and an incipient love affair. Philippe de Broca's first film in a long while is rather pleasing, even if the mystery suffers some for the sake of the romantic comedy. Philippe Noiret and Annie Girardot make a good pair. A little thin...