Word: chadman
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Hello Again abuses the talent of its cast with an inexcuseably trite fairy tale of a plot. Lucy Chadman (Shelley Long) is a frumpy, suburban housewife who feels somewhat displaced in the glitzy Manhattan cocktail set that she mingles with for the sake of her ambitious husband (Corbin Bernsen). "Isn't this party just suhblime!" coos Lucy's best friend and society beauty, Kim (Sela Ward). But nervous Lucy commits one social faux pas after another, culminating in a grand exit down the balustrade where she exposes more than just her sheepish grin...
Props were dropped, cues were missed, preview audiences became restive. The original director, Frank Dunlop, was summarily replaced by Co-Producer Ivan Reitman, and the footwork of Choreographer Christopher Chadman was supplemented by Billy Wilson's (Bubbling Brown Sugar). A parade of advisers came backstage to offer cardiopulmonary resuscitation: among them Directors Michael Bennett and Jerome Robbins. They all gave some general advice: Forget about the numbers; "Get on with the magic...
Musical comedies ignore that fact at their peril. John O'Hara's book has the spine of a skyscraper, with big-city sleaziness reflected in every panel of the glass-curtain wall. This is a Brechtian book in which a small-time heel, Joey (Christopher Chadman), with his naive boasts and shameless buttering-up, is letched onto by a rich, man-eating tigress named Vera (Joan Copeland), who loves him enough to stake him to a night club, but who coolly leaves him before he can leave...
Copeland seems to sing with her loins and if Western Union ever puts out a Lustogram, it should hire her to deliver it. Chadman is pallid as Joey, rather like a gypsy dropped from the audition of A Chorus Line. His dancing, however, is always fluent, and the actual chorus line, under Margo Sappington's supple control, both creates and burlesques a raft of dance routines. Mingling sordid facts with lovely tunes, Pal Joey is a modern Beggar 's Opera richly adorned in the apparel of a prince's ransom...
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