Word: chaillot
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DEAR WORLD. Plays converted into musicals have a high disaster ratio, and this one, from Jean Giraudoux's The Mad woman of Chaillot, is no exception to the rule. Angela Lansbury, looking like a ruefully unkempt Colette, is excellent as the madwoman, but the Jerry Herman score is disappointing and Joe Layton's choreography is mediocre...
Plays converted into musicals have a high disaster ratio. In some instances, the plays themselves could not have been successfully revived. The Madwoman of Chaillot, from which Dear World has been rather conscientiously adapted, is 25 years old, and it doesn't take a play doctor to see that rigor mortis...
...Dear World's new first act, even though substantially different from the original, got just as bad, if not worse, audience reaction. The critics had criticized the musical's shortchanging of the serious aspects of the play from which it had been adapted, Jean Giraudoux's Mad-woman of Chaillot. Apparently the authors took this prevalent criticism so seriously that they decided to drown the first act with eerie, sur-realistic doom. The audience was bored and dumbfounded, particularly considering the fact that the unchanged second act had a light, humorous tone...
Among those he has picked, Jerry Herman, the composer-lyricist has the best credentials for success (Hello, Dolly and Mame). Still, this time he is out of his element. Chaillot, even as embodied in this musical, is not the completely frivolous comedy Herman has worked with in the past. Although essentially telling us the story of a comic woman who refuses to accept the fact that the modern world is a different place than it was in 1903, Giraudoux has more than frivolity in mind. Below the surface of his comedy is the serious warning that the snowballing forces...
...paper, Dear World, the musical prepping in Boston for its New York debut, has a promising premise, one that could even be exciting in the execution: an adaptation of Jean Giraudoux's Madwoman of Chaillot with Angela Lansbury as the title character. On stage, though, it's a failure and not a hell...