Word: cleopatras
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...FIRST ROMAN, based on Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra. With Richard Kiley and Leslie Uggams...
...time Her First Roman makes Broadway, all that is Bernard Shaw's will likely have been exorcised and the show no worse off for it. As is, this musicalized Caesar and Cleopatra is on so un-Shavian a wavelength that the original dialogue (nowhere close to the 80 per cent once required of Shaw's adapters) serves as Champagne to a gasoline engine. Songwriter-book writer Ervin Drake has made no try at the worshipful style of My Fair Lady: instead his idea is to set a romance in ancient Egypt and happily let it go at that. With...
...third irrelevant, the fourth bad, and the fifth incomprehensible. By way of compensation, I'd suggest that if ever a name deserved to light a lyric, "Ftatateeta" does; that Caesar and Rufio might voice their contradictory opinions of vengeance and clemency in song; and that Caesar might urge Cleopatra to be a proper queen likewise. As long as Drake doesn't appear overly concerned about the incongruity of Shavian speeches and standard musical comedy numbers, he has lots of opportunities open...
...following lyric: "Rome: I long to be at her side, a groom with his day-old bride, trading my dusty sandals for a home." And "Many Young Men From Now" has the added virtue of relevance, not only to the show but to the original play and to Cleopatra as Shaw conceived her. Drake would do well, however, to drop such hack-work as (from a song called "The Wrong Man"): "The world will call it wrong, but I must disagree: The wrong man's the right man for me." True, Her First Roman is in many ways a rather...
STRATFORD, CONN.--Yes, Androcles and not Pericles. For the forty-seventh production in the history of the American Shakespeare Festival, the powers-that-be have for the fourth time gone outside the Shakespearean canon. The first departure, in 1963, was Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra; and this year we once again have Shaw. In between, the Festival gave us Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral and Anouilh's Antigone...