Word: coco
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Coco is more of a bore than a bomb. Opening night was like a disastrous party. Everyone who was anyone was there, primed for some kind of theatrical night of nights. Dramatically, the champagne was flat, the hors d'oeuvres tasted of sawdust, and the small talk on-and offstage sagged into yawns...
...great Parisian designer who is now a fairly fabulous 86 years old. What went wrong? The initial concept was wrong. The focal point of the fashion business is a dress. In and of itself, a dress is not dramatic. A parade of animated mannequins such as one gets in Coco does not make dresses dramatic either. A group of women milling about onstage always looks rather like a herd, and that is scarcely dramatic...
What about Coco's love life? Her lovers are flashed on a screen and mumble a few words of endearment. No one knows what they feel about Coco or what Coco feels about them. These are virtually spectral relationships. One is left with Coco herself, a spunky, ardent, nononsense, one-woman feminist liberation front, who somehow seems to be more passionately and intimately involved with her models than with any man in her life...
Triumph of the Will. Is Coco even Coco, or is she really another truly rugged individualist known as Katharine Hepburn? As an actress, Hepburn has spent a lifetime filtering characters through the steely sieve of herself. She does not submit to roles; she rules them, and everyone has grown terribly fond of her special brand of tyranny through personality. That personality is grounded in the New England mind, which has the same flinty character as the New England soil. Her performance is a triumph of the will over intrinsic limitations. If she cannot dance, she kicks; if she cannot sing...
...production seems to squelch almost everyone connected with it. Only René Auberjonois as a faggy designer manages to filch an occasional moment of amusing exuberance. A number he does called Fiasco is the closest thing Coco has to a show-jogger-and is all too apt as a one-word critique...