Word: coco
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Time was, not so long ago, when to be fat, balding, unmarried and in your late 30s was to be scorned by strangers, pitied by the family and ridiculed by friends of friends. Not any more. Not, that is, if you are James Coco, a fat, balding, bachelor of 39 who opened to rave notices last week as Barney Cashman in Last of the Red Hot Lovers, Neil Simon's latest smash...
Flop After Flop. "I used to stand around the Strand Theater," Coco told TIME Reporter Mary Cronin, "waiting for the stars to give me their autographs. Mom and Pop could never understand it." Pop was Feliche Coco, a shoemaker; James shined shoes and generally had "a really dull childhood." At 17 he joined a children's theater and toured for three years playing Old King Cole and Hans Brinker for $40 a week. From there it was years and years of summer-stock stints, auditioning, studying and touring. Finally, he started on TV commercials. Most of his fans know...
...Coco spent many lean years in New York "living in $8-a-week rooms on West 57th Street and appearing in one flop after another." In between were "all the cliche jobs actors do for money: I sold tops at Gimbels, was a waiter at a milk bar under Grand Central Station." Meanwhile, he was acting (six Broadway shows, 25 off-Broadway), collecting two Obies for off-Broadway performances (The Moon in the Yellow River and Fragments), and being entirely forgotten by audiences and casting directors when his shows were over...
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...