Word: comically
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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PROMISES, PROMISES follows all the hallowed tactics for promoting mediocrity into success. Jerry Orbach is splendid as the tall, gangling antihero, and Marian Mercer turns in the acting gem of the evening as an amorous alcoholic pickup. But the comic tone of Neil Simon's book is bland rather than pithy, and the songs of the Burt Bacharach score are for the most part interchangeably tuneless...
...more of a bore than a bombshell after the antics of the five clowns. The entire cast has been with the play since the beginning-including a four-month run in Los Angeles' embattled Watts district. Their three years together have paid off in the fine, comic ensemble playing that all but counteracts the soporific effect of big Buck White and his preachment...
...cliches about Whitey's hypocrisies-ecclesiastical and lay. But the players of the Negro Ensemble, under the direction of Michael A. Schultz, endow this "minstrel-morality play" with a lively inventiveness and bounce it was never born with. Arthur French and David Downing are notable as a comic couple of end men in whiteface out to stage a "traditional American lynching" on a long-suffering black man (Julius Harris). There is some show-stopping (if irrelevant) footwork by a trio of pretty chicklets billed as Extraordinary Spooks. And Frances Foster has a delicious bit as a highfalutin Whitey lover...
...colloquialisms iar the ear. Lines like "You mean you intend to kill your mother?" produce wildly inappropriate laughter from an audience saturated with Freud. The prevailing style of the evening is that of neo-Shakespearean swashbuckling, and the barely adequate cast seems to relish all opportunities for bombast and comic clowning. The chorus resembles the witches from Macbeth multiplied. The murders might as well have been performed by Richard III. Elizabethan Greeks are a novelty all right, but they reduce the play to historical pageantry, horseplay and melodrama when it ought to be blindingly focused on man's ineluctable...
Just as the stream of self-conscious ness winds down to a thin treacle, the film-and the car-take flight. Caractacus spins a tale of adventure, with Chitty Chitty Bang Bang as the hero. The car soars and sails, evil Baron Bomburst (Gert Frobe) covets it and unleashes comic villains to kidnap its owner. Instead, they get Grandpa. Off he goes to Vulgaria, a horrid land where children are forbidden. Underneath the baron's castle, the banished boys and girls have hidden for years, waiting for salvation...