Word: corsaro
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...book has apparently undergone some renovation, but purists of the Broadway class of '28 are the only ones who are likely to be troubled by that. If the word escapist were forgotten, Whoopee! would redefine it. The show is transparently mindless and totally exhilarating fun. Director Frank Corsaro has wisely pitched the tone of the entire evening between silent-movie comedy and balmy operantics. It is never camped. Like gentle satire, it is half in love with what it kids, but time−not the cast−does the kidding...
...against those who like her just the way she is ("She really is an angel," says Sebastian Engleberg, her voice teacher for ten years), there are others who feel that Flicka's full potential has yet to be tapped. One of those is veteran Stage Director Frank Corsaro, who worked with her at the Houston première of The Seagull. Corsaro senses a certain turbulence, even aggressiveness inside Flicka. "I would love to see her play a real bitch," he says. The most immediate possibility is the neurotic, highly sexed Fennimore in Delius' Fennimore and Gerda, which...
...actors bought the project on blind faith. Versatile Lead Ken Howard, who played all 13 Presidents, took the job without having seen a line of Lerner's book. British Actress Patricia Routledge, who played all the First Ladies, had heard only one song and Director Frank Corsaro (A Hatful of Rain, The Night of the Iguana) started rehearsals without even a finished second act. "That was," he says now, "a very dangerous situation. I would not have permitted this with any other playwrights...
...been on a new Harvard hymn, but Bernstein agreed to write the 1600 score. After five weeks of rehearsal in New York, the show opened in Philadelphia to devastating reviews and the play doctoring began immediately. Jerome Robbins and Mike Nichols traveled to Philadelphia and quickly fled. Director Corsaro left "by mutual agreement" with the company. Bernstein reportedly wanted to deal himself out too, but was persuaded to stay...
...these minds meet, so brilliant. We'd leave thinking that everything was fabulous." There were many versions of why all efforts to fix 1600 failed: Bernstein's score was more like an opera than a musical comedy; the show was racist; the chorus couldn't act; Corsaro botched the staging; the producers, not having put up the original money, didn't exert enough control; and so on. But almost everyone agreed that the overriding problem was Lerner's original idea. Says Ramin: "No amount of staging, acting, choreography or whatever was going to save...