Word: duet
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...while the manager rushes about waving correction slips and time cards. Then we're in the service area, cranking out the final tasks. Both choosing the same moment to drag out an ice cream tub, we collide. Eyes bugging, faces centimeters apart, we break into a primal scream duet. Nancy joins us, and we all scream again, faces flushed, drowning out the music, and then finally collapsing into exhausted laughter. Closing time...
Like Frank Doel, Stephanie Anderson in Duet for One has the plucky, soldiering-on English temperament. Beneath it, however, is a violin virtuoso's rage at being felled by multiple sclerosis. The role, played on Broadway by Bancroft, now extracts one of Julie Andrews' strongest performances. Fighting the disease and its accompanying despair, stoking her own infidelity and her husband's, displaying the terminal patient's luxury of being both noble and bitter, Andrews transforms Tom Kempinski's case history into a metaphor for middle age. Stephanie could be any careerist facing a mid-life crisis of confidence...
...Pupil Rupert Everett rants and sniffles; Macha Meril, as the Italian maid, provides her own subtitles in moments of distress ("Aiuto! Help!"). And finally the movie exonerates all the rats in Stephanie's life. She sees them happy and united and goes off to die by her favorite tree. Duet for One died long before...
Cast president Nick Weir as country singer Willie Everstop and Jon Blackstone as soprano Kiri On-Luggage (whose costume is a show-stopper) are a delightful pair of misfit lovers whose voices carry them through the show's strongest duet...
This is especially true of songs which are especially rapid, such as the Major General's song (admirably dispatched nevertheless by Gardner), or particularly soft, such as the duet between Mabel and Frederick (Lee Eichen). But on the whole such moments are rare and really nothing more than slight flaws on an otherwise extremely strong production...