Word: evening
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...holidays, Broadway has a festive new ornament, an all-black musical version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Scrooge is a Harlem slumlord with a goatee and an Afro, Marley's ghost marches through eternity in sneakers, and the three Christmas ghosts are high-stepping disco dancers. Even Dickens' capacious imagination could probably not have envisioned such sequins and flash. Taken on its own good-natured terms, however, Comin' Uptown is a high-gloss package that should bright en everybody's holiday...
...Even for great American prose writers, the theatrical muse has been a bitch. Henry James' and F. Scott Fitzgerald's plays were disappointments; Saul Bellow's The Last Analysis lasted less than a month. Thus Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer and Collaborator Eve Friedman find themselves in distinguished company with Teibele and Her Demon, a "fable" for Broadway...
...does not know when to leave well enough alone. Too often Fosse insists on fusing entertainment with superficially conceived Big Themes. Certainly musicals have a right to be serious, but Fosse's song-and-dance flights into the metaphysical are less illuminating than pretentious. Who cares about, or even remembers, the deeper meanings of such glittery Fosse projects as Cabaret, Pippin and Chicago...
...artistic associates are scabrous caricatures of past Fosse collaborators. Through a series of gritty backstage scenes and razor-sharp dance numbers, these players dramatize all the tensions, hard work and neuroses of idiosyncratic, inveterate show people. In Jazz's spectacular opening sequence, a Broadway audition, Fosse even creates his own capsule version of A Chorus Line...
...Fosse attempts to put his heart on the table, he does so too literally. All That Jazz contains close-ups of open-heart sur gery, but few insights into Gideon's soul. What Fosse regards as self-analysis often comes out as egomaniacal self-congratulation: there's even a scene where Gideon cries at his own funeral. Still, Fosse is no fool, and at times he is his own best critic. All That Jazz is never more honest than when its hero confesses, "Sometimes I don't know when the bull ends and the truth begins...