Word: finches
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...world we live in, where multimillion-dollar productions rarely find funding without a star's name on the marquee, it is hard to begrudge Broderick the part. To the role of J. Pierrepont Finch, the World Wide Wicket Co.'s window washer turned mailroom clerk turned rising executive, he brings the same quizzical intensity of gaze and naturalness of gesture that carried him to stardom in everything from Neil Simon comedies like Brighton Beach Memoirs to the Civil War epic film Glory. As an actor, Broderick has a gift that is almost impossible to fabricate: an unforced freshness...
...this one? By playing it straight. This is no update. We're still back in 1961, and the World Wide Wicket Co. continues to be a domain of rigid sexual roles, where men are the executives and women the secretaries. The plot remains a complementary blend of monomanias: Finch has eyes only for the top of the corporate ladder, and Rosemary, his secretary (winningly played by Megan Mullally), has eyes only for matrimony...
...Wodehouse country--especially those American fairy tales of his where the hero can hardly take a tumble without landing in a pot of gold, and the distance separating the egghead from the bonehead is minimal. Equipped with a book of maxims, or a new cravat, the Wodehouse hero--like Finch--is ready for anything...
Ironically, in an age proud of its toughness, this new production lacks even some of the mild bite of the original. Robert Morse, who created the role of Finch, was an equivocal presence. With his gap-toothed, tilted grin and his air of scrounging narcissism, Morse was simultaneously magnetic and faintly unsettling. You had to sympathize with his fellow executives, just a little, when they sang, "Got to stop that man . or he'll stop me." Broderick, on the other hand, is so beguiling that you are delighted when he becomes chairman of the board and heartened to hear...
Matthew Broderick may have landed the lead in Broadway's buoyant revival of the 1961 musical on name recognition alone, but it's hard to begrudge him the part. As J. Pierrepont Finch, the World Wide Wicket Co.'s window washer turned mailroom clerk turned rising executive, Broderick "brings the same quizzical intensity of gaze and naturalness of gesture that carried him to stardom in everything from Neil Simon comedies to the Civil War epic film Glory," says TIME contributor Brad Leithauser. As satire goes, Leithauser adds, director Des McAnuff's amiable version "lacks even some of the mild bite...