Word: hechts
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...front of Manhattan's Vanderbilt Theater one matinee day last week, a moppet sadly said to mother: "Gee, I wish I could see Mrs. Hecht's little girl in this." But Mrs. Hecht's little girl had just been forced out of the cast of the play Midsummer by Actors' Equity, and Broadway rang with the loudest theatrical Donnybrook in many a season. Actress Jenny Hecht seemed small (9 years, 45 Ibs.) to create such a furor. But then, as her father, Playwright (Front Page) Ben Hecht, had himself once remarked: (There never was an uninhibited...
...play. Then the grownup actors-who can be just as sensitive in these matters as children-took offense when Jenny started stealing scenes from them, by mugging or winking at the audience. Backstage, Jenny thumbed her nose at Actress Vicki Cummings' maid, and, it was charged, even mother Hecht insulted Hollywood Actor Mark Stevens (playing Jenny's father) by yelling and burping into his face...
Hazel Flagg (book by Ben Hecht; music & lyrics by Jule Styne and Bob Hillard) is generally cheerful, insistently lavish and notably loud. Based on Nothing Sacred, a satiric Ben Hecht movie of the '30s the story tells of a vast fraud: a young Vermont girl pretends to be dying of radium poisoning and yearns for lights and laughter at the end. Hazel Flagg stands forth a creature of breathtaking gallantry, reduces the city to wild and wet-eyed idolatry, inspires everything from prayers to parades...
...satire, Hecht's libretto is commonplace and even oafish; certainly Hazel Flagg uses a maximum of heavy artillery to inflict a minimum of wounds. Once again musicomedy, in the act of satirizing something else, has ended by satirizing itself-by pointing up its own excesses of color, blare, manpower and above all, length. Jule Styne's pounding music suggests a New York that never sleeps, and unconsciously gives the reason why Robert Alton's dances get to be relentlessly, unremittingly lively. If only there were less of everything in Hazel Flagg, it might...
...most amazing member of the cast is Ben Hecht's little girl, Jenny, who has the poise and sense of comedy timing that supposedly come only with grey hairs. The sight of nine-year-old Miss Hecht up-staging her elders and stealing scenes from them is almost as funny as her lines...