Word: hennaed
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...sometime in the 1950s, perhaps the last decade when fidelity counted for more than fulfillment, Jack Henna, an Italian immigrant insurance salesman, makes a routine visit to the Waspy widow of a policyholder. He falls passionately, inexplicably in love. Some days later, Henna leaves his family for a night and moves in, uninvited, to the ram shackle farm of the widow and her resentful son. His every at tempt, from seduction to cooking, fails to move his beloved to commitment. The next morning, resigned to the impossibility of escaping a wife whom he no longer desires and two sons...
...plenty of time to leave the country, but McLean stayed behind in Atlanta, where she was arrested by the FBI as a material witness to the escape. Argues her attorney, Edward T.M. Garland: "She's a forlorn ex-girlfriend, abandoned and left to her own devices." Said willowy, henna-haired McLean a day after her arrest: "I just don't know where he is." On that point, at least, she seemed to be in good company...
...shows is supposed to be that everybody trips over clodhopper-style numbers. There's still too much bumbling, but Greg Minahan as Kitty shows that fast feet can add to the show. He dances up a good watch-me-and-then-you-can-do-it number with Mark Szpak (Henna), and together with Buddy (Bruce Cranston) they dance a nice soft shoe in a satirical love song, called "Easy to Please." Even the bumbling has been made into more interesting dance with Judith Haskell, who doubled as choreographer this year. Robert Peabody as Flo Gently, who incidentally comes off with...
...Tots is something less than two-dimensional, only the one-liners distinguish one member of the cast from another. Flo has the best, and the thief in a flat sub-plot, Jerry Mander (Tim Feran) has a lot of the really bad puns and low humor (in response to Henna's rejecting him because he's stupid, he says "I'll be partially sage, Rosemary...in time...
What seems to bring Tots in Tinseltown slightly above the horizon of mediocrity isn't really a coherent whole: the art-deco sets by Frank Colavecchia, especially the backdrop for Preston Folded's Hollywood home; a few of the costumes by Barry Odom--one eye-catcher was Henna Hoofer's feathery outfit for the imaginary movie number, "Pigeons of My Heart"; and Ronald Melrose's music, which goes so far as to include an anomaly of sorts in Tots, a serious lost-love song called "Minus Me." All this floats around in a melange of parody and self-parody that...