Word: herman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Among those he has picked, Jerry Herman, the composer-lyricist has the best credentials for success (Hello, Dolly and Mame). Still, this time he is out of his element. Chaillot, even as embodied in this musical, is not the completely frivolous comedy Herman has worked with in the past. Although essentially telling us the story of a comic woman who refuses to accept the fact that the modern world is a different place than it was in 1903, Giraudoux has more than frivolity in mind. Below the surface of his comedy is the serious warning that the snowballing forces...
...HERMAN has another difficulty; his memory is too good. What he remembers working in his earlier hits, he feels can also work in Dear World. In Mame, the title character tells her nephew in a song "to open a new window" every day to get the most out of life; in World, the Madwoman tells the romantic lead the same thing (in the song "Each Tomorrow Morning"). The first act of Hello, Dolly ends with the title character leading a march that bristles with her optimism for the future. The first act of this new show closes with its heroine...
...With Herman's inability to cope with the property in his music, the duty falls to the authors of the book, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. Perhaps failing to see that the songs establish the central character as a nebulous Mame-Dolly figure, they don't make an effort to help their collaborator along. As a result, they do so little that the Madwoman is not fleshed out until the second act. Nor do Lawrence and Lee establish any other character until too late. This is particularly unfortunate in the case of the villains, who are such vague...
Angela Lansbury, a doll who refuses to be anything but living, plays the Madwoman as if the character existed in the script and score. She nearly makes it in the first act, and in the second, she takes flight (with some help from a Herman ballad, the only song in the show that works). Frocked in costumes that look like mountains of lace and sporting a crazy carrot-colored wig, Miss Lansbury still cannot help but be beautiful. Despite the unhappy things she has to do in Dear World, you have to love...
Most of the performers just hang around, hoping that Lawrence, Lee, or Herman might throw a bone their way. The usually redoubtable Milo O'Shea can't do a thing with the pale Sewerman, for example. And when O'Shea can't breathe life into a script, that's a sure sign the script is dead...