Word: horgan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND ON THE ROAD A Rock Spectacle Lyrics by JOHN LENNON and PAUL MCCARTNEY Directed by TOM O'HORGAN...
...this show. The idea was to cash in on the popularity of the Beatles. Their songs are probably as original and innocently evocative of the flower-child world of the '60s as they ever were, but here they are trampled under the dreck of Tom O'Horgan's grimagination. Just to offer one example, his notion of enhancing a song like When I'm Sixty-Four is to have two doddering floor-to-ceiling puppets paw lewdly at each other. As for plot, he tells a fragmentary tale of a Candide-like rock singer, Billy Shears...
...rest, O'Horgan simply grubs around in his museum of Halloweens Past and bemuses the audience with such papier-mäché wonders as a huge walking dental plate. The faggy odor of the show may be sniffed at its gamiest in a Beef Trust chorus-girl number featuring women padded out with lardy stomachs and grossly enlarged behinds...
...part. His big scene, the final assertion of his humanity, is blighted by the same gimmickry that plagues Mostel's transformation scene. Having acknowledged that he can never become a rhinoceros, Wilder climbs to the top of a tall building and looks out over the town of animals. O'Horgan's camera frames him against a blue sky, he lights a cigarette, music surges up in the background. What is meant to be a moving assertion of man's dignity ends up looking like a Marlboro...
...Horgan, who has directed Absurd plays before, says that "The 'absurd' style has always rested uneasily with the naturalism of film." His production has not made a very successful accomodation of the two. The banal absurdity of his comedy version of Rhinoceros is amusing, but forceless. Relying on traditional comic routines and gimmickry, O'Horgan's film hardly approaches the stark abstraction of reality and denial of convention demanded by real Theater of the Absurd. He has made an absurd film of a good play, not a good film of an Absurd play. The American Film Theatre should have stayed...