Word: lil
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...John Bottoms as the sinister Governor especially stand out. Geidt's impish sweet-talking and the Governor's calm imperturbability enliven a slightly sluggish first act. Kenneth Ryan plays Bill Cracker as a sulky, rughtless lump; he provides a good foil to the more aggressive and articulate Hallelujah Lil. The gang's rather indifferent voices, however, fail to do justice to Weill's music...
...Marilyn Casey's performance as Hallelujah Lil, however, that rescues Happy End from triteness. Casey provides one of the few bits of effective social commentary with her jabs at the hypocrisy of the Army hierarchy. Her sure, colorful voice invests the Weill/Brecht songs with an emotional depth that shames the plot's cliches. Casey uses the songs to suggest contradictions in Lil's character that the script brushes over. In the biting "Sailor's Tango"--sung to convert Bill-the evangelist smolders with sexual invitation. She turns the haunting denunciation of love into its tender yet rueful opposite--a declaration...
While Happy End is not--and should not necessarily be--a Threepenny Opera, Brecht and Weill's songs suggest that Happy End could have another face. The gang's pettiness and cowardice, the naivete and condescension of the Salvation Army sermons, Bill's amorality, Lil's sexuality--these elements of Feingold's adaptation should have been emphasized in the production. The Brecht and Weill characters, as revealed in their songs, are not the cute bumblers of Jones' production. The two paint a much crueler, darker world, a world in which the little guys squander their energies fighting each other instead...
Wendy Sonnabend, in the fourth slot, absorbed the other defeat, falling in four games to Lil Doubleday...
...friend on Paris-Match. He said he hoped they wouldn't credit him. The A.P. photographer was snapping away, grumbling. "I'd rather be out coverin' civil rights marches, shit. Or a convention--them Kennedy people taught me how to buy a convention. Nineteen-sixty, there I was, lil' country boy from Dothan, Alabama, coverin' Johnson, shit, they'd paid off everybody. Paid off the goddam elevator boys. If you was with Johnson, you couldn't get an elevator for 25 minutes." Click click click. "Shit, this is weird, ain't it boy?" Indeedy sir, it's right weird...