Word: mabell
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...LATEST movie. A Woman Under the Influence, director John Cassavetes shows schizophrenic pressures at work on a blue-collar wife in her tacky Los Angeles neighborhood. Cassavetes doesn't moralize about the ultimate "causes" for why Mabel Longhetti (Gena Rowlands) is, in her own words, "going whacke." But we use it encouraged by the insensitivity and aggressive self-assertion of her husband Nick (Peter Falk), by the claustrophobia created by relatives and by the family's tiny apartment, and Mabel's failure to find meaning in her life beyond her children...
...bear to listen to myself," said Mabel Mercer on her 75th birthday. But every smart pop singer in the past 50 years has listened and learned from Mercer how to shape and pace a lyric. Her unique style of talking a song was developed to compensate for her failing soprano voice. Now, she says, "it's just a noise." Enough, however, to hold some 500 guests spellbound at her birthday party in Manhattan. Mabel's star pupil could not make the party, but he did not forget the singer who "taught me everything I know." Frank Sinatra sent...
...musical's promise was that it could conjure up the madcap mayhem of the Keystone Kops, the antic nostalgic appeal of Mack Sennett's Bathing Beauties, and Mabel Normand, his mistress and the star of his two-reelers. Despite formidable talents working with will and wile, the promise is not kept...
...static narrative line relies on flashbacks, a fictional device poorly suited to theater. Mack (Robert Preston), rendered obsolete by talkies, reminisces about his slapdash improvisatory triumphs and his turbulent on-again, off-again romance with Mabel (Bernadette Peters). After one prolonged absence, Mabel returns to be greeted with a rousing song sequence called When Mabel Comes into the Room. Jerry Herman and Gower Champion have all but plagiarized their own big Hello Dolly number...
Robert Preston is an explosive Mack and Bernadette Peters a spunky Mabel, but they do not seem to take any real pleasure in each other, which goes for everyone else IN the show as well. Somehow, it's all a case of "Give my regrets to Broadway." "T.E.K...