Word: macdermot
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Flaws v. Foreign. For next season, Papp has scheduled two plays by off-Broadway Negro Playwright Adrienne Kennedy, and has commissioned Negro Actor Ossie Davis and Composer Gait MacDermot to do a contemporary musical on the race question. "I also have," says Papp, "an adaptation of Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading. But what I'm really looking for is American plays. I'd rather do flawed American plays than outstanding foreign plays...
What holds Hair together is the score, which pulses with an insistent, primitive beat. With gleeful impertinence, the music by Gait MacDermot and the lyrics of Gerome Ragni and James Rado manage to release the pent-up yelps of the sons and daughters of the affluent society. A song like Ain't Got No ("Ain't got no class,/Ain't got no mother,/Ain't got no father,/Ain't got no culture") telegraphs the credo of the self-proclaimed have-nots of the '60s. Satire with a playful nip makes a treat...
...punks in The Incident (TIME, Nov. 10), brings to the title role an imaginative boisterousness not unlike his superior work in that film; Ralph Waite is a dashingly demagogic Claudius. Anita Dangler is a fluttery flibbertigibbet of a Gertrude, while April Shawhan is a sexy, miniskirted Ophelia. Gait MacDermot's pounding rock background seems at least as appropriate to this version of the play as the gentle pleasing of a lute might have been in a 17th century production. Papp's new Hamlet will not crowd traditional stagings off the board, but it deserves credit for trying...