Word: mad
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...MAD ABOUT MINTZ--as you've probably heard by now-is about the efforts of a hard-sell promotional team to peddle the words of a third-rate writer. It would be easy--and it wouldn't be a million miles away from the truth--to say that Mad About Mintz is self-descriptive, that it has been hyped to the point where its (very real) virtues are disappointing. It's still worth seeing, but of expecting two and a half hours of pleasant whimsy, not non-stop genius...
LaZabnik's earlier work, The Teeth of Mons Herbert, was much weirder than this. The jokes were more obscure, but you got the sense he had a truly original sense of humor. Maybe Mad About Mintz is something of a commercialization of his talents, an attempt to bring the LaZebnik wit to a wider audience than the Lowell JCR. His parodies of Hamlet and Paradise Lost count on only as much knowledge of these works as the casual reader of Bartlett's could be expected to have. The move to Agassiz has made LaZebnik's theater less intimate, more like...
This year, LaZebnik wrote a new show, Mad About Mintz, a musical comedy about the efforts of an advertising agency to convert a hack poet into the best-selling bard of the country. Armed with a volunteer orchestra and a full production team. LaZebnik tackled Radcliffe Grant-In-Aid for funds to produce the show in Agassiz. The society had a reputation for supporting original musicals, having produced Suffragette in 1973 (now playing successfully in New York) and others before that. But after more than a months deliberation, the Advisory Board of Grant-In-Aid rejected the show, claiming that...
...make it to Youngstown. Ohio or Kallapol, either--although It's at the Cheri here. If you missed Chuck Stephen's review of it in yesterday's Crimson, or Andy Kopkind's fine piece about it in The Real Paper last week (with a great title--"Mabie's Mad Againe"), you ought to know that It's about a working class woman gone insane in the L.A. suburbs. Cassavetes, who made Husbands Faces, and Shadows, concentrates not on the origins of her madness but on the character of it and how that resonates among the people around her--her husbands...
...Mad About Mintz. On the basis of last year's successful Teeth of Mons Herbert, I can recommend this unreservedly. Phil LaZebnik is a farceur of great range, and Mintz--if it's half as good as the people working on it have told everyone--should be excellent. Don't expect anything to shed any light on serious questions of birth, copulation or death, but this might be the intellectual's alternative to the Pudding Show anyway, since you can hardly avoid seeing at least one farce this week. Tonight, tomorrow and Saturday at the Agassiz...