Word: madwoman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Plays converted into musicals have a high disaster ratio. In some instances, the plays themselves could not have been successfully revived. The Madwoman of Chaillot, from which Dear World has been rather conscientiously adapted, is 25 years old, and it doesn't take a play doctor to see that rigor mortis...
...cleverly garnished and disguised with wit, world-weariness, and wistfully disenchanted romanticism. In Giraudoux, as in Anouilh, there is also an elegance of manner, a fencing master's play of the intellect, and a sense of historical irony of which few Broadway adapters have the remotest inkling. In Madwoman, Giraudoux conceived of a vicious, filthy-rich, top-hatted capitalist cartel that discovers oil under a bistro called the Chez François and is prepared to desecrate all of Paris to pan for the black gold. But the eccentric owner of the cafe, the Countess Aurelia (Angela Lansbury), thwarts...
...memory is too good. What he remembers working in his earlier hits, he feels can also work in Dear World. In Mame, the title character tells her nephew in a song "to open a new window" every day to get the most out of life; in World, the Madwoman tells the romantic lead the same thing (in the song "Each Tomorrow Morning"). The first act of Hello, Dolly ends with the title character leading a march that bristles with her optimism for the future. The first act of this new show closes with its heroine doing the same...
...authors of the book, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. Perhaps failing to see that the songs establish the central character as a nebulous Mame-Dolly figure, they don't make an effort to help their collaborator along. As a result, they do so little that the Madwoman is not fleshed out until the second act. Nor do Lawrence and Lee establish any other character until too late. This is particularly unfortunate in the case of the villains, who are such vague "bad guys" that it's hard to know exactly what evil forces the Madwoman has to deal with...
Angela Lansbury, a doll who refuses to be anything but living, plays the Madwoman as if the character existed in the script and score. She nearly makes it in the first act, and in the second, she takes flight (with some help from a Herman ballad, the only song in the show that works). Frocked in costumes that look like mountains of lace and sporting a crazy carrot-colored wig, Miss Lansbury still cannot help but be beautiful. Despite the unhappy things she has to do in Dear World, you have to love...