Word: mamas
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Remember Mama (adapted by John van Druten from Kathryn Forbes's Mama's Bank Account; produced by Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein II) is the first producing enterprise of the great music-&-words team of Oklahoma!, the second smash hit within a year for the author of The Voice of the Turtle, and Broadway's pleasantest family album since Life with Father. Not really a play-it has no plot, no structure, no weightier crisis than an operation on a child or the chloroforming of a cat-Mama gets across as theater partly because it never struggles...
...chronicle of a Norwegian-American family in turn-of-the-century San Francisco, Mama is unfolded retrospectively (from a corner of the stage) by daughter Katrin, now a successful writer. The kitchen-for-parlor home life that Katrin looks back on is dominated by firm, frugal, warmhearted Mama (extremely well played by Mady Christians) who, to give her children a feeling of security, pretends that the family has a flourishing bank account. Domestic fireworks are provided by hard-drinking, softhearted Uncle Chris (Oscar Homolka); domestic dissonances by Mama's prying married sisters. The adolescent Katrin composes excruciating short stories...
...Mama's bank account" that gave Kathryn Forbes the title for her novel. Van Druten adapted her idea for Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, and the result is a very appealing family portrait that remotely reminds one of "Life With Father,' but makes the Clarence Day hit look like a Radcliffe Idler production...
...Druten has written and staged with the tasteful touch that made "Voice of the Turtle" a Broadway sensation. His characterizations in "I Remember Mama" have a human quality that few in the American theatre have achieved: the irresistible simplicity of good, kind, honest people...
Mady Christians as Mama is quiet and brave and wise and she does a standout job. But right along with Mama is Oscar Homolka as Uncle Chris, "a black Norwegian" who stamps around bossing the family, drinking liberally, and living in sin with "that woman" who is his housekeeper. Little Dagmar has a pet eat. Uncle Elizabeth, and Nels, her brother, identifies it as a man eat, and backs up his statement by saying, "I looked...