Word: mame
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Among those he has picked, Jerry Herman, the composer-lyricist has the best credentials for success (Hello, Dolly and Mame). Still, this time he is out of his element. Chaillot, even as embodied in this musical, is not the completely frivolous comedy Herman has worked with in the past. Although essentially telling us the story of a comic woman who refuses to accept the fact that the modern world is a different place than it was in 1903, Giraudoux has more than frivolity in mind. Below the surface of his comedy is the serious warning that the snowballing forces...
HERMAN has another difficulty; his 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...
With Herman's inability to cope with the property in his music, the duty falls to the 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...
...Ruth Buzzi, 28, from Wequetequock, Conn., plays Gladys, the man-hungry frump in the hairnet and ratty sweater-a character she developed when playing the spinster secretary in a summer-stock production of Auntie Mame. A graduate of 20 cabaret revues, she excels at song-and-dance numbers but is guaranteed to break it up when, as Gladys, she confides: "I never go out with soccer players. I hear they're not allowed to use their
...preserve their manners and their memory. If Miss Alexandria seems not entirely real except to his eye, what matter? Affection, especially in much of modern literature, is a rare commodity. Like the loyalty of a husband to an unattractive wife, Richter's affection for this Main Street Auntie Mame ends up being somewhat touching...