Word: mame
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...well as the Theatricals' impressive $70,000 budget) to act out their own love affair with musical comedy. Siegel has come up with a nicely eclectic score--from a very G&S number like "Establishment" to a first act curtain entitled "Glory" that is straight out of Dolly or Mame. Harman's lyrics are generally up to the same par, although one or two ("Remember the Mania," "Sit Down and Take a Stand") seemed to me not far enough removed from the patriotic foot-stomping of a John Wayne television special for their own good. The show is not without...
...earthbound, the score by Richard and Robert Sherman (who also wrote music and lyrics for Mary Poppins) is forgettable, the special effects lackadaisical. There are so many ill-concealed wires in one sequence that the actors look like marionettes. Miss Lansbury has not yet fully recovered from playing Mame, and Director Robert Stevenson has accomplished what has long been rumored to be impossible. He has found three British children totally devoid of talent. If only W.C. Fields were here to throttle them...
Granite Mask. Still, if Madame was a monster, she could be an endearing one, a cross between Auntie Mame and J.P. Morgan. She was, as O'Higgins points out, both earthy and plain-spoken to friends in high places and low. Her main problem seems to have been in dealing with those close to her, and except on rare, touching occasions, she could or would not allow true emotion to penetrate her granite mask...
...Auntie Mame would feel like a stranger in her creator's Paradise, Patrick Dennis' latest novel. The charisma, cheerful talent and canny sense of the absurd that brought fame to Mame are conspicuously absent this time. Too bad, because Dennis has invented a situation with comic possibilities. At the start of the tourist season an earthquake transforms an Acapulco resort into an island rocked by storms. Both amenities and necessities swiftly disappear. As Dennis' caricatures try to cope with life in the raw, long-distance television cameras grind away from the shore, picking up every grisly move...
...black and/or white costumes, but also dominates several of the most clever scenes in the film. Whether insulting her lesbian attendant, or shrieking for fine strawberries, or flamboyantly embracing the quest for money, Lansbury brings to her part the exaggerated theatricality which came off so well in Prince's Mame. After announcing her engagement to Conrad, she takes her fat daughter aside and says: "I was thinking of pink for the bridesmaids, but really, my dear, you do discourage...