Word: musicalizations
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Gilbert and Sullivan always sells better than the rest of Harvard theater. Who goes to see these shows? Administrators and their kids. Faculty and their kids. Music teachers, who mouth all the words, and their adopted kids. And just plain unaffiliated parents and their's. Yes, these tricks are for kids, and this year they're good tricks, so if you don't have a station wagon put them all on bicycles and head over. You may even enjoy yourself...
...last of the menagerie's precious trio is the glass animal herself, the crippled--"not crippled, you have a defect," says Amanda--Laura. Laura evokes only sympathy, smothered in abuse and pain, hopelessly shy, wandering alone in her own world of phonograph music, long winter walks and dear glass creatures. Williams is at pain to show that she most resembles her favorite glass friend, a tiny unicorn--"aren't they extinct in the modern world?" who is "crippled" by his horn but loses it in an accident, suddenly, like all the other glass horses, less freakish...
...fire escape/balcony, even a stroll nearer the audience would have been a nice touch. The lighting was properly dim, but the frequent blackouts for scene changes were too stark, too sudden, t.v.-like, often disturbing the sense of a flow of dream images. Finally, Williams' script calls for fiddle music at the beginning and end of the play, framing it in a Southern, story-telling manner but also providing an old-fashioned whine, a tug into the heart of this play and a sorrowful serenade at the finish. There is sometimes a brusqueness to this production that contrasts with...
...funeral directors are expected to be lank, lugubrious, waxen creatures like their customers, Mickey Milam, a smiling cherub of a man, provides the perfect antistereotype. In the Chapel of the Chimes, flanked by potted palms and backed by taped music, Mickey delivers his stand-up speech on the history, evolution, and utter necessity of the funeral home professional. Who else knows just how to suture the lips shut? Who else knows just where to make the incision so "you're gonna get your best drainage...
...persona, not the person, that's germane to art, and "kiss-and-tell" histories like Up and Down are supremely irrelevant. As Jagger once told Chet Flippo, "It's the attitude." The endless "Midnight Rambler," rambling forever on Get Yer YaYas Out; those spectral opening chords in "Gimme Shelter," music of nothingness played on the frets of your intestines; the way a song like "Sweet Virginia" talks about the shit on your shoes, there is shit on your shoes, shit on everybody's shoes, but you can scrape it off with your records. It's the redemptive quality of rock...