Word: pianos
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Joan Kennedy is a woman whose warmth and charm would have shone in almost any field of life. She has taught in public school and performed a Mozart piano concerto and read Peter and the Wolf with the Boston Symphony. Says one Bostonian who knows her well: "There isn't anyone wanner or dearer, when she's feeling good." But public life has not been kind to Joan Kennedy. Its wounds can be seen in the puffy eyes, the exaggerated makeup, the tales of alcoholism. Today she is a sadly vulnerable soul and an unknown factor...
...stage atmosphere compensates and redeems Music director David L. Reiffel, however, has turned an already obvious plot into a play that has the subtlety of a bulldozer. You know when somebody says something prophetic (thunder claps in the background) and you know when the witches are coming (bizarre piano medleys screech behind the gauze curtains). The best musicians, meanwhile--banjo and fiddle players Thornton Lewis and Matthew Brown--make one stage appearance and, sad to say, disappear...
...would be pressed to find three stage personalities as obnoxious as Brian McCue, Grace Shohet, and Fred Barton. With his pinched face and short catalogue of exaggerated expressions, McCue mugs like an eight-year old who wants a new tricycle; Shohet evokes Ethel Merman; Barton, the ham-handed piano player, thinks it's enough to bellow in a smug voice and grin idiotically like George Burns, jutting his prognathous jaw like a salient into the Comic Void...
...week Brown appointed an avowed homosexual to the Los Angeles County Superior Court, exposing the Governor, a potential Democratic presidential candidate, to further criticism. And for all his impressive legal credentials, even Halvonik was not everyone's idea of an appellate judge. A jazz player who moved his piano into his Sacramento office in 1975, when he worked for the Governor, Halvonik, who sports a Pancho Villa mustache, had once before been caught with a marijuana cigarette, but on that occasion the charge was dropped...
...canny amalgam of entertainment and history. Over 90 minutes the audience watches 14 numbers from typical musicals of different eras: Good News (1927), Anything Goes (1934), Oklahoma! (1943) and Company (1970). In between, Kaye describes the genesis and innovations of each show, augmenting her observations with demonstrations at the piano and interviews with Broadway veterans who helped create the originals...