Word: plot
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...meets girl served for a half-century as sufficient plot for virtually every Broadway musical. Then came a couple of decades of boy meets exotic locale, boy meets social dilemma, boy meets religious destiny, and boy meets his literary creator -- not to mention similarly unromantic encounters among personified animals and steam engines. Even musicals that focused on love tended to be wistful and full of woe, as if passion must always be a snare and delusion or a doom-struck mistake...
...black cast. In effect, he has carried the same idea over into Oh, Kay!, which shares with 42nd Street a show-business setting, a romance across class lines, a vintage score, a romanticized Art Deco vision of Manhattan and an abundance of tap dancing -- plus, alas, an irredeemably corny plot and some less than inspired clowning...
...lost track of since a chance encounter years earlier. They meet as he is on the verge of marrying the prim, domineering daughter of a minister. Most of the action arises from the show girl's I Love Lucy-esque contrivances to get her man. The side plot, about Prohibition and a nightclub's hidden supply of booze, is even sillier. Again, contemporary audiences may be a little queasy about the condescension to dialect and folkways and the equation of black status with pseudowhite behavior. But there is a nonpareil score by George and Ira Gershwin (Someone to Watch Over...
Such is Chicago's plot. But this play is more accurately a series of vacuous show tunes set back-to-back, with only the sparsest of dialogue separating musical numbers. And while a few of the tunes are catchy ("Razzle-Dazzle" and "Cell Block Tango" are both amusing), most of the dialogue seems flat and humorless. One exchange between Roxie and her lawyer is particularly foolish. When Roxie tells Billy, "You treat me like some dumb common criminal," he replies, "You are some dumb common criminal." Couldn't book writers Ebb and Bob Fosse have done better than this...
...plot revolves around two young British academics who seem ill suited to adventure. Roland Mitchell does plodding research on the Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash; Maud Bailey, a dedicated feminist, is interested in another 19th century poet, Christabel LaMotte. (Neither Ash nor LaMotte existed, but Byatt creates excerpts from their imaginary poems and journals that bring them vibrantly alive.) Roland stumbles across a tantalizing fragment of evidence that the respectably married Ash and the spinster LaMotte may have had an illicit affair; such an event, if proved, would set the scholarly world on its ear. Before long, he and Maud...