Word: showing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...VISIT to a bad show doesn't have to be a total loss. For one thing, you can learn the difference between a flop and a failure. A flop, in the words Walter Kerr used a few years back to describe a fiasco called Kelly, is "a bad idea gone wrong." Such a show, through its total ineptitude, can often be very funny. (A knowledgeable friend of mine who saw Kelly's one and only Broadway performance counts it among the most hilarious evenings he's ever spent in a theatre.) A failure, on the other hand, is a good...
...Dear World's case, high among the guilty is producer Alexander Cohen, who has hired all the people who make the fatal errors. While Cohen has gone with talented men who hold some of the best track-records in the business, he has hired them for the wrong show...
...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 doing the same bit in the same tempo. But the songs don't really fit the character this time around, and the new tunes aren't memorable enough to justify keeping them in the show...
ONLY the cast, who has the inhuman burden of providing everything Dear World's creators have omitted, cannot be blamed for the show's failure. Neither can Peter Glenville, the director, who has contributed some nice group blocking--an achievement that doesn't mean much when the stage is full of paper dolls...
...doll who refuses to be anything but living, plays the Madwoman as if the character existed in the script and score. She nearly makes it in the first act, and in the second, she takes flight (with some help from a Herman ballad, the only song in the show that works). Frocked in costumes that look like mountains of lace and sporting a crazy carrot-colored wig, Miss Lansbury still cannot help but be beautiful. Despite the unhappy things she has to do in Dear World, you have to love...