Word: showing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...jerk who first started telling the world that apple pie was synonymous with America? William Jennings Bryan? Alexander Graham Bell? Durward Kirby? Well. whoever he was. he would probably insist that Take Me Along, this fall's Agassiz musical, is as American as apple pie. The show has all the credentials: a fourth-of-July setting, young lovers making a marriage pact under a full New England moon, parades, red-white-and-blue razzmatazz, you name it. But despite all that, don't be tricked: Take Me Along is as American as Jack Daniels booze-and all the better...
...booze is in the show at Agassiz thanks to one man. Eugene O'Neill, whose one comedy, Ah Wilderness, is the show's source. While his play is essentially the story of two couples-one old, one young-who slowly but surely find happiness one Independence Day weekend in pre-World War I Centreville, Connecticut, O'Neill could not leave it that simple or that cute. Instead, he gives us a hero who is a good-natured but pathetic drunk and a heroine who is a lonely schoolteacher. All ends happily in the end, but there...
Joseph Stein and Robert Russell, the authors of Take Me Along's book, have not shortchanged their musical of this sorrow. They have written a stunning, if not perfect, musical comedy book. As the script weaves gracefully around Bob Merrill's songs, the show remains wittily upbeat, all the while quietly asserting the downbeat aspects of the characters...
...Grant-in-Aid production does this rather obscure musical proud. George Birnbaum, the director, who missed the boat somewhat with his Damn Yankees last spring, seems to have found himself this time around. His staging has clearly been well thought out: the comic elements are never punched: the show's silken melancholy is handled with exquisite grace...
Birnbaum is helped tremendously by the sets (unaccredited in the program), which are both atmospheric and serviceable. (The show really moves; it is the first time I have been out of an Agassiz musical by eleven o'clock.) Sara Linnie Slocum's lighting and Gail Steketee's costumes also contribute much to the production's dreamlike, hangover mood...