Word: shows
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...much higher than clinkers like the protagonists' names, so you had better find a little delight in Rock's old-fashioned cynicism. And if you'll buy, even for one night, the fragile premise that liquor and screwing are the soul of a good time, the 121st Hasty Pudding Show just may seem a delight rather than a fleece...
Inevitably a virgin is seduced (twice in fact it's so funny) and a teetotalling bar-smasher gets roaring drunk, but this particular show extends its faithfulness to formula a bit too far. Individual lines like "you boys couldn't flatten out a wrinkled postage stamp" ring a little hollow. I wondered during the first act whether the show would stoop to the Beach Party level of repartee with one character emphatically commenting "You can say that again," and his buddy really saying it again. It was there all right, a little dressed up, but dismally there all the same...
...show does better than the gags. There's a hint of elegant symmetry to the plot which brings Hatchet Ma Marion and her splendidly repressed son to Bootleg, U.S.A., a last outpost of boisterous prohibition violation. After Rock, the pink-spatzed hoodlum who runs the town, has dropped 45 jokes about his daughter Belle's drunkenness, the 46th ought to be an embarassment, but such is the momentum that...
...ENIGMATIC author isn't hiding himself in the wings--he is out there playing the lead, Rock, stage-managing each big number. And Patterson's performance seemed very much like the show he wrote. At times, you don't see Patterson, Rock Bottom, or anything like a person in the character--only a hyperactive catalogue of disembodied musical comedy gestures. It's a trick best watched in an alcoholic haze, perhaps, but a trick that succeeds...
...sometimes undirected energy. Clark wields a strong umbrella, an even stronger arched eyebrow, struts and talks his castrating role for all its raucous humor. Olive, who doesn't have much of a singing voice, is almost obscenely comfortable on a stage, engaging and convincing as he puts across the show's only ballad. Randy Parry (Belle Bottom) develops the indifferent drunken daughter's part well, but is overshadowed by the sensational obscene clowning of Ed Strong and Randy Guffey as the secretarial pool, which Rock lends Bootleg's mayor in anticipation of future favors. Smaller parts are handled with uniform...