Word: simonize
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...wrap Bacharach and his partner into a Broadway package, complete with a golden property and a golden boy to adapt it. The plan was to take The Apartment, one of the best American movies of the last ten years, and entrust its conversion to the amazingly successful Neil Simon, famous for his four concurrent Broadway hits. But as in all schemes where addition is allowed to pass for logic, there was the danger of the parts not resting snugly with each other, and it is exactly that danger which hits Promises, Promises hard. The plot, taken step for step from...
...HEART of this incongruity, I think, lies the gap between Wilder and Diamond on the one hand, and Simon on the other. There would be no cause to criticize the show in such terms if it hadn't retained so much from the movie and at the same time acquired so much that is new and not quite in phase. Besides holding fast to the screenplay's construction, Simon has used several short sections of dialogue intact, which have in common that they come from the story's more serious episodes. In the funnier scenes, he has cut loose with...
...that were the extent of the problem, Simon could easily enough discard all the lines left over from the movie and substitute his own. But much of his own dialogue, in addition to being incongruous, is downright awkward. Too many of the show's laughs as presently constituted drain the credibility of its characters and situations. For instance, Simon has the doctor from across the hall at one point volunteer that "Experimentally, I took a trip once on L.S.D.--I had a better time in Miami Beach when it rained for two weeks." Lines like that and "I'm just...
...same effect is compounded by the two lead actors, Jerry Ohrbach and Jill O'Hara. Both are talented but neither is quite right. Ohrbach settles comfortably into the easy, audience-conscious manner Simon has designed for him, draws all the requisite laughs, sings at least passably on occasion, but has none of the timely flavor or the essential fascination of Jack Lemmon in the movie. Miss O'Hara has some charm and quite a voice when her range and Bacharach's coincide, but has not yet defined herself sufficiently beyond the realm of run-of-the-mill ingenues. Still less...
...Simon and Co. haven't really made a musical out of The Apartment--not yet, anyway. They've been able to work songs in here and there--some knockout numbers among them--but when the plot descends into the nitty gritty of suicide, recovery, redemption and love triumphant, the book and score don't mesh. There is even a sizeable stretch in the middle of the second act where the music disappears altogether...