Word: stadlen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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What's it like to have Katie Hepburn in bed with you? "I have ambivalent feelings about what she did," said Actor Lewis J. Stadlen of the Broadway musical Candide. Ten minutes before the show began one day last week, Stadlen, who plays Dr. Pangloss, had climbed into the bed that dominates the open set surrounded on all sides by the audience. To his delight, Hepburn was sitting out front. Next thing he knew, "She just sidled into bed with me," said the startled actor. Hepburn stayed a mere 15 seconds under the covers, then murmured, "Excuse...
Presiding over the action is Lewis Stadlen, who plays the geriatric Voltaire, the buoyant Pangloss and assorted villains. The set, which might have been a collaboration between Rube Goldberg and the sculptor Jean Tinguely, turns in its own virtuoso performance. It throws down bridges between continents, cascades green streamers down to simulate jungle, and rocks like a storm-battered ship. Despite such assaults, the audience is treated with a kind of 18th century courtesy and just the right note of complicity. If there could be a lovelier Candide than this, it is difficult to imagine...
...named Lewis (Sam Levene) and Clark (Jack Albertson). Clad always in pajamas and bathrobe, Clark lives alone in one of Manhattan's rundown hotels and is sustained by TV, soup and a weekly copy of Variety brought to him by his solicitous nephew-agent Ben (Lewis J. Stadlen). Clark particularly relishes scanning the obits in the show-biz bible ("Bernie Eisenstein...he was Rodriguez in the dance team of Ramona and Rodriguez...
While the actors do a creditable imitation of the famed brothers, it is Lewis J. Stadlen as Groucho who achieves inspired mimicry. He has the best lines. (Groucho always did.) He has all the rest too: the eyes and eyebrows that whip up and down like window shades, the fluent crouch, the quick leer and the quicker wit of an urban bordello cavalier. He is a great credit to the show and-the ultimate compliment-to Groucho...
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