Word: staging
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...served well--the chorus has an unforgettable tune, and "doo-wah, doo-wah"s, too. Another group number, "Ring Dem Bells," smartly choreographed and lively, gave Joe Orlando and his colleagues a chance to show their skill with batons, which they politely refused--passing the props onto the stage, across it and off again without any twirling...
...both the blessing and the curse of musical revues that a few numbers and performers always stick out. Three women--Judy Banks, Tangee Griffin, and Sherri Hays--each had show-stealing songs. Banks's "Love You Madly" used a great bit of stage business, bringing the entire cast out from under a giant envelope onstage, but Banks's deep-chested, poignant singing elevated the song from cuteness. Griffin made "I Got It Bad and That Ain't Good" the model of a torch song, alone on stage with nothing but a non-functional microphone, a spotlight and her voice...
...SUCCESS OF the other songs depended more on a combination of good staging and acting than vocal purity. In "Strange Feeling," for example, smoke flowed like a waterfall from the back of the stage over the front edge, as the offstage male chorus eerily echoed Susan Perkins's ghostly singing...
...time while the band held still, but it jostled the modern-ballet choreography in nearby numbers. The ballet bits added a little visual spice to a largely aural show, and let lithe Bonnie Zimering show her impressively precise dancing--but fancy ballet choreography and Duke Ellington are uncomfortable stage-mates at best...
...band played well, never drowning singers out, but its sound sometimes became a bit muddied on the long trip from the back of the Loeb stage into the auditorium. During the entr'acte, when the curtain which hid the musicians lifted and the spot shone on them for a change, the murk cleared, and the audience could pay some attention to the type of music Ellington wrote without singers' personalities intruding...