Word: sung
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Adapted by Seth Weinstein from the book by Judith Guest, "Ordinary People" is not an upbeat story. As a fully sung musical this becomes even more apparent--all the songs follow the same sad format, hardly leaving the audience whistling on its way out. There was a message and some talent on display during the show's two weekends at the Agassiz Theater, but extracting all of it from the monotonously sung dialogue was a challenge...
...Having sung the praises of my first year and the Harvard experience, however, with exams looming more ominously than today's black clouds, I'm feeling a certain anxiety to leave the sanctity of the Yard and return to the comforts of Michigan. And I'm not necessarily sure that I am alone in this regard...
...production begins extremely slowly, and the first few scenes are not played with enough energy to sustain themselves or to pull the audience into what could be an exciting and driven show. Although Aunt Em's (Laurie Sheflin) musical number is nicely sung, the cast lacks spirit until the entrance of Addaperle (Kimberly Aboltin), one of the two good witches. Aboltin, with Urban Outfitters bag in tow, fully exploits the hilarious nature of Addaperle's character, bringing to it some of her own very funny mannerisms. With the down-beat of the next song, "Ease on Down the Road...
...role of Dorothy, played by Charmaine Smith, is sung beautifully and performed in an unusual but convincing manner. Instead of the traditional interpretation of Dorothy as a child who is actively seeking her way home, Smith plays a wide-eyed, younger Dorothy who is pulled around the land of Oz by her new-found friends. As such, these friends, the Scarecrow, Tinman, and Lion, become much more important to the action and motion of the plot...
...Sung painters, their renderings of mountain landscape--awesome in scale but without theatrical drama, the bare crags rising in swirls and convulsions of gray ink as the background to intensely seen trees and tiny human figures--achieved a relationship between notation and object that would make any draftsman, Eastern or Western, faint with envy. The blots, scribbles, hatchings, scumblings and flicks of the brush build up a world of microforms that seems at once abstract and dense with specific experience. No wonder Beijing wants all this back; no wonder Taipei is determined to keep...