Word: trudeau
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...understandably inattentive Princeton team napping the week before the big 100th. It was not, to be sure, the sort of anticipation that had preceded the 1968 Game, toward which both teams had swaggered without a loss. The '68 astonishment still reverberates: Quarterback Brian Bowling, the model for Garry Trudeau's B.D. in the Doonesbury comic strip, and big Calvin Hill, the star halfback who went on to play pro football for the Dallas Cowboys, led Yale to a 29-13 advantage with less than eleven minutes to go. Yalies in the crowd began waving their handkerchiefs...
...cynical and defiantly out of place on the comics page of 710 newspapers, G.B. Trudeau's laid-back communards provided a daily recipe for coping with the '70s. The reclusive Trudeau scourged Viet Nam, Watergate, the hostage crisis and every political superstar from Henry Kissinger to Jerry Brown to Elizabeth Taylor regularly and acutely enough to win a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning, as well as a sizable cult following. A year ago, Trudeau gave his strip a sabbatical and set to work bringing the gang from Walden Commune to Broadway. It turns out to have been...
...Trudeau might have anticipated a few of the problems. Cartoon figures cannot-maybe should not-move, let alone sing, dance and shamelessly mug; and Doonesbury never had the fairy-tale simplicity of Little Orphan Annie or Peanuts, both of which survived their trips to the musical stage more or less intact. Perhaps realizing this, Trudeau streamlined and cutesi-fied his characters. The result is a modest libel on the real Doonesbury. It might as well be called Archie and Drughead...
...crazed Uncle Duke (Gary Beach) from "turning our commune into a flophouse for dopeheads and burnouts"? These problems, and the question of how to dramatize them, might occupy a students' lunch break at the High School of Performing Arts; they are hardly worth a year of Garry Trudeau's time, or two hours of anyone else...
Elizabeth Swados has given Trudeau's lyrics (some of them witty and energetic) rhinestone settings; not one of her 14 tunes offers a memorable melody or a surprising chord pattern. It does surprise that Margo Sappington's choreography is so stunningly inept, that the cast is strident and charmless. In turning some likable icons of the center-left into show-biz brats, this musical Doonesbury emerges as a vision of '70s youth only Richard Nixon could love. -By Richard Corliss