Word: tryout
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...reinvigorate the text, Miller and Director Peter Wood have gone back to its beginnings. The inspiration for the piece, Miller acknowledges, was Studs Terkel's sprawling oral history Hard Times. But during pre-Broadway workshops and a Charleston, S.C., tryout, Miller was repeatedly counseled by critics to shift emphasis from a documentary-style montage of vignettes to a focus on a particular family, resembling his own, whose growing deprivation and humiliation reflected the Depression in microcosm. These semiautobiographical characters proved unable by themselves to bear the weight of enormous events; meanwhile, the play's sweep had been diminished...
...tuneful, and it has an irresistible gimmick: the song and dance comes to a halt in mid-syllable to mark where Dickens' novel breaks off. The audience then votes to select the murderer and therefore the ending. This do-it- yourself detection has been honed since last summer's tryout by Director Wilford Leach and Choreographer Graciela Daniele, the team that made a zonked- out Pirates of Penzance a 1981 Broadway triumph. Fully half of Holmes' songs are instantly hummable, notably the sweet Perfect Strangers and the plucky Don't Quit While You're Ahead. The show's style calls...
...humor, but much of it verges on the cruel or the macabre. The jokes are mostly preposterous self-justifications or savage put-downs of those near by. It is hard for an audience to laugh at Iceman without feeling it is further belittling these shriveled lives. Indeed, during a tryout at the Kennedy Center in Washington, spectators seemed to respond to the play's bleakness, not its raucous...
...exists only as a two-record LP. Following the precedent he and Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber set with Superstar and Evita, Rice has released an "original cast album" of his latest pop opera before there was ever a show. The Chess set thus functions as an out-of-town tryout, a promotional gambit and a thumpingly successful fund raiser--so much so that Rice, Andersson and Ulvaeus will be providing most of the (pounds)1 million capital needed this fall when Chess boards the London stage. Already, the West End theaterati smell a hit. As Rice happily notes...
...Malory's Arthurian one, men are ever the victims; it is women who have the power to make them betray their best selves as well as the ability to inspire them to redemptive glory. In Roy's case, all unknowing on the eve of his big league tryout, he answers a mysterious woman's summons to her hotel room where she shoots him (with a silver bullet, no less...