Word: ziegfeld
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...newest hot ticket on Broadway these days?$55 a pair from scalpers ?is an admission to a haunted house. Elegiac strains of the '20s, '30s and '40s hover in the wings. Ectoplasmic chorines, all beads and feather boas, wander across the stage like Ziegfeld girls come back to life. Characters are at once 19 and 49. Time bounces off the walls, like sound and light brilliantly altered and distorted...
Compacted of memory, dreams and desire, the illusions and disillusions of love, the shifting structure of the self, Follies fuses all into one of the great haunting themes of the Western mind: Time. Follies is a triple-edged title. It means the Ziegfeld Follies, the follies of people in love, and the follies one commits by not fully knowing who one is or what one wants...
...side when you have six-hundred out front?" The size of the Loeb exasperates him, because of its unfairness to non-professional actors. "These are people-sometimes very talented but who have little or no voice training, and they're being asked to appear in this cavernous auditorium !" (The Ziegfeld, now a cinema but the largest built-for-legitimate theatre in New York, has fewer seats downstairs than the Loeb...
...adapting Days of the Commune in "Cantata" form, Lehrman included the four songs by Hans Eisler which Brecht originally wrote into the texture of his play. But hoping to make Brecht's uncompromising moral preachments more palatable to American audiences, whose effete musical diet dates from the Ziegfeld Follies, not Wagner, Lehrman has inserted six more songs by Eisler and the Communist anthem "Internationale" to make Commune more fully music-drama ( Theater mit Musik ). He justifies the increased emphasis on music not solely as a concession to American sensibility, but as the "use of a Wagnerian technique to make...
...groomed aristocrats. This leads to some of the worst and the best moments of the evening. The worst: Phil Gabrielli is competent but ridiculous as suave Jewish gambler Nick Arristein. He plays him like Cyril Ritchard dipping his pinky finger into something icky. John Cook as theatrical entrepreneur Flo Ziegfeld tries hard but is equally unlikely. The best: a Ziegfeld production number called "His Love Makes Me Beautiful." Eight deadpanning preppies running around with sequined mirrors create an infinitely better satire of a Follies extravaganza than a hundred would-be Eddie Cantors-the Busby Berkeley approach taken by the movie...