From: b-spachman@nwu.edu (Brad Spachman)
Subject: Re: GoodBye Girl in Chicago?
Followup-To: rec.arts.theatre
Organization: Northwestern University
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1993 21:13:45 GMT

In article <MURRAY.92Dec31001137@aristotle.ils.nwu.edu>,
murray@aristotle.ils.nwu.edu (Thomas Murray) wrote:
> 
> THE GOODBYE GIRL started playing the Tuesday before X-mas (Dec. 22nd)
> and officially "opened" in Chicago on Dec. 29th.  Reviews should
> already be out.  Alas, I am in LA, and unable to get a Chicago Tribune
> to check for reviews.  I do hope some other Chicago "regulars" will
> keep an eye open for these.
> 

Well, I've never been too much to rely on the reviews of shows, so I doubt
I would be very good at writing one. However, there seems to be a strong
desire to know about the show, so I'll give you all my impressions. First
off, the Chicago Tribune basically said that there is some good stuff in
the show, but that everything is very uneven. Well, no surprise there, it's
an out of town tryout. However, they did say that the leads (Bernadette
Peters and Martin Short) performed well.

After seeing the show on January 3rd, I can honestly say that the review
hit pretty close to the mark. The performances were quite good in general.
The actress who played the landlord (sorry, I can't remember the name)
stole every scene she was in. She was a very funny character. I had strong
reservations about hearing Martin Short sing, but to this untrained ear, he
was at least passable in the singing department and of course gave a very
comedic performance when not singing. I had a hard time even finding many
of the other performers because some of the scenes and songs had already
been changed from how they were printing in the program.

As for the material, well.... The creators have a lot of work to do in the
next month. Marvin Hamlisch's songs were what I expected to hear, there
wasn't a lot of "poppishness" about them (take that ALW!), and they were
effective, if not particularly memorable. The lyrics, by David "City of
Angels" Zippel, were by far the best part of the entire experience. I
thought he showed the same tongue-in-cheek humor that I saw in "City of
Angels" and I'd like to see the show in a more final state just so I could
pick up on more of the puns. What was very disappointing, however, was how
choppy the whole thing was. I thought that in a three hour (including
intermission and a 15 min. tech problem), Neil Simon could do much more
with the characters in a smoother manner than what was on the stage. The
first act made sense, for the most part. The characters were believeable
and I could sense their motivations. It was also the act that seemed to
have undergone the most changes (lost one song, one scene, and 3 characters
from the program printing). In comparison, the second act seemed like a
series of vignettes, leaping from one theatrical idea to the next. It was
very disappointing after a very enjoyable 1st act.

I don't know enough about choreography to judge how well it was performed,
except for 2 things. One was that a dance number in the second act seemed
to have been cut short, because it ended really abruptly. Second, casting
Peters as an out-of-work dancer was really funny, because she certainly
isn't a dancer. Technically, they had real problems. The lights never
provided enough light when the action was downstage. When on the apron,
people's faces were constantly in shadow. The set is very beautiful, but
unwieldly. It could be because the Schubert Theater has a very narrow
proscenium arch, but everything seemed very tight. Hopefully, that will be
resolved in the move to New York. They had a major tech problem during the
scene change before the end of the first act. It was honestly the biggest
stage disaster I've personally seen. They took down the house curtain for
10 minutes to straighten it out. What happened was that one of the scenery
pieces on the ShowTrak system (automatic scenery moving) got tangled up in
an offstage light boom that flew. They couldn't move the set piece or fly
the lights without getting a ladder (probably) and untangling the top of
the set piece. At first, some of the actors tried an improv about the
upcoming scene, but that had to be given up quickly. Again, it seemed to be
a space problem more than anything else (except perhaps bad scenery
driving).

On the positive side, there were two important-looking people sitting in a
house right box taking notes throughout the performance (it wasn't Simon or
Hamlisch, though), so things are being changed. The show has a good
foundation and should have at least a couple of months on Broadway based on
the stars names alone. If someone besides Tom sees the show in the next few
weeks, keep us all updated on the changes being made, because despite the
problems, I enjoyed myself enough to justify the ticket price (around $50!
Is that a lot for a try-out?), and that's the acid test of a show.


Brad
Organization: Freshman, Drama, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA