From: adolphso@mizar.usc.edu (adolphson)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.theatre
Subject: Re: "Company" in concert
Date: 26 Jan 93 06:14:42 GMT
Article-I.D.: mizar.1k4d4iINNcqv
Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
NNTP-Posting-Host: mizar.usc.edu

In article <C1GtwA.Ln7@news.udel.edu> 
conrad@brahms.udel.edu (Jon Conrad) writes:
>In article <1k228pINNo9b@mizar.usc.edu> 
>adolphso@mizar.usc.edu (adolphson) writes:
> >> >Although I did like "Pacific Overtures" quite
> >> >a lot.  I think I was the only person in the 4000-seat Dorothy
> >> >Chandler Pavilion who *did* like it. 
>
> This reminds me of a personal experience I forgot to mention before.  I
> was seeing Pacific Overtures at the Winter Garden, enjoying it (in fact,
> in awe of much of it) though aware that not everyone was. 

[Amusing story deleted.]

I, too, was in awe of much of Pacific Overtures.  I still
remember the staging for "Pretty Lady", which, to use an
expression current at the time, blew me away.

> >[About Anthony Perkins:]
> >> I started asking myself, "Well, who WOULD
> >> be a good Bobby?"  And came up with Anthony Perkins, who was the right
> >> age and persona, a good actor, a sufficient singer,
>
> >Sufficient?  Good heavens, Jon, what do you look for in a 
> >Broadway singer?  
>
> As good a voice as I can get, and as the music demands.

Interesting difference between us.  I am unbelievably
severe when it comes to opera (as should be clear from
what I wrote about Cuberli on rec.music.classical).  I
am much more forgiving in pop music.  In fact, I rather
like "imperfect" voices in musicals.

> >So Perkins wasn't a Melchior, but I think
> >he's really quite good in Greenwillow.  His pop albums are
> >sort of hit and miss, but that has as much to do with the
> >sappy arrangements as anything else.
>
> I'll listen to Greenwillow again.  My memory of it is disappointment
> that his singing wasn't as good as I'd hoped (I've always liked him as
> an actor and personality).  He has some challenging numbers to sing,
> like Never Will I Marry, and he sounded uncomfortably stretched by them.

Never Will I Marry is not an easy song to sing.  And if
you think Anthony Perkins sounds uncomfortably stretched
by it, do give a listen to Judy Garland's recording, or 
Barbra Streisand's.  I've never really been able to get
a handle on Greenwillow.

> >This reminds me: in "You Could Drive a Person Crazy", Susan Browning
> >didn't shout out "You son of a bitch!", but rather something like
> >"You goddamned bastard!"  
>
> Those expletives are basically ad lib anyway -- I don't think they're
> scripted.  But I wonder why this particular subsitution.

The substitution *was* peculiar.  

> Two textual points on this number while we're at it and if you remember:
> Did they do the "real" ending (instrumental), or the awful made-up-for-
> the-recording "Bobby is my hobby" business? 

I can't remember, now that you ask.  I think -- but I'll have
to doublecheck with the people I attended it with -- that
they did the instrumental ending.

> And did they sing "I could
> understand a person if a person was a fag"? 

Yes, and I'm glad they did.

By the way, I just remembered something about Elaine Stritch.
A friend of mine ran into Elaine Stritch at a party some time
during the Broadway run of Company.  He told her how much he
loved the show, loved her, and how wild he was about "The 
Ladies Who Lunch", especially the lines "A matinee, a Pinter
play, perhaps a piece of Mahler's / I'll drink to that / And
one for Mahler".  Leonard told Stritch that Mahler was a 
brilliant touch, and how he thought she really got across the
sarcasm.  Stritch smiled vaguely and thanked him, which only
seemed to encourage Leonard to babble on and on even more. 
"I've seen those ladies at Bernstein's Mahler concerts."
Stritch looked surprised, and then started howling with
laughter: she had thought "a piece of Mahler's" was a 
type of pastry, or a pastry shop.

> >I'm thinking back on all this kind of casting in LA.  Lots of washed 
> >up has-beens or never-weres.  Priscilla Lopez in Irma la Douce!  There's 
> >magic!  You like Shakespeare?  How about Macbeth, with Charleton Heston 
> >and Vanessa Redgrave?  
>
> I'd see Vanessa Redgrave in anything.  The idea of the two of them
> together, though, is fairly mind-boggling given what we know of their
> respective politics. 

Not just their politics, but their acting styles.  She was
a brilliant Lady Macbeth.  He was not very good.  

> Still, though I'm no Heston fan, he's always been
> serious (more so than most other movie stars, in their prime or not)
> about keeping up his stage acting in classical roles -- which is, after
> all, his background.  I can't treat this combination as intrinsically
> ridiculous,

Oh, I was just being snide.  We get lots of TV and movie people
in huge productions of things here.  Richard Chamberlain in
Richard II, for instance.

> or him and Kerr in Long Day's Journey for that matter.  I'd
> kind of like to have seen them, though maybe the productions were as
> poor as you imply.

Deborah Kerr was really pretty good.  I can't remember who
played the sons, but they were quite good too.  Heston was not.
And the set was a disaster -- a two-story house on a turntable.
Whenever the house began to move (which was sometimes *during*
scenes, as the characters moved from the sitting room to a
hallway, or out onto the front porch), all the actors would
grab onto a piece of furniture for dear life.  It was quite
amusing.

Arne
Newsgroups: rec.arts.theatre