Arts and Manners

Even if I say so myself, my nostalgia for the Minsky brothers and their burlesque is not so much due to a lecherous turn of my mind as to a great respect for their sense of timing. The Minsky brothers, I am afraid, hardly ever read Aristotle. And yet, they knew all there was to know about the ground rules of writing for the theater—certainly more than the ladies and gentlemen who wrote, produced and staged Janus: A Romantic Comedy.

This latest potential Broadway hit is (to put it as succinctly as I know how) abominable. Worse, it is painfully amateurish. The Minsky brothers, if they had ever had the poor taste to touch the script at all, would surely have restored it to what it no doubt was in the first place—a “black-out” gag of some forty years ago, with the permissible maximum running time of, say, four minutes.

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William S. Schlamm

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Even if I say so myself, my nostalgia for the Minsky brothers and their burlesque is not so much due to a lecherous turn of my mind as to a great respect for their sense of timing. The Minsky brothers, I am afraid, hardly ever read Aristotle. And yet, they knew all there was to know about the ground rules of writing for the theater—certainly more than the ladies and gentlemen who wrote, produced and staged Janus: A Romantic Comedy.

This latest potential Broadway hit is (to put it as succinctly as I know how) abominable. Worse, it is painfully amateurish. The Minsky brothers, if they had ever had the poor taste to touch the script at all, would surely have restored it to what it no doubt was in the first place—a “black-out” gag of some forty years ago, with the permissible maximum running time of, say, four minutes.