Mélange of Musicals

It sounded so simple: “Go,” I was told, “and review three current Broadway musicals,” and go I did. Night after night. But fast as I moved, they folded. Only a few New Yorkers were nimble enough to see Juno and the Peacock, an Irish revolutionary tragi-comedy in three-quarter time which even the artistry of Shirley Booth could keep alive only a week. But I managed it.

First Impressions, the Abe Burrows muscial adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, was flourishing when I ordered my tickets. By the time I saw it, headliner Polly Bergen had withdrawn (appendicitis, not disgust) and the closing notice was shortly to be posted. A distinct loss because, with or without Bergen, it was a funny show, although hardly hallmark Austen. Give an audience a desperate mother, a brood of marriageable daughters, and a bear market in suitors, and the reaction you get from perverse humanity is laughter, not pity. When the mother, the once stuffy Mrs. Bennet, is played by Hermione Gingold, who combines perfect timing with a comic style as broad as the Great Plains, the resulting laughter is apt to be loud and strong. While suffering through Farley Granger’s insufferable Mr. Darcy—his rendition had all the mobility and expression of a clothes hanger—one always knew Hermione was there, waiting in the wings to erupt on stage with the tuneful “As Long as There’s a Mother,” or “Have You Heard the News?” Second only to Miss Gingold was the acting of Christopher Hewlett, a come-to-life Dickens illustration whose finest hour as servile suitor of Elizabeth Bennet, his “fragrant flower,” was reached in the plaintive ditty, “You Are My Fiery Fuchsia.”

PL

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Priscilla L. Buckley

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It sounded so simple: “Go,” I was told, “and review three current Broadway musicals,” and go I did. Night after night. But fast as I moved, they folded. Only a few New Yorkers were nimble enough to see Juno and the Peacock, an Irish revolutionary tragi-comedy in three-quarter time which even the artistry of Shirley Booth could keep alive only a week. But I managed it.

First Impressions, the Abe Burrows muscial adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, was flourishing when I ordered my tickets. By the time I saw it, headliner Polly Bergen had withdrawn (appendicitis, not disgust) and the closing notice was shortly to be posted. A distinct loss because, with or without Bergen, it was a funny show, although hardly hallmark Austen. Give an audience a desperate mother, a brood of marriageable daughters, and a bear market in suitors, and the reaction you get from perverse humanity is laughter, not pity. When the mother, the once stuffy Mrs. Bennet, is played by Hermione Gingold, who combines perfect timing with a comic style as broad as the Great Plains, the resulting laughter is apt to be loud and strong. While suffering through Farley Granger’s insufferable Mr. Darcy—his rendition had all the mobility and expression of a clothes hanger—one always knew Hermione was there, waiting in the wings to erupt on stage with the tuneful “As Long as There’s a Mother,” or “Have You Heard the News?” Second only to Miss Gingold was the acting of Christopher Hewlett, a come-to-life Dickens illustration whose finest hour as servile suitor of Elizabeth Bennet, his “fragrant flower,” was reached in the plaintive ditty, “You Are My Fiery Fuchsia.”