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November 17, 2006
TT: A spoonful of vinegar
Time once again for the Friday Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. It's another three-play week, and for the first time in a month, all three shows, Mary Poppins, the revival of Les Misérables, and The Little Dog Laughed, are on Broadway:Let's cut to the chase: The special effects in "Mary Poppins," Broadway's new Disney musical, are wondrous to behold. Not only does P.L. Travers' practically perfect nanny bring down the house by flying all the way from the stage to the balcony, umbrella clasped firmly in hand, but Bert, her jolly sidekick, strolls up one side of the proscenium arch and down the other, pausing at the top to do a feet-in-air tap dance. As for Mary's bottomless carpetbag, from which she extracts, among many other improbable things, a full-length coat rack, all I can say is pretty much what the four- and seven-year-olds sitting next to me said: "Ooh! Aah!" I only wish I'd felt that way about the rest of the show. It's spectacular, and not even slightly boring, but anyone familiar with Walt Disney's 1964 film version of "Mary Poppins" is likely to come away asking what happened to the charm....
What struck me most forcibly about "Les Miz" is that its appeal is essentially operatic. Not only does it contain no spoken dialogue--every word is sung--but Messrs. Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg, the authors, have crammed it full of surefire devices shamelessly pilfered from 19th-century opera. High notes, rousing choruses, a coincidence-crowded Victor Hugo plot, even a drinking song: All are present in profusion. The only thing missing is music. In its place, Mr. Schönberg force-feeds us three hours' worth of chattery non-melodies that sound as if they'd been written by a woodpecker on a xylophone....
A friend of mine who saw a preview of Douglas Carter Beane's "The Little Dog Laughed," which has moved to Broadway after a sold-out 10-week Off-Broadway run, described it as "a gay sitcom." Yes and no. The plot, in which a deeply closeted movie star (Tom Everett Scott) gets caught in bed with a hustler (Johnny Galecki) by his brassy agent (Julie White), is more like bad Kaufman and Hart with full frontal nudity. On the other hand, one aspect of "The Little Dog Laughed" reminded me of "Sex and the City," which is that Mr. Beane's women talk like campy gay men....
No free link. To read the whole thing, pick up a copy of today's Journal and turn to the "Weekend Journal" section. Better yet, go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instantaneous access to my review, plus loads of other interesting stuff. (If you're already a subscriber, the review is here.)
Posted November 17, 2006 12:00 PM
