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| re: Did anyone ever come close to Joanna Gleason as the Baker's Wife? | |
| Posted by: JereNYC (JereNYC@aol.com) 12:16 pm EDT 06/19/18 | |
| In reply to: Did anyone ever come close to Joanna Gleason as the Baker's Wife? - bobby2 01:00 am EDT 06/19/18 | |
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| The big "problem," I think, is that Gleason's brilliant performance is captured on video and is, thus, ingrained in so many people who love the show. It's always going to be difficult to acclimate to another actress in the role when you literally hear Gleason's voice and line readings in your head. I imagine it's also very difficult for actresses to thread that needle...that can either give the audience what they're hearing in their heads, an approximation if not an imitation of Gleason, or risk losing the audience by trying a different approach to the character and having the audience contrasting and comparing in their heads all night. | |
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| re: Did anyone ever come close to Joanna Gleason as the Baker's Wife? | |
| Posted by: Thom915 01:14 pm EDT 06/19/18 | |
| In reply to: re: Did anyone ever come close to Joanna Gleason as the Baker's Wife? - JereNYC 12:16 pm EDT 06/19/18 | |
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| There is indeed some validity in what you say however no one is asking "did anyone come close to Bernadette Peters (fine as she was) or Chip Zien in "Into the Woods?" though they too are on the video and the OBC album. Gleason's performance was just as close to perfect i think as one can ever get in a theater show. | |
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| re: Did anyone ever come close to Joanna Gleason as the Baker's Wife? | |
| Posted by: lowwriter 10:41 am EDT 06/20/18 | |
| In reply to: re: Did anyone ever come close to Joanna Gleason as the Baker's Wife? - Thom915 01:14 pm EDT 06/19/18 | |
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| Chip Zien probably is one of the best Bakers I've ever seen. | |
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| re: Did anyone ever come close to Joanna Gleason as the Baker's Wife? | |
| Posted by: JereNYC (JereNYC@aol.com) 03:33 pm EDT 06/19/18 | |
| In reply to: re: Did anyone ever come close to Joanna Gleason as the Baker's Wife? - Thom915 01:14 pm EDT 06/19/18 | |
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| To that point, I may be in the minority, but I find Peters' Witch to be almost as indelible a creation as Gleason's Baker's Wife. I've never seen a Witch who bettered Peters' performance, and that includes Vanessa Williams, Linda Mugleston (who played the last week of that production for Williams), Donna Murphy, and Meryl Streep. I would say that the closest I've come is an actress whose name I've, unfortunately, forgotten who played the role at a small theatre in Philadelphia in a production so early in the show's post-Broadway life, that it was before the original was shown on PBS and before the masses were familiar, beyond the cast album, with those performances. I think this was probably the first Philadelphia area production. I would love to have seen Julia McKenzie's Witch...she sounds genuinely terrifying on the London cast album, but it's hard to judge a performance just on that. I also recall seeing a fairly big budget production in the 90's in a small city that shall remain nameless in which the entire cast was clearly directed to mimic the original cast and which had to have been directed right from the video. That...was a choice. Didn't work at all and I was struck by having paid quite a lot of money (for me at the time) to see a show that was a pale imitation of what I could have stayed home and popped into the VCR for free. |
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| re: Did anyone ever come close to Joanna Gleason as the Baker's Wife? | |
| Posted by: JereNYC (JereNYC@aol.com) 04:39 pm EDT 06/19/18 | |
| In reply to: re: Did anyone ever come close to Joanna Gleason as the Baker's Wife? - JereNYC 03:33 pm EDT 06/19/18 | |
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| After some checking around, I was able to come up with the name of the actress who impressed me so much in that early, post-Broadway INTO THE WOODS. Her name was Bettina Warren and I recall also seeing her Eva Peron a year or two after her Witch and her Eva was just was compelling. | |
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| re: Did anyone ever come close to Joanna Gleason as the Baker's Wife? | |
| Posted by: dooey 12:18 pm EDT 06/19/18 | |
| In reply to: re: Did anyone ever come close to Joanna Gleason as the Baker's Wife? - JereNYC 12:16 pm EDT 06/19/18 | |
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| So true. An excellent point. | |
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