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. |
