| MIDLER, MURPHY, AND PETERS (with a lot more about Peters) | |
| Posted by: GabbyGerard 12:13 am EDT 06/27/18 | |
| In reply to: MERMAN, CHANNING, PETERS - LivingMyDream 05:23 pm EDT 06/26/18 | |
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| Let me start by saying that I am not a Peters acolyte. I find her very hit-or-miss, and don't quite understand how she ascended to the same level as (and, in many cases, even surpassed) her musical theatre contemporaries, including Buckley, Paige, and especially LuPone. Perhaps her status was solidified by her having the most successful crossover career in film and television--which probably had more to do with her having a more telegenic face than the other women--while still remaining active in theatre. The peak of her fame in "mainstream" America probably came in the years between 1976 and 1982 with her notable roles in Silent Movie, The Jerk, Pennies From Heaven, and Annie. These roles increased her visibility, won her some new fans, and garnered her some significant accolades, including a Golden Globe nomination. If I'm not mistaken, they also took her away from Broadway for ten years--the time between Mack and Mabel and Sunday in the Park With George. I believe this was the longest interim of time between her appearances on the Great White Way after having made her debut in The Most Happy Fela. This is quite the contrast to LuPone whose longest spell between appearances in a musical on Broadway is the eighteen years between Anything Goes and Sweeney Todd. (I'm not counting her solo shows or straight plays.) It has been over 20 years since Buckley last did a a musical on Broadway (Triumph of Love); she also had ten years between Pippin and Cats. I've digressed, but this is all to say that I wonder if Bernadette has solidified the reputation she has because, in addition to having enjoyed a reasonable amount of crossover success, she's prolific. I can divide my experiences of seeing Bernadette in book musicals into three categories. The first category is unqualified triumphs. This is the category in which I would place her performances as Dot and the Witch. The second is "problem performances" where there were, at the very least, flashes of brilliance, but also issues that were impossible to ignore. The most notable entry in this category is her performance as Rose in Gypsy. I saw her five times throughout the run. When she was good, she was BEYOND BRILLIANT, reinventing the role while still honoring the text, and more thrilling than I could ever describe. But when she struggled, she was sloppy--not just with the widely discussed vocal challenges she experienced at the beginning of the run, but, more frequently and more problematically, messing up lyrics and seemingly breaking character to express her frustrations with herself. On this category, I would also place her Desiree. I wish I could have Frankenstein-ed her and Catherine Zeta-Jones's performances, using CZJ's first act and Bernadette's second. The glamorous hauteur that CZJ brought to the first act sold her as a diva and unforgettable object of erotic affection, but Bernadette sold the "me here at last on the ground" factor with heartbreaking vulnerability and sincerity. In this category, I also place her Sally and her Dolly...which, for anyone who's still reading, I promise I'll get to soon. The third and last category is "flabbergasting flops." There is only one entry in this category and it's her Annie Oakley. She was miscast, always reading as a caricature performed by one of those gals with umbrellas who's always out with fellas that Annie so envies. I can't imagine who first thought to put her in AGYG, but, despite the disdain you and I share for the performance, they couldn't have been complete morons because she won a Tony and the production recouped. I maintain that it was more of a career Tony than anything else, honoring her body of work and dedication to the musical stage. Which brings me to Dolly. At this point, I have seen Midler twice, Murphy twice, and Peters once. Though there are some highly insightful dissenting voices (in this thread alone), count me among the majority who thought Midler played Midler--and still found it glorious. Hello Dolly was written for the type of outsized personality that Midler has. It's, as John Clum says, a "big lady" show, built around the persona of the diva whom we've showed up to see. Midler has persona for days. DOLLY BECAME MIDLER. That's what we wanted. That's what we got. And it was wonderful. Donna Murphy was not a lightning rod for the same sort of rock concert electricity. She could not be. She is not a celebrity the way Midler is. She is, however, one of musical theatre's greatest actresses and chameleons. And so MURPHY BECAME DOLLY, an exhausted widow who's tired of living hand-to-mouth, swindling, and improvising, and who is desperate to rejoin the human race. And yet--and here's the real brilliance of her performance--she did not lose a single laugh. Maybe the crowd didn't roar the way they did with Midler or, probably, Channing, but they laughed and they laughed hard, particularly when Murphy used her considerable knack for period styles/pastiche. If Midler's performance exemplifies one extreme, and Murphy's the other, I felt like BERNADETTE WAS LOST SOMEWHERE IN THE MIDDLE. She didn't transform herself enough to disappear into the role, employing many of the token Bernadette-isms that repeated viewers of her work will notice and maybe even want to see (e.g., cute, kewpie doll squeals). At the same time, those Bernadette-isms don't add up to a strong enough persona to make the whole show bend to her will, at least not when tempered with the character work she is doing. It seems like she's wandering in some non-committal mid-ground between the Murphy and Midler approaches. She's also not helped by Garber who lacks David Hyde Pierce's specificity and ends up turning in a thoroughly general performance. Even with my highly mixed feelings about her Dolly, I think her work merits more examination than your original post insunates. |
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