| re: Broadway to dim lights for Kaye Ballard? | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 07:20 am EST 01/26/19 | |
| In reply to: re: Broadway to dim lights for Kaye Ballard? - bobby2 03:04 am EST 01/26/19 | |
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| Reuben Reuben was an opera by Marc Blitzstein that Cheryl Crawford produced for Broadway in 1955 (back in the days when it was fairly common for operas to be produced on opera). It wasn't advertised as an opera, but it really was one. It had nothing to do with the 1964 Peter De Vries that was the basis for Herman Shumlin's play Spofford and the later movie with Tom Conti that retained the novel's title. The very serious Blitzstein work starred Eddie Albert, Evelyn Lear (later primarily an opera singer), Kaye Ballard and George Gaynes. It opened to generally negative reviews (although some of them noted that there was some excellent music and some compelling sections) and supposedly terrible audience response. It concerned an ex-soldier, whose father, a circus acrobat, had committed suicide. The ex-soldier, Reuben, suffers from what we now call PTSD. He often loses the ability to speak, although he can speak when spoken to gently and with love. The whole thing takes place in the Village during the San Gennaro Festival. Reuben is planning to commit suicide by jumping off the bridge, when he meets a girl with whom he falls in love. A saloon-keeper in desperate need of money, in order to win a bet, tries to convince Reuben that he should commit suicide despite having met this girl, Nina. Some of it took place in the psycho ward of a hospital. I hope I've got all that right. So it wasn't really the barrel of laughs and fun that it was said the audience was expecting. Of course, why supposedly reasonably sophisticated Boston theatregoers expected a new Blitzstein show, whether musical, opera or in between, to be a light musical comedy is hard to figure. |
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