| re: NYT review | |
| Posted by: JereNYC (JereNYC@aol.com) 02:28 pm EST 02/21/20 | |
| In reply to: re: NYT review - EvFoDr 03:32 pm EST 02/20/20 | |
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| This production is using the revised book by Francine Pascal, by the way. Here's the issues, as I saw them...there's a lot of telling, rather than showing. Mack has big monologues in almost every scene in which he tells us things that the show should be showing us. Sills did fine by them, but it gets tedious. Also, the central relationship of the show, that of Mack and Mabel, takes place mostly off-stage in scenes we don't see. That's a big, glaring fault for a show called MACK AND MABEL. The only sort of tender, romantic scene between them is the one that contains "I Won't Send Roses." We don't see what attracts her to him or him to her. We don't see how their personal relationship evolves after this scene, until she walks in on him having sex with someone else and leaves him. The show presents only bits and pieces of their professional, working relationship. The entire story presented by the musical is fictional, except that there are characters called Mack Sennett, Mabel Normand, Fatty Arbuckle, and William Desmond Taylor, which share names with actual historical figures. The real story seems much more interesting that the fiction, so I wonder why the writers bothered with the fiction at all. All the characters are completely fictional. I'm not sure a single true fact about any of the "real" characters is presented here, other than that they were involved in making silent movies. By the same token, if the writers were going to present a story that is their own creation, why not come up with something better? The rise and fall of glamourous Hollywood figures has presented drama for nearly a 100 years in various guises...surely, they could have come up with something better for a musical. We're also never really told what the issue is with Mabel's health in Act II, although we're left to assume that she's a drug and/or alcohol addict, which, again, we're told, but don't really see. As far as this production is concerned, the powers that be made some errors, the most destructive of which is that the juxtaposition of the events leading up to the murder of William Desmond Taylor and the funny, bouncy "Tap Your Troubles Away" is confusingly staged and I had trouble following the Taylor story. I literally kept losing Taylor, Mabel, and the other couple involved in the dancers doing the number and Alexandra Socha and the other actress were very similar in type and costumed similarly, so it was difficult to tell at times who was who. William Desmond Taylor is reconceived as a dancey, bisexual goodtime guy...from what I read, almost the complete opposite of what he was like in real life. Mabel's drug use is foreshadowed nicely in the first act when we see her popping pills to keep up the manic pace required by Sennett while making 2 reeler after 2 reeler, but doesn't really go anywhere in Act II, where we don't see her taking drugs, even those specifically handed to her by Taylor. In real life, Mabel's main health issue seems to have been TB, but that is not even mentioned here. So that's what's wrong with it, in my opinion. There was also some terrific stuff here other than the justifiably adored score, but you didn't ask about that. :) |
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