| Favorites that got bad reviews | |
| Posted by: aleck 09:37 am EDT 04/15/20 | |
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| Picking up on a theme suggested in an earlier thread, I was thinking about some of the shows that I really liked that got really bad (and I think unwarranted) reviews. These are productions that I saw in previews before the reviews came out to tell me how wrong I was. Number one on my list is Chess. That production, despite some curious set choices, blew me away -- that is during previews when I went twice. I went another two times after the scathing reviews came out. The performances -- Judy Kuhn, David Carroll, Philip Casnoff -- all fantastic. A gripping book and a load of great music. Number two on my list is Jessica Lange in Streetcar Named Desire. What a performance. She made Streetcar a wholly new experience from all the previous productions I'd seen -- including the movie. I saw it during previews from the mezzanine. When the wildly negative reviews of her performance came out I was puzzled beyond expression when they claimed her performance did not reach past the fifth row. What fifth row? I was blown away when I was sitting upstairs. A later TV version of kind of changed people's minds about that performance. A well-known critic friend of mine admitted to me that maybe he was wrong. A few years after that production (which featured what I thought was a not-so-good Alec Baldwin as Stanley) I had an opportunity to praise Gregory Mosher, the director of that production, for the production in general and Lange's performance in particular. He expressed a similar surprise about the critical reception: "I thought Jessica's performance was going to redefine American acting." I ageed. (However, I think the single production that had the greatest impact in redefining American acting in my lifetime was "Streamers." That original production brought unaffected theatrical nauturalism to its heights compared with anything I had seen before.) Another was Look Away, with an amazing performance by Maya Angelou. And one that never got reviewed because it never opened was Face Value. I thought it was both fun and provocative. I've seen a LOT worse that opened, got decent reviews and decent runs. But what do I know? Now on the flip side are the dogs that somehow got rave reviews -- like, what I consider the worst, Honeymoon In Vegas. But that's another thread. |
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