| I saw it in London in the summer of 1975--about three months into the run, I believe. All the original London cast were still in it. Jean Simmons was always wonderful in everything she undertook, and she was here, too. Simmons struck me as a more elegant Desiree, and a more guarded one, than Glynis Johns. She didn't have the frog-princess magic that was Glynis Johns--who else ever did?-- and may not have got as many laughs as Johns, but Simmons got both the underlying strength and the vulnerability when they were needed, especially in the second act. But the two moments I remember most from that production, 45 years later, are Diane Langton's Petra blowing the roof off the place with the sheer energy and gusto of her "The Miller's Son," and Gingold getting up out of "her" wheelchair and dancing a little jig down to the front of the stage for her curtain call as the place went wild. |
