| No debacle. You have to be careful about books that "mix fact and fiction." | |
| Posted by: keikekaze 05:30 pm EDT 07/31/20 | |
| In reply to: The 'Wildcat' Debacle - Clancy 01:06 pm EDT 07/31/20 | |
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| In the real world, postwar Broadway musicals that were really debacles closed in a week or less. (Unlike the 21st century, when they might run for years.) Wildcat played 171 Broadway performances and might have run a lot longer if Lucy had remained in good health and remained enthusiastic about doing it. Yes, the show lost some money, but apparently Lucy herself was the principal investor, so it's not like a lot of people lost their shirts on it financially. The show is, in fact, a perfectly valid second- or third-level Broadway musical of its era--an era when even third-level musicals were not terrible. Not My Fair Lady by any means, but equally far from Portofino or Happy Town, some of the real debacles of that time. The creatives (among them Michael Kidd, Cy Coleman, Carolyn Leigh, and N. Richard Nash) were professionals who knew what they were doing, and they turned out a show that was endearingly silly but reasonably enjoyable--that is, more or less what they were aiming for. As for Lucy's singing, after nine years of "I Love Lucy" on TV, Lucy's fans knew she wasn't going to sound like Barbara Cook, and they didn't expect her to, or even want her to. Everyone got what they expected--Lucy being "Lucy"--and it's unlikely that anyone was very disappointed. |
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| Previous: | re: Valerie Harper was a dancer in Wildcat; here she sings "Hey Look Me Over" with Lucy and Dinah - Lapsedfan 04:42 pm EDT 08/01/20 |
| Next: | re: No debacle. You have to be careful about books that "mix fact and fiction." - Chromolume 07:43 pm EDT 07/31/20 |
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