| "Moose Murders" Follow-Up (Long) | |
| Posted by: Whistler 03:25 pm EDT 08/18/20 | |
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| The recent postings about “Moose Murders” led me to pulling the script from the library and reading it. I never had before. Especially in the framework of what playwright Arthur Bicknell recently described he was attempting – ten dysfunctional people trapped in a conventional stage murder mystery/farce (which about describes most of them, in both genres) – it’s just ordinary. But it’s not awful. But the production must have been truly terrible, the far extreme of how Mary Martin described “Jennie” – “We kept waiting for it to jell, and it never did,” – or Lillian Hellman described “The Autumn Garden” – “ Sometimes you watch a production dribble away in rehearsals, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.” (These are both paraphrases.) And Bicknell’s right in that Samuel French botched the first printing –1984 – by leaving out or garbling some important stage directions. I don’t know if that’s been corrected, but it’s not directly clear who kills one character or that the character then falls or crawls down a flight of stairs then crawls to the center of the stage to meet another mysteriously stabbed second character who’s also just crawled there, all while a third, blind character obliviously sings. With the right direction, this could be hysterical, – and it has been in other scripts and productions. Eve Arden’s character is actually well and consistently written, and if she’d been able to remember her lines and blocking, she would have been fine. Holland Taylor, with control of both, should have been terrific, if she hadn’t been drowned out by other actors’” noise” – especially by the actors unfortunately playing the thankless and one note roles of her three kids. There, the littlest bit of rewriting, underplaying, and character definition guided by a strong director, could have solved what seem to be much larger problems. But there was no strong director. The six other roles are also fine, and easily playable. One’s just a joke, but a pivotal one for the plot, and another could have been fixed by a less obvious costume and make-up (I’m judging by a publicity photo.) After reading what Bicknell said in an interview about his new book about the production, I went to this script expecting to find a dark farce that had been misidentified and trampled on, but I found just an ordinary farce – but the kind of easy Broadway staple that was common in earlier years and is often still found on television. It should have had an ordinary New York run and a more widely produced, if overall forgettable, afterlife. Instead, it became legend – which actually might be better for the playwright – If you can’t have fame, take infamy – but less good for his wallet. I realize most of you aren’t going to run out and read the script – and I’m definitely not encouraging that. But if you do, you might – might – discover that it’s mainly benign, and it was the horrible production that raised it far above that. |
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