| re: I Agree... | |
| Last Edit: AlanScott 03:21 pm EDT 08/19/20 | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 03:16 pm EDT 08/19/20 | |
| In reply to: I Agree... - Whistler 11:46 am EDT 08/19/20 | |
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| This brings to mind The Bed Before Yesterday, the sex comedy by Ben Travers that was produced in December 1975 when he was 89. He had supposedly started it in the early 1950s but didn't finish it either because it was too racy to be produced at the time or because he was depressed after his wife died in 1951. Different articles said different things about that. It was produced in London starring Joan Plowright, with Helen Mirren in a supporting role, directed by Lindsay Anderson. It was initially presented in repertory with The Seagull (Mirren was Nina to Plowright's Arkadina) and then continued on its own, running 16 months. Reviews had been mixed but leaning toward favorable, and audiences embraced it. Plowright was succeeded by Sheila Hancock in late July 176 and then Judy Cornwell took over around six months later. In October 1976, a pre-Broadway tour started with Carol Channing in the lead, again directed by Lindsay Anderson. After three months on tour to reviews that ranged from mediocre to awful, it closed. Broadway plans were canceled. Last year, I read it. I found it difficult to believe that the play could ever have been successful anywhere in any production, but apparently Plowright was brilliant, and it somehow worked in that first production (or worked well enough for enough people). I'm not Plowright's biggest fan, but it does seem to me that if anyone would be right for the central role, she was the person. But in reading, it seemed one of the worst things I'd ever read that had received a major commercial production. Around a month before the pre-Broadway tour started, Clive Barnes saw it in London and wrote this in the Times: “It used to be a compliment paid to certain English comedians that ‘they were funny without being vulgar.’ For too much of the time this play is vulgar without being funny." That can't have been encouraging for the play's Broadway prospects, but it seems to me about right, except that he might also have mentioned that it managed to seem both mechanical and incoherent (at least that's how it seemed to me in reading). In 1994, it was revived in London with Brenda Blethyn and was not a success. Lighting struck once under just the right circumstances. As for Moose Murders, I agree that it's far from the worst script of all time. In fact, it probably reads better than The Bed Before Yesterday. It's probably even more coherent than The Bed Before Yesterday. |
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