Word: broadway
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...judicious review of the show, see Richard Zoglin's piece in TIME; I'll just fill in some connections and breaks the show makes with the movie. For a start, the Broadway version gives a backstory to the film's 36 hours. It wants to tell how J.J. got Sidney into his awful career commitment: by discovering him, when he was just a nebbish - Sidney Falcone, dazzled by the Hunsecker hubris - and educating him in the ways of venality. (It's basically "The Producers," but without the gaiety, the color or the synchronized goose-stepping.) As played by Brian...
...fizz of its own. (That's what happens when you decide to promote Susie and Dallas from foils into virtual coequals in stage time with J.J. and Sidney.) The show is not so much dark as drab; it lumbers instead of sprinting; and Hamlisch, after three pretty fine Broadway scores, seems to have run out of tunes. But it could be I'm too possessive of the movie, too reluctant to give credit to those who have tampered with it - sorry, elaborated on it. Get back to me in 45 years; maybe we'll see another classic in another "Sweet...
...world "Sweet Smell" so pungently defines was nearly in the past tense. The Broadway we glimpse under the opening credits reveals a street little like today's. The Trans-Lux Theatre, the Warner and Capital and Rivoli: all are gone. So are the roomy, stately Checker Cabs. The Palace Theatre, where the Herbie Temple sequence was shot, dropped vaudeville shortly after the picture was made. The Brill Building, Tin Pan Alley's Deco palace, still gleams, though it was never a residence; J.J.'s penthouse apartment, with its marble finishings, a Xanadu-size fireplace and a terrace that beckons frail...
...today, when some of us get a wistful kick seeing how nattily the nasties dressed back then, as if for the funeral of those character they were trying to assassinate. Like all old movies, this one is a documentary: a precious, permanent record, not just of the vanished Broadway landmarks, the mausoleums of cafe society, the media mammoths at the very moment they were becoming dinosaurs, but of a bygone film style and an acting style. Today, that sort of directorial and behavioral efficiency is, alas, as dead as the Stork Club...
...admit it. I collect the original Broadway cast recordings of many shows. I also collect the recordings of the original London cast. And the revival cast. And the studio cast. Often, all for the same show...