Word: mama
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...Harvardmen, but this latest of the 1944 season's period pieces can hardly be called memorable. John P. Marquand '14 has collaborated with George S. Kaufman on a good and a very funny play, which, unfortunately, for itself, follows closely in the wake of the smash hit, "I Remember Mama,' and cannot help but suffer decidedly by comparison...
...Remember Mama (adapted by John van Druten from Kathryn Forbes's Mama's Bank Account; produced by Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein II) is the first producing enterprise of the great music-&-words team of Oklahoma!, the second smash hit within a year for the author of The Voice of the Turtle, and Broadway's pleasantest family album since Life with Father. Not really a play-it has no plot, no structure, no weightier crisis than an operation on a child or the chloroforming of a cat-Mama gets across as theater partly because it never struggles...
...chronicle of a Norwegian-American family in turn-of-the-century San Francisco, Mama is unfolded retrospectively (from a corner of the stage) by daughter Katrin, now a successful writer. The kitchen-for-parlor home life that Katrin looks back on is dominated by firm, frugal, warmhearted Mama (extremely well played by Mady Christians) who, to give her children a feeling of security, pretends that the family has a flourishing bank account. Domestic fireworks are provided by hard-drinking, softhearted Uncle Chris (Oscar Homolka); domestic dissonances by Mama's prying married sisters. The adolescent Katrin composes excruciating short stories...
Closer in tone to Our Town than to Life with Father, Mama is warm, humorous, sentimental, lightly nostalgic, more than slightly idealized...
Mady Christians as Mama is quiet and brave and wise and she does a standout job. But right along with Mama is Oscar Homolka as Uncle Chris, "a black Norwegian" who stamps around bossing the family, drinking liberally, and living in sin with "that woman" who is his housekeeper. Little Dagmar has a pet eat. Uncle Elizabeth, and Nels, her brother, identifies it as a man eat, and backs up his statement by saying, "I looked...