Word: plot
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Juliet is to forget Oklahoma, South Pacific, and The King and I. Certainly Rodgers and Hammerstein did, for their new musical is a leggy trifle, with an abundance of color and no significance. Hammerstein's characters in Me and Juliet seem cut from pasteboard to be maneuvered through a plot that's as corny as Kansas in August. But since the cast is talented and the staging fabulous, the show is a pleasant evening of lightweight entertainment...
...bows at the final curtain. His cat walks and lighting bridges rise and lower, the entire stage shifts to the right to reveal the theatre wings, and his sets alternate between elaborate glamor and backstage authenticity. Because of his thoughtful staging, the confusing musical-within-a-musical plot is somewhat untangled...
...interior musical, also called "Me and Juliet," is a parody of all musical-comedy, with special pokes at Cole Porter and Frank Loesser. The plot of the main show, however, can only be a parody of Rodgers and Hammerstein-with all the unnatural villainies and pat romances which on occasion have plagued the team. This time, the action is so melodramatic and unreal that the audience cannot accept the characters as people...
...Isabel Bigley is big and attractive in voice and frame as a chorus girl who renounces a brutish electrician for the assistant stage manager. As her suitors, Mark Dawson and Bill Hayes each have powerful stage voices but too little to do with them; the shifts between the backstage plot and the on stage musical are so frequent that none of the principals is seen often enough. This is especially true of Joan McCracken, pixie-faced little dancer whose number, "It's Me," is the show's comic high point. Helena Scott, Juliet in the sub-musical, has a fine...
Much of this material needlessly piles extra melodrama on the movie's sufficiently melodramatic subject so that the picture at times almost collapses from its own plot weight. Director & Co-Author Giuseppi (Bitter Rice) De Santis also injects an extraordinary amount of sex appeal into his picture, notably by having the better part of the 200 attractive accident victims strewed about on the collapsed staircase in various states of fetching disarray. But underneath all this excessive color, the picture has a hard bedrock of realism that props it up dramatically: it is an earnest, often eloquent indictment of social...