Word: scripting
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Director Joel Schwartz did what he could with the script, and all things considered, he did a lot. Judged professionally, House Afire would rate low grade B, but the production is meant to entertain, and it does so beautifully...
...different disguises, and his impersonation of a crackly-voiced beggar woman in "I Beg of You" nearly steals the show. Sandra Robbins, as Columbina, sings the eighteenth century melodies beautifully, if a bit too softly, but she has trouble warming to the sex-ridden requirements of the twentieth-century script...
...Randy Lindel, who plays Steckel, a town oaf, is often tiresome in his buffoonery: his eating scene at the beginning of the third act, however, is a wonderful replica of Squire Western's gluttony in Tom Jones. Lucian Russel, as Odario, sprinkles an appalling covetousness into the otherwise romantic script, grabbing for jewels and selling his lovely daughter. Randy Pyle, who plays the ghost of Steckel's father, conveys slightly more the circus clown parodying Hamlet than the spectre, although he fits both parts equally well...
Beyond Miss Dukakis, however, Murray's success is due almost solely to the power of the script; most of the cast is either bland or annoyingly energetic. `Louis Zorich gives a sporadically moving, but basically uninspired, performance as the step-father. When he confounds the Director by positing the elusiveness of human reality, he sounds more like a philosophy student reciting chapter and verse than a man whose very movement is tortured by the recollection of his lechery. Even in the early moments, when taunted by his step-daughter, Zorich seems overly calm and cold...
People are consumer products to Sammy Glick, and when he has consumed enough-script writers, girl friends, studio chiefs-he reaches the projection room at the top of World Wide Studio. At musical's end, he is faced with the topman cliché: "You're all alone, Sammy Glick." As Sammy, Steve Lawrence moves with the wary savage grace of a jungle cat, and when he claws, he claws. Bernice Massi, the banker's daughter Sammy marries, matches him in velvety ferocity. In a subplot romance, Robert Alda and Sally Ann Howes seem to be going through...