Word: scripting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When taken as naive and youthful stupidity, Laura's actions seems forgivable. But the script does not allow this attitude to endure. Like everything else in the film, Laura's actions are taken to the extreme. When she finds Jean kissing a mutual male friend, Samy (Carlos Lopez), she becomes outraged, screaming at both of them and hitting everything in sight...
...four acts. No one dies, only the villains end up with egg on their face, and just about everyone finds a love to run off with. Although the Bergman film on which the musical is based, "Smiles of a Summer Night," explores the darker side of romance, Sondheim's script and score revert to a more optimistic vision. HRDC's Night Music loses track of the inevitable happy ending and plays with conflicts as if they may never be resolved. All too often the players dwell heavily on melancholy as if it may prevail, rather than as a comedic device...
Somehow these familiar gender battles are played as serious conflicts despite little depth of thought in the script to justify the treatment. Upton's portarayal of Henrik, for instance, is at once pathetic and sympathetic, but plunged too deeply in melancholy to make his overtures to the maid and his step mother amusing. The others seems to follow his lead when playing out marital strife caused by infidelities, both real and merely desired. The result is a series of quasi-serious conflicts rather than the farcical situation comedies of the script. Stokes attempts some slapstick with his rejected advance...
...inexplicable decision deflates the tensions and, frankly, the fun, of this incoherent effort. The script lacks plot to begin with, but shifting focus from hit material makes "Proxy" just plain suck...
Morality is the ostensible subject of Blue Chips, from a script Shelton wrote in 1980. A college coach (Nick Nolte) fights for traditional values against venal alumni who want to buy the best players. But the film avoids the hard truth that even traditional values in big-time college sports are a shuck. Education is just the fig leaf for the only multibillion-dollar entertainment conglomerate in which the entertainers (the players) don't get paid. The Nolte character, like any college coach, is the overseer of slave labor...