Word: scripting
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...happened--as Hollywood would have seen fit to script it--the only people aside from Reagan who really believed in Star Wars were the military leadership of the Soviet Union. The Zap! Pow! Bam! comic-book defense strategy reinforced Moscow's growing despair about the future and hastened the end of the cold war. And that, finally, is what has proved most galling to the Gipper's ideological opponents: his glossy Hollywood optimism proved more supple than the professional pessimism of the intellectual left. Ultimately, Reagan's sloppy and often insensitive domestic governance will have little impact on his place...
...himself was not so simple, not to mention simpleminded, as his critics held--the "kindly fanatic" in Garry Wills' phrase. He confounded his biographer Edmund Morris, remained opaque even to friends of many years. The notion that he was a second-rate actor who did well with a script continues to be dispelled with the release of his radio addresses and more recently, his personal letters, which show a far more subtle mind and sophisticated outlook than the caricature ever suggested. But then, Reagan had a gift for being underestimated, which served him well in all the lives...
...tradition of concert revivals - in which the principals wear evening clothes and carry the script (though they have memorized their parts), while a couple dozen musicians saw away at the original orchestrations - is a distinguished one. Jerome Kern's 1985 centenary cued four glittery restorations of his early Princess Theatre musicals at New York's Carnegie Hall. These were the shows (with book and lyrics by Guy Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse) whose Held-girl-slim plots, witty rhymes and gorgeous scores created the form of the Broadway musical comedy. John McGlinn's meticulous orchestrations, and showstopping turns by Judy Kaye...
...show's script hadn't survived intact. That meant the new production required extensive revisions. Lucky for Encores!, David Ives is its script doctor in residence. Ives, whose evening of short plays known as "All in the Timing" revealed a mad-genius mastery of sketch comedy, has pruned, edited, concertized a dozen Encores! shows. Here, though, he practically had to invent a script - "Pardon My English" wasn't so much revived as vived. So Ives pinwheels his ingenuity to make the audience conspirators in the play's structural silliness...
...Ives made a pretty, witty something of the script. Director Gary Griffin made it sing, sumptuously; Russell Warner touched up the orchestrations to these just-short-of-classic Gershwin songs; and Rob Ashford staged some sublimely silly choreography. (My notes read, "six dancing couples form a giant pretzel," but I may have been hallucinating.) In a nifty cast, I especially liked Felicia Finley, who played Magda the saucy parlormaid. Finley has looks, a voice and that ageless soubrette pertness - the total musical comedy package. But then, that's what you almost always get at Encores...