Gwen Verdon's Ugly Duckling And The Seven Deadly Sins
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE By Joseph T. Shipley Gwen Verdon's Ugly Duckling And The Seven Deadly Sins Redhead, Book by Herbert and Dorothy Fields, Sidney Sheldon and David Shaw. Music by Albert Hague. Lyrics by...
...The claptrap asininities of an enemy should hardly be displayed as art...
...As an unfriendly gesture of scorn toward America, it has been far surpassed by our native products...
...There is nothing in the choreography, the language, the idea, to make The Seven Deadly Sins worthy of presentation...
...THERE IS no question that Redhead is, deservedly, another hit musical...
...A wistful love 8ong, as Essie protests that "the right finger of my left hand" is no man's land...
...the casual music of Kurt Weill is misused throughout the evening...
...There's almost too much in the hodge-podge evening...
...weirdies in the waxworks...
...At the 46th Street Theater...
...In every city Anna sells herself...
...The dancer's rehearsal exercises (however gracefully executed by Allegra Kent) are scant excuse for choreography...
...The swan ward journey is complicated by the strangling of an actress, whose murder Essie Whimple, the ugly duckling of the waxworks, reproduces for the museum show...
...In and around the Simpson Sisters' Waxworks Museum, it ripples into a riot of song and laughter...
...Tom's song of discovery that "My girl is just enough woman for me...
...The story and its language are fantastically flat and unreal...
...I can see no valid reason for the continuing pressence in the repertoire of The Seven Deadly Sins...
...Lyrics by Dorothy Fields...
...This is intended as satire, not as burlesque...
...Directed by Bob Fosse...
...Then let us hear his music in the concert hall...
...Visions that come to Essie...
...Instead of developing just one story, the musical team has dumped out a cornucopia of frolics...
...even Frankie and Johnny has a better flow, better diction—and better story...
...Allowing for the fact that Lotte Lenya (called in the effusive program notes "the greatest chanteuse since Yvette Guilbert") cannot sing, and has such a pronounced (not Southern) accent that even in the fourth row one often cannot understand her, it is hard to believe that W. H. Auden and Chester Kalhnan (to whom the translation is debited) could actually have perpetrated such feeble and tawdry verse...
...Now that the good City Center ballet season has been replaced by the even better musical comedy series, I am moved to protest one number in the ballet repertoire...
...Neither as drama nor dance nor satire, does this come within rocket-range of art...
...Written by a man who chose the eastern side of the Iron Curtain, it shows Berthold Brecht's constant scorn for the West combined with his frequent banality...
...Gwen Verdon carries delightfully one of the oldest of sure-fire themes, that of the ugly duckling who turns out to be a swan...
...My colleague on the music page may tell me Kurt Weill has done a good job...
...A Chaplinesque harlequinade by Gwen Verdon, "Erbie Fiteh's Twitch," followed by a ballet suite, as Essie dreams herself a star...
...Later, when she has achieved notoriety, men line up to jump out of the window when she spurns them...
...a night of cockney low life at the Green Dragon Pub...
...Rehearsal at the theater of a rollicking travesty of a British company doing "The Uncle Sam Rag...
...Theater Strong Man Tom Baxter, hunting the murderer, finds Essie oddly in his way, but ends—of course—catching the strangler and being caught by the girl...
...a crowded jail scene with a song and dance for freedom amusingly reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan's Yeoman of the Guard...
...Tritely in 1933, Brecht rehashed this picture, with added absurdities no American would commit...
...Here the faults are in the present version...
...He usually was shown gloating over the succulent women served up for his sexual appetite...
...The wild chase after two men, the murderer and the man he has made himself up to resemble, makes an exciting and amusing finale for an evening of varied delights...
...Not even a comic strip achieves such banality...
...When Anna of Louisiana comes to the big cities, she jumps upon men in the street: Click goes a camera, and presto they pay her blackmail...
...In the choreography, she doesn't even pretend to give them the pictures...
...Parodies should be clever, should expose the faults of what they mock...
...In the early I920's—as in O'Neill's Fifth Avenue mannikins of The Hairy Ape (1922) and in John Howard Lawson's Processional (1925)—it was fashionable for American writers to picture the wealthy man with gross paunch and giant cigar...
...Presented by Robert Fryer and Lawrence Carr...
Vol. 42 • March 1959 • No. 9
