| re: Question for Alan re. Gypsy | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 10:13 am EST 01/09/25 | |
| In reply to: Question for Alan re. Gypsy - DanielVincent 02:37 pm EST 01/03/25 | |
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| Hi, DanielVincent. First, thank you for the very kind words. Second, I’m sorry it’s taken me a few days to reply. I wanted to refresh my memory by watching it again, and it’s taken me a few days to watch all of it. So I gotta say it was better than I remembered. I think perhaps I have allowed myself to be too influenced by Arthur Laurents’s negativity toward the film. I do think it’s a mixed bag. It looks kind of cheaply done. There isn’t much visual style to the direction or camera work, although I did appreciate that there wasn’t hyperactive cutting from one shot to another that we would get nowadays. Sometimes there are even relatively long takes. And it profits from much of the singing having been done live. I could probably write a few thousand words about what I liked and what I didn’t like, as well as stuff that I neither really disliked nor liked but I felt didn’t quite come off. Sometimes the camera seems obviously in the wrong place for a moment, but not too often. It’s nice to get virtually the whole script and score (at least the script as Laurents wanted it by that time), and even the original underscoring, and with a generally competent and certainly talented cast, and with the Robbins choreography. One odd thing (this is minor) is that it’s pretty obvious that every time we see a stage, it’s the same stage. It’s pretty obvious that they used one theatre for all the different theatres. Obviously, the biggest problem is Midler. And it’s hard for me to quite put my finger on what was wrong. Most of her choices make sense, but she almost never seems to go very deep in realizing them. And it’s not because they didn’t have enough rehearsal because they had a pretty-much unheard-of seven weeks. But I don't think she's the disaster some people think she is, although “Rose’s Turn” is not good, except for the interesting way she does the “Why did I do it?” section. She has some good moments elsewhere, and, again, almost all her choices make sense on paper. But her performance seems very surface to me. Also, for the most part, her Rose doesn’t go very dark. She gives us a very cheerful Rose, which I guess is justifiable. And when she does go dark, sometimes it’s wrong, like how little time she looks even sort of in Louise’s direction during “Everything’s Coming Up Roses.” She spends way too much of the song way in front of Louise and Herbie. I think it’s fine for her to be in front of them some of the time, but she just moves completely away from them for extended periods to a degree that would look odd even onstage. But it seems to me that she wanted to play a more likable Rose, or perhaps that’s all she was equipped to play. She made one interesting choice that I don’t recall from any other Rose: I don't recall any other Rose seeming to consciously know that Herbie is going to leave her when he walks back in to the dressing room as Louise gets dressed for the strip. But there are moments that should be important for Rose but go for nothing, like, “Louise, don’t be like June.” I was surprised by how much I liked Cynthia Gibb, especially in the strip and in the moments between "Mama, I'm pretty" and when she finds herself onstage. And much of what she does in the Minsky’s dressing room scene is very good, although for some reason she is not good in the speech starting, “”I SAID TURN IT OFF!” but I think I have seen other Louises who suddenly go awry there. Peter Riegert is a good actor and he makes a lot of smart choices, but many don't feel organic. It sometimes feels like he and Midler had no personal connection. I wonder what he felt. I wonder if he sometimes thought, "I feel like I'm acting alone." But he has nice moments, and once in a while, he and Midler even have a good moment together. And Ardolino got nice moments from other people here and there. It certainly is vastly better than Mame so that was a bad comparison. |
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