John Dossett as Herbie | |
Posted by: DanielVincent 05:02 pm EST 01/24/25 | |
In reply to: re: The clever title of your Substack is "Tony" worthy! - lordofspeech 11:57 am EST 01/24/25 | |
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Thank you for your kind words. I very much agree with you that Rose’s resistance to marriage is mostly about her wanting control over her own life, and that truly exploring the experience of a mixed race couple in the first half of the 20th century would probably require different text—which is yet another reason why I question Wolfe’s casting of Burstein, specifically, and a white actor more generally. Dossett, in no small part because he had such electric sexual chemistry with Bernadette Peters, projected a strength and virility that I’ve not seen another Herbie possess. While he was chivalrous (after all, the “ugly sister” line was still in the book), he was no doormat. His constant sublimation of his own needs in favor of Rose’s seemed like a new experience for him, and it’s always more interesting to watch discovery onstage than habit. Moreover, it made his sacrifices a more potent source of conflict, both internally and with Rose. In the scene before “You’ll Never Get Away From Me,” when he says he gets angry on the inside because he’s afraid of himself and afraid of the possibility that he’d walk out on Rose if he ever let himself feel all that he’s suppressing, it landed differently with Dossett. It wasn’t a threat, but there was a potential for danger absent from the characterizations offered by Danny Burstein, Jonathan Hadary, and Boyd Gaines. They all seem to have chosen “mensch” as Herbie’s defining character trait. Dossett’s Herbie was more complicated. |
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