Friday, February 4, 2005

SO ARE THEY, LIKE, SCARY LITTLE?: I may have passed on my only opportunity to see "Good Vibrations" tonight by instead opting for "Little Women." I've never read Alcott's novel, though I'm a big fan of Gillian Armstrong's starry 1994 movie version, with Winona Ryder, Claire Danes, Kirsten Dunst, and Susan Sarandon. I was expecting a relatively "heavy" show as a result. However, what theatre-goers get instead is a schizophrenic mix. Act I plays (mostly) as a lightweight musical comedy--the girls play dress-up, Jo and Meg have an ill-fated trip to a ball, Beth convinces the crochety next-door neighbor to let her play his piano, and the girls sing and dance, with laughter and lessons ensuing.

At least for leading lady Sutton Foster, so good in "Thoroughly Modern Millie" a few years ago, Act I works out OK, but it's not what I was expecting. During the first act, Foster plays Jo as almost a variant of Millie, with the same antic clutziness that worked well in that show. However, my image of Jo is driven by Winona Ryder and Katharine Hepburn, and in Act I, Foster seems committed to playing it as far away as possible from those performances. The performance reaffirms that Foster needs a regular sitcom gig, or at least a movie part, as a goofy and charming comic. Not everyone manages as well, particularly Amy McAlexander as Amy, who's apparently been directed to be as annoying as possible in the first act.

And then Act II takes an abrupt tonal shift--it's almost like the creators said "enough with the fun!" After a moderately peppy opening number, the whole second act is full of ballads and "big voice" numbers (aside from a very brief quasi-comic patter song in which Laurie and Amy announce their engagement). Of course, you know how it ends--Beth dies, Marmee comforts Jo, who uses it as inspiration to write stories about her sisters, and Jo winds up with the Professor. The biggest problem is that (at least on stage), none of the songs are really interesting or inspiring (though Foster and Maureen McGovern as Marmee both sing quite well), and the show just ends.

It's not a "Good Vibrations"/"Dracula" level disaster by any means, but it isn't what it could be--perhaps this was an ill-founded musicalization from the beginning, but Foster's performance is well worth seeing.

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