![]() ![]() ![]() Surely Nesbit (Lynnette Perry), who inspired socialite Harry Thaw to blow architect White’s brains out (neither man is depicted onstage), was more than a standard-issue bubble-headed chorine. With a few exceptions, the characters here are whittled down to their signifying traits, a reducing that goes beyond the standard musical theater shorthand. What shouldn’t have gone, though, is three-dimensional characterization. Something had to go or we’d be sitting in the Ford Theater for more than the plenty-long three hours. In Livent Inc.’s $ 8 million-plus production, headed for Broadway late next year, lyricist Lynn Ahrens and book writer Terrence McNally have kept most of the figures who populate the novel - a feat the movie barely managed - even if some of the characters (Houdini, for example) are little more than stock figures.įans of the novel will no doubt be disappointed with some of the editing done here - Emma Goldman’s interaction with starlet Evelyn Nesbit, eliminated entirely, would be my gripe - but such fault-finding is hardly fair. Doctorow’s tale of the gilded (think summer linens and parasols), the oppressed and the newly arrived blends the lives of common folk with the rich and famous of the day, a story not so much of serendipity as of the threads that connect all our lives, from the inhabitants of whitebread New Rochelle to Harlem, from a just-off-the-boat immigrant to Houdini and famed architect Stanford White. ![]()
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