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Showing posts with the label Marin Mazzie

The ABCs of Broadway

A is for Annie, Get Your Gun . Irving Berlin wrote this when he was sort-of-washed-up. It was a come-back. He had help from Rodgers and Hammerstein. There's some speculation that the help was more extensive than the surface story would suggest. Bernadette Peters won her second Tony--after a long dry spell--for a Gun revival. She maybe didn't deserve it. Her accent was very, very broad and distracting. People felt that her replacement--Reba McEntire--actually did a better job than she, BP, had done. (It pains me to type this.) I spent a fair amount of the latter half of my high school years visiting the Bernadette Peters website. She wrote quite a bit about her touring schedule, and her love for dogs. I went to NYC, ostensibly to tour a university, but really to see Ms. Peters on stage (in 1999). Years later, after the big British Petroleum spill, I was given a Bernadette shirt with her image, centered, on the front, under a tagline: "The BP who Isn't Fucking up the...

A Death on Broadway

(5) I don't love the musical "Ragtime." To me, it feels like the dutiful work of an uninspired "A" student. Competent and lifeless. It lacks humor. It lacks surprise. It wasn't material that suited Marin Mazzie well--because Mazzie was sexy, and "Ragtime" didn't let her show that. She just had to stand center-stage and deliver some leaden and fairly obvious observations about gender inequality. (That said, she did her work well. "Let this be the year we *both* travel.") My favorite Marin Mazzie moment was her performance in "Broadway's Leading Ladies." This was some PBS special that threw together Mazzie, McDonald, Judy Kuhn, Lea DeLaria. The list goes on. A closeted boy's wet dream. Mazzie did a slinky, winking song by--you guessed it--a gay man. A genius. Lorenz Hart. The song was "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered." I saw this at the start of my freshman year in college, via VHS tape. Mazzie was ...