Act, The review

Act, The review

Act, The Review - Broadway musical

This magnificent play at Broadway was directed by Martin Scorsese. In addition, during the preliminary plays out of the city (read it as – off-Broadway) to save the performances, which often were disrupted because of the enormous hostility of cast to a leading actress, Gower Champion was invited to handle all this. His work did not help and in fact, it did not have the desired effect, and in addition he wasn’t listed as director, although for a long time he was doing its job.

Judging even by just photos, all of them have Minnelli in the foreground. All the rest are on the second stage. And even being somewhere close, but still there is a serious wall between them percepted, and Liza, who, as if the piranha, greedy takes herself all pieces. With all her as if saying "look at me, only I'm the best". In general, this musical is a big, solid, and ongoing benefit of one actress. Only the costumes were a huge part of her game that she happily acted. The story, the music and the other actors – all these were at the secondary ground. Everything is in order to allow Minnelli shine as much as possible, as a shooting star. Critics spat this musical to the fullest. Everything was surrounded with criticism – from the plot to the music and from the costumes to the mood, with which main actress played, along with all accompanying actors – ones strove at every opportunity to disrupt a musical and not to go on the stage. Despite this, she is an example of self-made woman, and won a Tony Award for the fact that the audience loved her, never mind the disastrous musical performance. Those who sits in the jury of such institutions that organize regular giveaways of awards and nominations and assess the extent to which someone is worthy or go to oblivion – these people loved her.

The plot is quite thin – Minnelli plays a singer who hasn’t been singing for a long time and is trying to regain lost grounds. That’s it. This is a complete summary of the plot. We neither had to reduce artificially the summary nor try to make it thinner anyhow. All this is very swollen and smeared on screening time, which Liza seeks to fill with her.

If critics were less restrained in presenting their thoughts for fear of hurting inadvertently or offend someone, particularly the provincial singer Liza Minnelli, so they would tell the whole truth, not hiding behind the grandiloquent duality of own literacy, directly accusing main culprit in the failure of this musical – Liza Minnelli. Instead of blaming the musicians, actors, directors or someone else there. The audience had about the same reaction to this piece, as well as from the audience in the movie "Death Becomes Her" with Bruce Willis, Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn. When in the beginning, it is a disastrous musical showing, in which the heroine played by Meryl Streep and spectators begin to leave the room, swearing about loosely bought tickets.

Maybe paints are little exaggerated, but it may be that not – who can tell for sure soon after half a century, what really was happening backstages in 1977?
Last Update:April, 06th 2016

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