Some of that price is familiar: broken love affairs, broken families, broken lives. Like its predecessors among backstage musicals, ''Dreamgirls'' is about the price of success. Bennett uses shadows and klieg lights, background and foreground action, spotlighted figures and eerie silhouettes, to maintain the constant tension between the dark and bright sides of his dreamgirls' glittery dreams.Īnd in that tension is the emotional clout of the show. In Act I, an exchange of payola money between two men blossoms into a surreal panorama of mass corruption that finally rises, like a vision out of hell, clear to the roof of the theater. Robbins, he almost pointedly recreates moments from ''Gypsy'' before soaring onward in his own original way. As if to acknowledge his historical debt to Mr. He keeps ''Dreamgirls'' in constant motion - in every conceivable direction - to perfect his special brand of cinematic stage effects (montage, dissolve, wipe). Aldredge's costumes - keep coming together and falling apart to create explosive variations on a theme. Like the show's voices, the set pieces - gloriously abetted by Tharon Musser's lighting and Theoni V. Wagner has designed a few mobile, abstract scenic elements -aluminum towers and bridges - and keeps them moving to form an almost infinite number of configurations. What's more, the score's method is reinforced visually by Robin Wagner's set. It is a show that seems to dance from beginning to end, yet in fact has next to no dance numbers.
It takes place in roughly 20 locations, from Harlem to Hollywood, but it has not one realistic set.
#Effie dreamgirls full
''Dreamgirls'' is full of plot, and yet it has virtually no spoken scenes. He has done so in a most imaginative way. Bennett has fashioned a show that strikes with the speed and heat of lightning. Working with an unusually gifted new composer, Henry Krieger, and a clever librettist, the playwright Tom Eyen - as well as with a wholly powerhouse cast and design team -Mr. Robbins's Broadway heir apparent, as he has demonstrated in two previous ''Gypsy''-like backstage musicals, ''Follies'' (which he staged with Harold Prince) and ''A Chorus Line.'' But last night the torch was passed, firmly, unquestionably, once and for all. In ''Gypsy,'' the director-choreographer Jerome Robbins and his collaborators made the most persuasive case to date (1959) that a musical could be an organic entity - in which book, score and staging merged into a single, unflagging dramatic force. If Miss Holliday's Act I solo is one of the most powerful theatrical coups to be found in a Broadway musical since Ethel Merman sang ''Everything's Coming Up Roses'' at the end of Act I of ''Gypsy,'' so ''Dreamgirls'' is the same kind of breakthrough for musical stagecraft that ''Gypsy'' was. Not only does he have a brand-new, svelte Dream in costume, ready to replace Effie on stage, but he also has chosen another Dream to replace Effie in his bed.Īnd, with all due respect to our new star, there's plenty more to cheer. And Curtis's bad news does not end there. Effie no longer fits: she's fat, and her singing is anything but light. To take the final leap, the Dreams must change their image - to a new, more glamorous look and a ''lighter'' sound. The act's hard-driving manager, Curtis (Ben Harney), has come into the Dreams' dressing room to inform Effie, who is both his lover and the group's best singer, that she is through.Įffie is through because the Dreams are at last escaping the showbiz ghetto of rhythm and blues to cross over into the promised and lucrative land of white pop. At the end of Act I, the heroines are beginning to make it in Las Vegas, but there's some nasty business to be dealt with backstage.
Like the Supremes, to which they bear more than a passing resemblance, the Dreams have their share of obstacles to overcome on the way up. ''Dreamgirls'' is the story of a black singing group that rises from the ghetto to national fame and fortune during the 1960's. Broadway history was made at the end of the first act of Michael Bennett's beautiful and heartbreaking new musical, ''Dreamgirls.'' While such moments are uncommonly rare these days, I'm here to report that one popped up at the Imperial last night. What you feel is a seismic emotional jolt that sends the audience, as one, right out of its wits. WHEN Broadway history is being made, you can feel it.
0 kommentar(er)
