Monday, October 24, 2016

Can You Believe They Are Going To Revive This On Broadway????????????????????


                                                      "Ouisa:  You are my SLAVE, and you will
                                                           serve me, BOY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
                                                         Paul: Ah am from New York! And ah ain't
                                                            no slave boy to no motherfuckin' White
                                                          BITCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

     
                                         Once upon a time, in the late 1980's, an enterprising grifter named David Hampton, claiming he knew some private school children, as he was the son of actor Sidney Poitier, found his way into the lives of news exec and Dean of The Columbia School Of Journalism,  Osborn Elliiott, and his wife Inger.  Believing his story, they invited the young man into their home.  But they were quickly disillusioned, one evening, when they returned home from a prestiege engagement, and found Hampton had brought into their home, a gay hustler, a naked creature of the streets, who robbed them, and probably had crabs, so they all got it, too.  Hampton spun another story, about how his father would get them auditions for the film version of "CATS," but soon Hampton was out on his butt, and eventually convicted.

                                           One of the Elliotts' friends turned out to be a rather mediocre, and overrated playwright named John Guare. When  they told him this story, he saw its dramatic possibilities, and wrote what is now his signature work, "Six Degrees Of Separation."  It was trouble from the word go.

                                             Blythe Danner had originally been cast as Ouisa. But she quickly backed out of it, and no one, to this day, knows why.  Blythe is not talking.  Stockard Channing was recast, as Ouisa, and when it opened, at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre, Lincoln Center on May 16, 1990, I could not get over how crazy the critics were falling over this thing.  That big old closet case, Frank Rich, thought it was the greatest thing to come down the pike.  By the time I saw it, with my "Chorus Line" fave, Kelly Bishop playing a wonderful Ouisa, I was already calling it "Six Degrees Of Crap," which I still do to this day, and painting comic speech balloons on the poster that had the lines above--created by me--which would have livened up the play quite a bit.  The only redeemable thing I thought was in the play were the actors who played the obnoxious children, the only honest characters in the play, and the ones I identified with most, because they were exactly what they were supposed to be, while everyone else was pretending to be something they weren't.

                                               And the play puts down everyone, even New York, When the two young actors, innocents from another part of the country, ended up murdered, I was completely disgusted with the whole thing.

                                                The movie was not much better, except the actual New York locales, were luscious to look at.

                                                  And now this clunker is going to get revived, Guare must need cash, since he never had a hit since.  I love Allison Janney and John Benjamin Hickey, but can they breath life into this turkey??????????????????????

                                                    Now, darlings, if I could get seen for one of the obnoxious children, that COULD make a difference.                                          

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