Picture it! May, 1978! A confluence of LEGENDS, all nominated for Tony Awards for Best Performance by an Actress in a Musical, go to lunch at Sardi’s Restaurant and make THESE FACES to bless this timeline! Let them wash over you!
PS: Liza won for the The Act, a musical I’ve never heard of but which sounds like it was A DISASTER! Our beloved Madeline Kahn was nominated for On the Twentieth Century; the glorious Eartha Kitt was up for Timbuktu!; and Frances Sternhagen, whom I did not even know could sing, was up for Angel, which is not somehow a time-travelling musical adaptation of the Buffy spin-off but instead a musical adaptation of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel (!!!), which sounds like a TERRIBLE IDEA and which did in fact close after FIVE PERFORMANCES. Please enjoy these excerpts from its New York Times review, via Wiki:
- “Angel…is a damp and oppressive amalgam of bathos. It has lyrics of the consistency of cornbread soaked in milk, a whole collection of indifferent performances and a score of sufficient banality to furnish a number or two for the piped music on airplanes waiting to take off.”
- “The performances have no shine to them; at best they are losing battles.”
- “Mr. Geld’s score is so thin and trite as to make us notice Don Walker’s orchestration. Its vulgarity is unfailing.”
- “It is putting things too strongly to call “Angel” a disaster. It is a desert.”
AHHHHH no wonder she is screaming!
