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| Max Showalter, Ruth Ford, Russ Thacker, Barbara Cook, Carol Brice. |
A 1952 play version of Truman Capote’s 1951 novel, The Grass Harp, had a brief run but this
musical adaptation, 20 years later, was gone much sooner. It was first produced by the Michigan University Professional Theatre Program in 1971.
The whimsical story
deals with a group of saccharine-sweet eccentrics--some of their names altered from Capote's--in the Deep South. One of
them, Dolly Talbo (Barbara Cook), is a spinster who has possession of a miracle
gypsy medicine for dropsy. When some of the others try to get her to release it
for commercial production, Dolly and several buddies (Collin [Russ Thacker], a youth; Judge Cool [John Baragrey]; and Catherine Creek [Carol Brice], a black housekeeper) take to a tree house in a China tree.
The conflict revolves around Dolly’s sister Verena (Ruth
Ford) trying with the aid of Sheriff Amos Legrand (Harvey Vernon) to get them all put in
jail. The resolution arrives with the antagonists coming around and accepting
Dolly’s point of view.
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| Carol Brice, John Baragrey, Russ Thacker, Karen Morrow, Chrisrian Stabile, Barbara Cook, and children. |
Aside from the TV critics, the reviewers were unable to
pluck their strings happily for The Grass Harp.
John Simon spurned it as “a sad, short, hard breathing and artificially
breathless musical” in which “you sit there watching feyness pass for
profundity, coyness for inventiveness and tartar sauce for béarnaise.” The show
was too stickily sentimental for most and its characters too mushily good at
heart. Its bland book and lyrics struck few sparks, although the music had
redeeming qualities. Cook, Ford, Carol Brice as the housekeeper, and Karen
Morrow as an evangelist called Babylove (played by Celeste Holm in the Michigan tryout), were in fine form, but the musical was too lethargic in
conception and direction to stir up interest, and The Grass Harp's strings were silenced in a week.