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| Muriel Costa-Greenspon, Matt Conley, Joe Masiell. |
HOW TO GET RID OF IT
[Musical/Fantasy/Marriage] B/LY/D: Eric Blau; M: Mort Shuman; SC: Eugene
Ionesco’s play Amadée, or How to Get Rid
of It; S/C: Don Jensen; L: Ian Calderon; P: 3W Productions, Inc.; T: Astor
Place Theatre (OB); 11/17/74-11/24/74 (9)
The creators of this show had been tremendously successful
with their revue, Jacques Brel is Alive
and Well . . . , but came a cropper with this clumsy, nine-performance
attempt to turn Ionesco’s Amadée into
a musical. The original is a classic absurdist comedy about the decay at the
heart of a failed marriage symbolized by an ever-growing corpse in a back room.
The husband, Amadée Buccinioni (Matt Conley), is a dried-up playwright, the wife, Madeleine (Muriel Costa-Greenspon), works at a
switchboard in their home. Mushrooms are sprouting in the living room. The
corpse is encroaching on their space. The couple get more and more on one
another’s nerves. While trying to get rid of the corpse, Amadée meets several characters, including an American soldier (Joe Masiell),
and flies up into the air when the police come after him. His wife begs him to
come down but he floats away.
The musical followed the original’s plot, but trivialized it
by discarding its fragile tone for a more uncouth and earthy one, with
heavy-handed gags and characterizations. Clive Barnes, who called the show “a
travesty” in which Ionesco has been "raped,” felt the play simply may have been
impossible to effectively musicalize. He acknowledged the “good score” and
noted the influence of Brel and Kurt Weill on the music, but these could not
compensate for the otherwise muddled production.
Among major changes were the transfer of the locale from
Paris to Greenwich Village and the soldier’s character from a Paris-based American
to a Vietnam vet. Joe Masiell was excellent in the role.