 |
| Set for Some People . . . (Photo: John Lee Beatty._ |
Self-described as “a revue with very little music,” this hapless little show was composed of thin sketches with shallow premises that lacked the substance for necessary development. Clive Barnes described the bits as one-joke ideas that exhausted their humorous potential once the joke was clear. In sum, he called it “a harmless little show” of modest pretensions.
The able, four-member cast performed a sequence of skits,
some of which were Kafkaesque in their depiction of a world where man is
threatened by the mechanical devices (phones, vacuum cleaners, tape recorders)
he needs for everyday life, or is himself metamorphosed into an inanimate
object, a spoon in one of the better scenes. (It was too early for cell phones
and personal computers.) Other routines showed such things as a man who makes
his living by drawing the arrows on maps, a clairvoyant whose future-gazing show
only the most banal things, and a scene involving two couples taking turns in
bed.
The actors were Lois Battle, Rod Browning, Jordan Crittenden,
and Carol Morley. The show is most worthy of recognition for providing only the second credited examples of leading scenic designer John Lee Beatty’s work in New York. Coincidentally, when I informed Mr. Beatty that I was going to be running this piece, he replied that, by chance, he had just come across the long-forgotten image seen at the top of this page, which he kindly allowed me to reproduce. No other production photos appear to be available. His note mentioned that a newspaper strike at the time of the opening prevented the bad reviews from coming out. "Once they did, we closed immediately!"
