ZIEGFELD’S LAST WORDS
Monumental Oak Rapier & Dagger Club
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The setup for the acts, and the source for this production’s title, is the presence of a doddering Flo Ziegfeld. He bumbles about, performing minor magic tricks while he talks about his life in vaudeville. Whenever he exits, vaudeville’s lost gems appear before us.
This production is among the most amateur I’ve seen; it’s like a high school pep assembly. The staging is awkward and clumsy; the lights achieve no depth, color, mood, or variation. Though Ziegfeld mentions people and places during his occasional appearances, we’re told nothing about them; instead of enlightening us about the turn of the century, the names are just confusing. Director Suzanne E. Hannon has no feel for what makes something funny–even a simple cream-pie-in-the-face sequence loses its appeal because there’s almost no cream on the “pies.” But the main problem is the acts themselves, which are for the most part dreadful.
The well-acted Fool for Love, with Patricia Kane and Frank Nall, beautifully intermingles the fight sequences with the scene itself–it’s almost plausible that Shepard intended it that way. John Hines and Ned Mochel in The Odd Couple have the most interesting sword sequences, and some delightfully silly acting. Mochel’s fluid movement juxtaposed with Hines’s absurd posturing is something to see.
