Trudy, Trudy, Trudy,

I simply must tell you about How to Suck! I mean to How To Succeed, bien sūr! Oh, to be a classic musical subjected to such agony. Now we both know that some pain and teasing, when judiciously applied, can be emminently amusing, but poor Messrs. Burrows and Loesser. Surely they deserved a tad more respect than Mr. McAnuff and Mr, Cilento and Mr. Arnone have decided to give them.

What can I say? Well, they've made the show ugly, loud, stupid and seemingly worthless. Mr. McA has directed with all the humor of Dr. Goebbels. When the show is funny (oh, once or twice over its two hour forty-five minute running time it raises a bit of a smile) it isd almost always because this eagle-eyed director has missed yet another oportunity to KILL A JOKE! The sets, my dear! The sets! Hideous to the eye and wrong, wrong, wrong for giving the show a sense of time or place! And chorus boys! Chorus trolls! And "Brotherhood of Man," that brilliantly tasteless showstopper of 1961, has become less than that in 1995! It was funny when a white woman sang like Mahalia Jackson. Now they've made her black and the irony is gone. IRONY! Remember irony, my dear. IRONY can be found in the rapturous reviews this deconstructed piece of dreck has recieved!

There is little to say about young Matthew - remember when we used to see him shopping at the D'Ags in those oh, so casual sweat pants (pants! pants!). Well, dear lady, he has turned into my favorite breakfast fish - El Lox! The rest of the cast was adequate but the show lacked energy and joy and evil. Now all they had to do was observe the usherette on the right side of the house and they could have seen all the evil they needed to see.

Thank goodness you are not here to see it! But is there more to see. Well I have not kept my well-trimmed buns idle and more when next I put digits to to keys! Love to fuzz-face!

Mr. Jewel