When I went back closing weekend, there had been at least two replacements in almost all of the principal roles, and some had had as many as four replacements. The show I saw that weekend was not nearly as funny as the show I saw a few days after the opening. I might have chalked that up to different audiences, but the audience on the final Friday night was certainly revved up to see it. I will say that what it had lost in laughs, it seemed to gain in a greater sense of reality with which the movie sequences were played. I wouldn't necessarily say that I preferred the closing cast, but I did appreciate that a bunch of them brought different values to it than had the original cast.
I did wonder, though, if Michael Blakemore had looked in on it much during the run. |