Arts
Tuesday, June 8, 1982

The Michigan Daily

Page 7

Emotions run
high when
poltergeists fly
yChris Case quirky and utterly likeable. A genuine
By __ __ ___ __ __ and only rarely sappy sense of their
love for each other fills the kind of
STEVEN SPIELBERG is the recog-emotional void that you get with
nized master of audience Raiders and keeps the dialogue spicy
gratification. He knows what people and entertaining.
want to see, hear, and feel and he has Craig T. Nelson plays Steve Freeling,
the expertise to provide these things the father of the family whose house is
and make them phenomenally suc- beseiged by supernatural intrusions.
cessful. Nelson has a good part and he turns it
Poltergeist is no exception to that into a great one. His facial expressions
success. It is a kinesthetically beautiful and sometimes-stoned antics are half
movie that moves as quickly and surely the fun of this movie. The warmth bet-
as a Japanese railway train. It has ween Freeling and his wife Diane
moments of mouth-dropping, wide-eyed (Jobeth Williams) comes across as
fascination and some scenes of real and attratively off-beat.
remarkable power. The Freelings' love for their children
But the film is also often surprisingly is also convincing and appealing, which
gentle. There is more of a sense of is fortunate since that love is central to
humanity to Poltergeist than there is, the story. There are some real throat-
for instance, in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
The family concerned in the film is both See SPIELBERG'S, Page 10
so mysterious
opera, worked well, although again the of the late Nastasia. The take off on
lyrics saved the day and not the music. modern opera with its surrealistic
Vivacio and Arpeggio, played by Ed- wooden horse and absurd costumes was
ward Smit and James Newton, were
hilarious romantic foils. See 'MYSTERY', Page 10
In the funniest and strongest scene of
the evening, Todd donned a Carmen '
Miranda outfit and went dancing at the
Flamingo Room, entrancing sailors II 61-9E,.,00
and stopping runners plugges into
walkman's dead in their tracks. The 5y
Latin beat and irony of the "Nastasia,
Lady of Mystery," numher were DINNER
enough to recall Jack Lemon's in-
fatuation with his newfound
womanhood in Sofhe Like It Hot. ANDRE
Act II began with a "Trojan Trilogy"
in which Todd's fame grew as his
singing became too good to pass as that 5TH WEEKI ENDS SOONI

Just when you thought it was safe to go into your house, Spielberg brings out
the tricks and treats of Hollywood to scare you with 'Poltergeist.'
'Na tasia' isn 't

By Jane Carl
"T'M ALWAYS afraid that I've al-
ready died and they've forgotten to
tell me," moaned Pat Rector as the title
character in Tom Simond's latest,
Natasia, Lady of Mystery, which
premiered at the Power Center this
past weekend. Unfortunately for the
audience, it was the production that had
died long before it reached the stage.
The show opened with a number en-
titled, "$27,946," which was
reminiscent of Pajama Game's
"7/4" and introduced the plight of a
debt ridden opera company. It also in-
troduced one of the major flaws of the
musical's realization: the orchestra
and the stage were never together, each
had their own continual tempo fluc-
tuations.
The Producer, played with vivacity
by Loren Hecht, came up with an
unlikely scheme to recoup the com-
pany's losses by staging the comeback
of a diva who had walked offstage in the
middle of a performance some 30 years
ago and disappeared; the only catch
being that the diva, Natasia Remora,
is now 66 and without a voice.
The comedic possibilities of this
situation were virtually ignored. In-
stead, with the aplomb of a '40s, "Hey
kids, let's put on a show!", Judy
Garland/Mickey Rooney movie,
Natasia's comeback was staged in a
Rossinian spoof entitled, "The Unloved
Maid and the Witch." More like
Weber's Der Freischutz than Rossini,
the spoof didn't work musically or
comically.
Shortly thereafter, Nastasia collap-
sed, and after carrying half of her
scenery onstage and laboriously clim-

bing into her sickbed, she sang an in-
sipid duet with the company's naive
bookkeeper and died. No one should ex-
pire mid-song, especially a middle-
aged, platitudinous opera singer whom
it has become increasingly harder to
take seriously.
Of course, the company couldn't
lose their prime breadwinner; so,
Natasia, Lady of Mystery, was recast
in the form of Todd Edward, playing
himself, the innocuous bookkeeper.
Todd was drafted in one of the stronger
musical numbers, "A. Pair of Gams,"
where he had his shapely legs exploited
and was condemned to spend the rest of
the evening showing them off in a pair
of gym shorts or in drag.
The next scene, a spoof of a Mozart

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