Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Quote of the Day (Lauren Graham, on Life After “Gilmore Girls”)


"I'll never be anything but thankful for the show (Gilmore Girls), but I don't think about it much. I see the DVD boxes and I'm, like, 'look at my hair. What was I doing?'"—Lauren Graham, quoted by Joanne Kaufman, “Life After 'Gilmore Girls': Egg Salad, Adelaide, and All,” The Wall Street Journal, March 10, 2009

Everybody’s been dying for something to cheer them up this dreary winter, so the critically panned revival of Frank Loesser’s classic musical Guys and Dolls has to rank as one of the major disappointments of the year to date. (My God, even the immortal opening lines of “Fugue for Tinhorns”—“I got the horse right here, /The name is Paul Revere”—weren’t enough to put the critics in a happy mood!)

Fortunately, the notices for Lauren Graham have not been as uniformly bad as the show itself. Though the Times turned thumbs down on her, numerous other critics have praised her effort as Adelaide, the forlorn longtime fiancée of Nathan Detroit.

As you might expect, Graham’s interview with Joanne Kaufman reveals an actress refreshingly without diva qualities. At the same time, she sets straight any idiots who carp about her lack of prior Broadway experience (“It’s not my job to feel bad that I haven’t been on Broadway before, you know what I mean?”)

Many who’ve come to Guys and Dolls are, of course, fans of her from Gilmore Girls. But maybe the minority who have not yet will rush out to the video store and, ignoring Ms.Graham’s statements about her hair, bring home a DVD box set of the show. They won’t be disappointed.


She never had the chance to be one of those great screwball comediennes of the big screen in the Thirties like Irene Dunne, Jean Arthur or Claudette Colbert, but Ms. Graham had the next-big chance with some of the fastest, wittiest dialogue ever written for the small screen, and—at least in the episodes I’ve seen—she delivered without fail.

1 comment:

bjn2727 said...

I approve!
One of your better posts!