Shimmering Donna Murphy Duels Mean Daughter in ‘People’: Review
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Comedy in jackboots is, with all due respect to Mel Brooks, a tough sell. Ernst Lubitsch found this out with his brilliant 1942 film “To Be, or Not To Be,” about a ragtag theater troupe struggling to survive in Warsaw during Hitler’s rise to power. The reaction to the movie was brutal, despite a cast headed by Carole Lombard and Jack Benny.
“The People in the Picture,” the Roundabout’s new musical at Studio 54, has a similar plot. Switching in time between 1977 Manhattan, and Poland from 1935 to 1946, the show tells the story of the “Warsaw Gang,” who sing “We play the shtetl circuit, a lousy deal no matter how you work it.”