Mae West: Leticia's Back

MAE WEST returns to the East Village — — March 7th-9th, 2008 — — and even though "Myra Breckinridge" is not her most deliciously whipped screen-puff, every local critic covered the announcement that the Brooklyn bombshell is back.
• • Nicolas Rapold, the "h" missing Arts & Letters columnist for The New York Sun, said it best. Rapold explained: Joining Ms. Welch, who might have known better after appearing in Southern's "The Magic Christian," was 1930s vaudeville-born sexpot performer-gag writer Mae West. Here, age 76, she's looking for man-flesh as a casting agent with admirable, unstinting innuendo. . . .
• • But all this leaves the best for last, as Mae West might say, though she'd make it sound dirty, added Rapold. As queen of the casting couch Leticia Van Allen, West leers at rows of aspirant young bucks (including a green Tom Selleck) and savors lines she might have liked to deliver onscreen decades earlier. Costumed specially by Edith Head and encased in makeup or some species of preservative that renders her face a peaked waxen death mask, West presides over her own musical numbers, including a funk ditty. In her way, she's one of the more inspiring bits of taboo-taunting here (— — and it wasn't even her last bow: See 1978's "Sextette" opposite Timothy Dalton). Still, as a critic once wrote of Preminger's "Skidoo," this all inevitably sounds more interesting than it plays.
• • "Myra Breckinridge" — — Through 9 March 2008 [32 Second Avenue, between 1st and 2nd Streets (anthologyfilmarchives.org); 212-505-5181].
• • Source:
• • "Vidal's Not-So-Tender Gender Bender"
• • Byline: Nicolas Rapold
• • The New York Sun
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
________
Source:http://maewest.blogspot.com/atom.xml
Mae West
• • Photo: • • Mae West • • 1970 • •
NYC
Mae West.