PLAY READING: My three Angels by Bella Spewack and Sam Spewack

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Date/Time
Date(s) - 04/06/2017
5:00 pm - 7:00 pm

Location
Alliance Francaise de Bangalore

Categories


PLAY READING:My three Angels by Bella Spewack and Sam Spewack

5.00 pm | 4th of June |Alliance Française classroom 7

Free and open to all

This play reading is a part of the Alliance française de Bangalore and Bangalore Little Theatre partnership.

The Spewaks specialized in writing nice, clean plays with fresh, bright names: Spring Song (1934), Boy Meets Girl (1935), and the much more daring book to Cole Porter’s musical Kiss Me Kate (1948). My Three Angels (1953), which became the 1955 film We’re No Angels, with Humphrey Bogart, Aldo Ray, Basil Rathbone, and Peter Ustinov, was their attempt to write a wholesome Christmas classic–if that’s not redundant. Surprisingly, for a play that deals wholesale in miracles, My Three Angels pulls off a tiny one of its own. Unashamedly saccharine and calculatedly heartfelt, it can still deliver the holiday goods–most of them anyway–even to the most critical Scrooge.My Three Angels is so blatant in its contrivances that it comes off as the stuff of unpretentious wish fulfillment. Its sentimental plot bypasses the brain and makes straight for the heart, reducing the audience’s mental state to the level of children’s credulity and hopefulness, always the best soil in which to grow Christmas corn.As make-believe goes, the Spewaks’ confection is almost nourishing. It’s Christmastide 1910, and three French Guiana convicts manage to brighten the lives of a poor Cayenne shopkeeper and his deserving family. Felix Ducotel and his adoring cipher of a wife are in straitened circumstances because stuffy, honest Felix, a dreamer who thinks himself practical, extends credit to everyone and is exploited by all. The result is cash flow like molasses. The crisis comes when Felix’s oily cousin and business sponsor, Henri Trochard, arrives in the colony hoping to turn Felix out of his shop, just as he had cheated him in France.