Theater: Marx's Revenge

Flora, the Red Menace. The idea of spinning a musical comedy around a Manhattan Communist Party cell in the Depression '30s bears out Marx's warning that history repeats itself as farce. The era resists the prevailing modes of musical comedy: satire and nostalgia. The '30s are not close enough for slashing satirical gibes, and not distant enough to be bathed in a glowing forgetfulness of things past. Half the audience is too young to care, and the other half is too old to wish to be reminded of it.

Though filled with plot-happy cartoon...

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