Chicago Trib: Tentative Christina Applegate sweet, but doesn't take charge

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0503050270mar05,1,1921181.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed

With a sweet but tentative performance from Christina Applegate in the title role -- an underplaying lamb surrounded by musical comedy wolves -- the wan revival of "Sweet Charity," continuing through next weekend at the Cadillac Palace Theatre, never makes good on the promise of its best-known song, "Big Spender," the one about fun, laughs and a good time.

Director Walter Bobbie's production is more about bits of fun here and there, a few chuckles and, at best, an OK time, none of which scan as nicely as the "Big Spender" lyric Dorothy Fields actually wrote. Even Cy Coleman would've had a hard time with it.

Applegate plays Charity Hope Valentine, a sunny romantic who dreams of true love but keeps flushing her hopes. At the top of the show, her married boyfriend pushes her into the Central Park lake and steals her purse. From there it's a series of romantic and comic misadventures, including a not-quite-dalliance with the International Film Star Vittorio Vidal, leading to her apparent knight in buttoned-down armor, anxious, uptight Oscar Linquist, played by Chicago veteran Denis O'Hare.

Charity and Oscar get stuck in an elevator together at the 92nd Street Y. The minute O'Hare starts shvitzing, "Sweet Charity" acquires a comic pulse. This is one of the few surefire scenes in Neil Simon's 1966 libretto, which he based on the 1957 Fellini picture "Nights of Cabiria." (In that version, the heroine was a prostitute.)"