LONDON (Hollywood Reporter) – “Betty Blue Eyes” is a new stage musical based on the 1984 Michael Palin and Maggie Smith post-war English comedy “A Private Function,” but in making something loud and boisterous, the show loses the film’s quaint eccentricity and occasional bite.
The setting in 1947 is almost a mirror image of the current state of affairs in the United Kingdom with war, austerity measures imposed by the government, and a royal wedding about to take place.
In the show, Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip are about to be wed. Food is rationed following World War II and so the local bigwigs in a small northern town decide to use an unlicensed pig for a banquet to honor the royal couple.
In Alan Bennett’s screenplay for the Malcolm Mowbray film, the town toffs merely conspire in their usual selfish way to eat as high off the hog as they can. When inoffensive podiatrist Gilbert Chilvers (Palin) discovers the plan, his social-climbing wife Joyce (Smith) schemes to kidnap the beast and butcher it for the family.
The musical, with book by U.S. writers Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman, is exactly the same except that everybody sings about it. It’s a tune-filled if not
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