(Remember “Marty”?) And on Oscar night, it beat out all those big-budget, arty doomsayers for best picture. And along came “Rocky,” the kind of common-man fairy tale you thought they’d stopped making in the 1950s. America was a scared and skeptical place in the mid-1970s, when paranoiac, big-picture pictures like “Taxi Driver,” “Network” and “All the President’s Men” were all the rage. The movie’s real-life back story was also a tale of the little guy triumphant. Avildsen, was about a fast-aging, perpetually losing boxer who magically becomes a world-class contender. It wasn’t just that the film, directed by John G. Stallone (who also wrote the screenplay, in three days), this is one of those films that show up every so often to make Hollywood believe its own myth of a democracy of gumption and talent. Overseen by the brilliant movement director Steven Hoggett (“Black Watch,” “Once”), the climactic boxing match between the uberdog Apollo Creed and the underdog Rocky Balboa becomes as much of a crowd rouser as it was in the 1976 film that inspired this otherwise leaden show, which opened on Thursday night.įew movies, after all, have inspired the kind of good will that “Rocky” did. Of course, by that point, it’s all over but the fighting.Īdmittedly, it’s a hell of a fight, a brutally balletic coup de théâtre that shakes up the joint in more ways than one.
And the audience wakes out of a couch potato stupor - the kind you experience when you have the television tuned to an infomercial station - to the startling tingle of adrenaline in its blood. That’s when a production that has seemed to be down for the count since the opening bars of its overture suddenly acquires a pulse. But at the risk of promoting tardiness among theatergoers, I feel obliged to point out that the show doesn’t really get started until 10:10 or thereabouts. The official curtain time for “ Rocky,” the new musical at the Winter Garden Theater, is 8 on most nights.
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