Bulldozer: The Ballad of Robert Moses
Moses’ famously crowded and contentious career is glossed over except for his final battle with Jacobs over the Lower Manhattan Expressway. "Bulldozer" doesn’t even give a good summary of his long and length exploits. Although the program lists the time scheme, there is nothing in the show to let us know how much time passes between any of the scenes. The dialogue does a lot of name dropping (Al Smith, Jimmy Walker, Fiorello LaGuardia, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Walter O’Malley) without making any of these people real. Hardly any of the songs forward the plot but instead tell us what we already found out in the preceding dialogue scene. The song lyrics have endlessly repeated refrains and choruses which is typical of rock and pop songs but death in a theatrical presentation in which we expect more information and cleverer wording. [more]