Regarding Broughton Street on a wet Wednesday afternoon in late May, who is not instantly reminded of Passadena?
Are those lampposts not reminiscent of palm trees? Don’t the fag butts floating in puddles remind you of lilos in swimming pools under a cloudless Californian sky?
And couple all this glamour with the sudden preponderance locally of bored students with no exams left to do and no job to go to, and what have you got?
Of course: Mike Nichols’s The Graduate transposed to the Athens of the North.
Their latest A-board creation pays tribute to the 1967 classic, single-mindedly substituting sexual appetite with an inexhaustible taste for coffee.
The Wikipedia entry about the film is particularly interesting on casting. It could all have been so different if only Doris Day, Julie Christie and Jack Nicholson had got the parts.
And as for the soundtrack, Paul Simon was thinking of someone else entirely …