Two pairs

Press, 7 October 1988, Page 24

Two pairs

Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin both play the double roles of twins separated since birth in a hit comedy, “Big Business,” which starts at the Savoy today. The confusion starts in the tinv town of Jupiter Hollow. At the Hollowmade Furniture Company hospital, two sets of identical twin girls are born simultaneously: one to the Sheltons, a wealthy New York couple, and the other to a local family, the Ratliffs. Unfortunately, after receiving the same names — Rose and Sadie — the four newborns are entrusted to the hospital’s myopic nurse, who mismatches the tots in their cribs and mistakenly turns over one of each to the wrong parents. Years later, Sadie Shelton (Midler) is the ironhanded boss of a New York conglomerate, Moramax. An aggressive businesswoman who likes

her profits high and her takeovers hostile, she can easily dupe her naive sister, Rose (Tomlin), into going along with her cutthroat corporate decisions, the latest of which is to sell a tiny company acquired years ago by their father, Hollowmade. Comic complications multiply even further as everyone from the bellman’at the Plaza Hotel to the prospective buyer of Hollowmade (Michele Placido) mistake the small town siblings for their Manhattan counterparts during a whirlwind week-end of missed connections and new-found romance.