Stage

...In this country, Vicki Baum's multipurpose work began its very long Broadway run in late 1930, became a best-selling novel in 1931, and emerged as an all-star MGM film (Garbo, Crawford, Beery, two Barrymores) in 1932...

...Tommy Tune is clearly the dominant creative force in the musical...

...The music and book are by Robert Wright, George Forrest, and Luther Davis, conventional Richard Hayes, who served as Commonweal's drama critic from 1952 to 1961, succeeding Walter Kerr, died of a beam attack at his home in New York on January & at the age of sixty, May he rest in peace...

...Hugh Wheeler's book follows the film scene by scene, using much of the original dialogue, but to very little effect...

...GERALD WEALES...

...The musical Grand Hotel, however, wants only to give new form and new force to the original work...

...It is in the creation of this pattern, this movement, that the musical is most successful...

...Meet Me in St...

...In the novel, when Grushinskaya falls in love with the baron and decides not to commit suicide, she remembers a number from her repertoire "in which love and death danced a pas de deux...

...After all, it has gone through a great many generic changes since it first turned up as a novel and then a play in Germany...

...Louis," "Under the Bamboo Tree") and new ones by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane that have become standards ("The Boy Next Door," "The Trolley Song," "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas...

...The intermeshing stories of the hotel guests manage to transcend their essential sentimental melodrama by becoming elements in an overall pattern, the life of the Grand Hotel which-like life itself-moves on, unimpeded by broken bodies, broken dreams...

...GERALD WEALESn...

...As Walter Kerr said in the New York Times (December 17, 1989), both Kringeleins-Sam Jaffe on stage and Lionel Barrymore in the film-outacted their colleagues, but it is almost impossible in a straight performance to get the sense of discovery that each new experience brings to the character...

...The words are there and the music is there and a hard-working band of performers, but the spirit has gone out of the piece...

...On the other hand, when Baum's fussy Suzette (the ballerina Grushinskaya's all-purpose servant) becomes Raffaela (the companion with an unspoken love for the ballerina), statuesque, handsome Karen Akers-a presence on any stage-gets a good role and two strong songs...

...Not much is gained by turning Baum 's coldly efficient reception clerk, Rohna, into a martinet with homosexual designs on Erik (Baum's hall porter, Senf), the birth of whose child gives a life-affirming frame to a many-stranded tale of death and loss...

...Broadway warhorses (Kismet), but the special quality of the show almost certainly derives from the work of Tommy Tune as director and choreographer and Maury Yeston, credited with "additional music and lyrics...

...Perhaps Grand Hotel is a special case...

...LOUIS' When Shenandoah was revived last summer, I saw the Gary Geld musical for the first time and spent the evening wondering why anyone bothers trying to make a stage musical out of a successful film...

...the typist who sells herself as well as her skills and who wants to be a film star...

...Raving Beauty" worked better as a love duet in that show than it does as a courting contest here...

...The movie (1944), which I just saw again on video, is a lovely evocation of an America which may never have existed but should have, with period songs ("Meet Me in St...

...There are performers in St...

...Money is central to all of the Grand Hotels, which explore the consequences of poverty, genteel and ordinary...

...I have not left much space for Meet Me in St...

...Louis (George Hearn, Betty Garrett) who have done fine work elsewhere, and there are scenic devices-the movable house, the trolley, the ice pond, the fireworks-filled fair-that are meant to reproduce the feel of the film...

...There is a Charleston number in which Michael Jeter throws off his tottering character and gives a happily frenzied performance that lets us know what Kringelein's mind and heart are capable of...

...the domineering but honest provincial businessman who learns to lie to his associates and to cheat on his wife...

...And yet, the musical is dead on the stage...

...Although the flow of the piece occasionally stops, as other musicals do, for a solo in a spotlight, the show gives the impression of constant motion, sometimes-even during those stops-by a kind of visual overlay which reminds the audience that something else is going on somewhere else, even as we concentrate on the performer in the spot...

...There are long and tedious passages in the novel in which the character ruminates on his quest for LIFE...

...Louis offers support for the why-bother point of view, but Grand Hotel suggests that genuine stage life can result from such a metamorphosis...

...It can be done in dance and in a show that, forgoing naturalism, is itself a dance...

...It has spawned a great many offspring which often fail to acknowledge their parent...

...There have been changes and additions, some more useful than others...

...This may be a touch of Brechtian overemphasis (the show is set in Berlin in 1928), but some of the other dance devices are more effective...

...He helps put the grand in Grand Hotel...

...The musical underscores the author's relentless preoccupation with the subject, not only through its parallel plots, but through a chorus of scullery workers, commanding figures who appear periodically, shaking tin dishes against wire containers-like giant tambourines-and singing "Some Have and Some Have Not...

...It may be that Louis Burke and Joan Brickhill, the South African director and choreographer who dote on American musicals, are just not Vincente Minnelli...

...Tune, Yeston, and several of the performers (Akers, Liliane Montevecchi, Kathi Moss) had already worked together on Nine, an often inventive reworking of a film, Fellini's 81/2...

...the impecunious baron who is a thief...

...Best of all is what Tune has done for the dying bookkeeper, Kringelein...

...The show is not so much staged as choreographed, and the set (Tony Walton) and the lighting (Jules Fisher) become part of the dance...

...the sad and sardonic doctor, badly wounded in the war, an observer of what the first musical number calls "The Grand Parade...

...Now we have had two new musicals that provide an opportunity to contemplate that transformational genre...

...Tune provides such a dance, an oddly old-fashioned pas de deux, but moves it to the end of the show for the baron's death...

...It has kept Baum's cast of characters: the aging ballerina...

...Louis, which may be just as well...

...Or it may be that successful films-Grand Hotel notwithstanding-should be left on the screen...

...the dying bookkeeper who wants to experience LIFE before he leaves it...

...Martin and Blane have returned to the original, added songs, and borrowed some from Best Foot Forward...

...the television series, "Hotel," is the most recent, highly visible example...

...Tune and the other makers of the musical have built on Baum's novel even more than on the other versions of her story...

...When Suzette was renamed for the occasion, I wonder if someone remembered that Rafaela Ottiano had played the character in the film...