Poetry
lnskeep-Fox, Sandra
script into stage life, greatly helped by the music of Taj Mahal. The play is a very slight tall tale--not unlike many of Hurston's stories--in which two friends, joined by the music one...
...It is a foolishness about a television performer, just off a 10ng-running series, who is about to play Hamlet in Central Park and who, not so coincidentally, has rented the famous John Barrymore apartment, the "Alchemist's Comer" that he designed as a kind of medieval retreat...
...avid Hirson's La B~te is about as unlike Mule Bone as one could imagine...
...It was not the Pied Piper that Hirson had in mind, but Moli~re, who is represented here by the anagrammatic Elomire...
...The serious point of Hirson's elegant comedy is that in the marketplace of artistic ideas vulgarit~ will inevitably triumph...
...As I write this, Paul Rudnick's I Hate Hamlet is still running...
...So said most of the reviewers, meaning that Tom McGowan was not up to the task, but he did well by the piece and would have done better had he or the director (Richard Jones) not saddled him with repetitive cute gestures...
...Rudnick did not intend that ending for a joke, but, given the quality of much of the comedy in the play, it would have been a step ahead of dumb-Hollywood-director jokes, male-genitalia-in-tights jokes, cigarette-addicted agent jokes (Celeste Holm with a German accent), twenty-nine-year-old-virgin jokes...
...Elomire's company, a band of serious comics who, through Prince Conti's support, have worked themselves up from street fairs, find themselves menaced by Valere, whose buffoonery has amused the prince and whom he sees as the man to bring new vitality to a group of artists he believes have begun to go stale...
...At the end, everyone forgets that the bone-wielder has been banished from the town, and the entire cast gets together for a musical finish which celebrates community that transcends any local quarrels...
...Mule Bone ran for a few months, buoyed by its tremendous sense of fun and by a setting that drew black audiences who presumably had no desire to check out La B~te or I Hate Hamlet...
...The play is a very slight tall tale--not unlike many of Hurston's stories--in which two friends, joined by the music one plays for the other to dance to, are split apart by a flirtatious young woman who likes the attentions of both...
...Most of the first act consists of a nonstop monologue by Valere, a tour de force that demands a consummate performer...
...GERALD WEALES 374: Commonweal...
...For one thing, it was written ~ , , A m in rhymed verse, and I haven't heard anything like that since Van Johnson played the Pied Piper of Hamelin on television in the late fifties...
...Barrymore materializes in the person of Nicol Williamson, trying for parody roguish charm in the Peter O'Toole vein...
...It would be ironic if it should turn into a hit, proving that, after all, Valere was right about what audiences want...
...They finally fight over her, one knocking the other out with the titular mule bone, an event that leads to a trial which is mostly a confrontation between rival churches, an epic trading of insults which provides the main vitality of the piece...
...There was some wit in the piece and a theme worth any playwright's attention, but the most impressive thing about the production was Richard Hudson's stark white oblique setting beautifully lit by Jennifer Tipton...
...Or any other recent D play, for that matter...
...In the end both men reject the woman--who expects the man who gets her to take a real job--and stick with one another, their friendship, their music, and their freedom being more attractive than sparking which might turn into the trap of marriage...
...At that point, I felt a lump in the throat which turned out to be my gorge rising...
...How funny is it really when a young woman in a Renaissance gown lifts her skirt to reveal that she is wearing sneakers...
...Barrymore is there to help young Andrew master the role, but the performance is a flop...
...Yet a moment of success in the general disaster makes Andrew see the glory of the stage and he turns down a multimillion-dollar offer from the TV mavens to build the kind of sotid stage career that Barrymore years before abandoned for the movies and the bottle...
...Those insults were never more than grand rhetoric, appreciated by insulter and insultee alike...
...Is it knee-slappers like that that define a Broadway play...
Vol. 118 • June 1991 • No. 11
