On Stage

GREEN, HARRIS

On Stage TIS THE SEASON TO BE TRENDY BY HARRIS GREEN The American Place Theater (apt) has a splendid new home underneath a Sixth Avenue Manhattan skyscraper that is fully up to the high...

...Alienation is the theme of Love Me, Love My Children, the Canadian export now off-Broadway...
...In a television script, a situation is a mere surface to be decorated, never a matter to be probed and molded...
...co-adapters Doug Dyer and Gretchen Cryer and director Gerald Freed-man have finished him off by having 12 dewy-fresh incompetents play Iphigenia...
...The digital affliction of the tide has befallen our hero, but Ribman makes absolutely nothing of it...
...It deals with an American family on vacation in a devastated national park, stranded in their all-electric trailer miles away from any power connection...
...Melvin Van Peebles, in Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death, on Broadway, attempts to recapture Negro life in New York City with a series of unrelated musical vignettes about violence, degradation, perversion, and criminal insanity...
...Davidson Jr.'s script has flaws????whites are all grotesque, Malcolm's conversion occurs during intermission, and his break with and murder by the Muslims are glossed over????but the strong ensemble work of the Afro-American Studio and the bold, ingenious direction of its founder, Ernie McClintock, make the evening a genuine theatrical event, not a radical-chic outing...
...I heard no reason in the lyrics, which get a bit runny ("She came to me from out of the night/Dressed in gold and amber light"), or the tunes, which run off one like globules of mercury escaping from a broken thermometer, shattering as they fall...
...I intend no disrespect for his two splendid stars, Peter Falk and Lee Grant, when I praise him so...
...To add to the gloom, the cast trapped in th;s mess deserves much bette...
...APT's other opener, Steve Tes-ich's hake of the Woods, was much funnier and more meaningful...
...Tesich's wit for the most part enlivens what could otherwise be a rather predictable vignette about materialism...
...The high quality of Simon's jokes shows how well he learned his trade during his apprenticeship to the tube...
...I got my first really good look at the auditorium during Fingernails...
...Their world of job security and material comforts is crumbling under the pressures of recession, crime and people in general...
...Was it only a few years ago that Stan Freberg joked about having the musical rights to The Bad Seei...
...Manu Tupou's Fiji Island Agamemnon and Madge Sinclair's Jamaican Clytemnestra certainly suggest the kind of parents who would spawn such a brood...
...good as they are, I'm sure another director could have persuaded them occasionally to overplay as they prowl about Richard Sylbert's marvelous set, japing their fate...
...but half the sparse audience I was in consisted of young blacks who had entered on student passes...
...In the final third, when the writing is weakest, he does push things a bit...
...Death ends with the obligatory damning of the audience for creating the conditions Van Peebles has been exploiting...
...Now, if it will only add some scissors, blue pencils and rejection notices to its equipment, apt will be the best company of its kind in town...
...Neil Simon, naturally, supplied one with his farce, The Prisoner of Second A venue...
...Ronald Ribman, who had provided the Theater with three long works, including the well-remembered The Journey of the Fifth Horse, now delivered a triviality called Fingernails Blue as Flowers...
...Neither proves very funny or dramatic...
...On Stage TIS THE SEASON TO BE TRENDY BY HARRIS GREEN The American Place Theater (apt) has a splendid new home underneath a Sixth Avenue Manhattan skyscraper that is fully up to the high professional standards generally set in its productions of new plays...
...On Broadway, spirits are higher now that two big hits have arrived...
...Robert Swerdlow has created nothing but a virtually plotless medley of bland rock about a runaway adolescent, Justine, who flees home to join her hippie sister, Juliette, in a commune...
...The stage is capacious...
...When they fail, as they inevitably do, the result is a dramatic affront, as well...
...Lake does not impress me as a work destined for the anthologies????it's about half an hour too long and the young man needs a more believable occupation than "houseboy"????but there are scenes, images and effects that show Tesich to be the kind of writer apt should be encouraging...
...The fallacy of mass accusation has rarely been so well demonstrated...
...Someone named Peter Link has beaten Euripides into foolishness with rock, adding nothing while taking almost everything away...
...Being kept out of range of another Broadway-rock barrage is hardly my idea of deprivation, though I dare say thousands of musical-comedy patrons will think so...
...the light and sound equipment are powerful...
...It can take great pride in Frederick Rolf's production, a strong cast (headed by Hal Holbrook), Kert Lundell's boldly open setting and Roger Morgan's evocative lighting...
...Designer Frank Trotta and architect Richard D. Kaplan have provided such fine sight lines and decor that patrons will have a handsome view whether they watch the stage or cast a pained eye about the house during a performance, searching for something better to occupy their time...
...The other big hit, the rock version of Two Gentlemen of Verona, is such a smash that no press seats could be found for me for at least six months...
...The cast is at least worth watching, especially Ed Evanko, Suzanne Walker, Matthew Diamond, and Sharron Miller...
...he has not been able to lose it after 27 years in this country...
...I do not care to think what would happen to musical comedy, not to mention professional theater and possibly Western civilization, if Link & Co...
...A far more harmful condition is the thick Ecuadorian accent of Albert Paulsen, who plays the wealthy one...
...His music is only swollen drumming, laced with trumpet sneers and electric-guitar tics, and his lyrics????always chanted, never sung????are riddled by dismal recurring phrases ("Lily done the Zampoughi every time I pulled her coattail...
...English is so mangled in fighting its way through his clenched teeth that "Miss Singer" emerges as "Miz In-ga...
...The same sense of fairness that made his The Carpenters apt's best play last season is also in evidence: The old as well as the young are longing for an America they can plug into...
...Let 'em work your playgrounds, too...
...All that marred my considerable enjoyment of Prisoner was Simon's inability to delevop the great comic potential in his theme of urban angst as embodied by a middle-aged, middle-class couple...
...the deflating triviality of his ending shows he learned it all too well...
...The musical is already in bad enough shape now that composers are blithely attempting the kind of subjects that Mahler or Berg would have been hard pressed to set to music...
...Nichols somehow draws forth each laugh without ever overemphasizing any gesture, speech, or, for that matter, inflection...
...the seats are absolutely luxurious compared to what subscribers had to perch on in the old place three blocks further west on 46th Street...
...Two Gentlemen offers the aging middlebrow the ultimate in cultural bargains: the opportunity to be in step with the kids while absorbing a little Shakespeare...
...A more worthv work about "blackness" is El Hajj Malik, a biography of Malcolm X. N.R...
...The gruesome appeal of a classic that's been subjected to trendy debasement may draw patrons to the Public Theater's latest orgy of amateurism, the double bill of The Wedding of Iphigenia and Iphigenia in Concert...
...The play is a factory-made affair, built to run as long as one of Detroit's arrogant chariots and destined for posterity's scrapheap...
...Other performances may have been thronged with slumlords, trigger-happy cops and Klans-men...
...I was looking around on my first visit when, in obedience to the Zeitgeist or The Law of Diminishing Returns or whatever it is that's squelching the creation of full-length works, apt opened with two one-act plays...
...Good as many of these are, I would have settled for fewer laffs had this denial lessened the taint of TV-comedy writing in Prisoner...
...You gotta be holdin' out five dollars on me...
...They either shriek her lines in unison or rap with one another in midperformance, with painfully forced spontaneity, about personal and contemporary parallels to her plight...
...Put a curse on you...
...Set on the beach of a Jamaican resort where a vacuum-tube tycoon is attempting to enjoy and flaunt his wealth, it contains one joke????people either do not hear or do not understand the tycoon????and one insight?power cannot always get you what you want...
...Mike Nichols has directed with none of that fumbling for style that has blighted his films...
...Ron Field's hard-driven revival of On the Town is probably doing average business only because the simple-minded show is not old enough to be nostalgic and thus seems merely dated?an abhorred quality in this youth-obsessed time...
...In the hands of a mere showman like Van Peebles, these become sensationalism, not art...
...are successful enough to spawn a horde of imitators...
...yet all Simon does with their common plight is create one gag after another about burglaries, family quarrels and the like...
...The production represents Broadway craftsmanship at its best...
...Despite the Sadistic implication of these names, little develops after some 90 uninterrupted minutes except Justine's disenchantment with a communal life she suddenly seems to accept in the finale, when the title song bears down upon us...
...Many another man, faced with staging a farce that uses only two performers in its first three scenes, would have whipped up frantic sight gags and feverish crossings to keep us amused...
...Don't ask me why...
...As long as no one proclaims it "a true comedy of our time" or hails him as "our Moliere," there will be no outcry from me...

Vol. 55 • January 1972 • No. 1


 
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