Theatrical Mysteries

...A tight line of bodies suggests the cell where Mr...

...This is made especially evident by the fact that some of the most inventive aspects of Trevor Nunn's and John Caird's staging cleverly employ the cast's bodies with a minimum of accessories-and no reliance at all on the surrounding metallic structures...

...The only real puzzle is how two authors possessing the reputations of Jerome Chodorov and Norman Panama could have come up with so clumsy an effort...

...This is traditional where old-fashioned melodramas are played for fun, yet I wonder whether it is what the Royal Shakespeare Company was looking for in bringing its show across the ocean...

...In the other, a person escapes death, but the disconnected details make it impossible for us tounder stand how or why...

...Similarly, having some actors watching the others from above reminded me of Peter Brook's staging of A Midsummer Night's Dream...

...While half a dozen couples happily congregate upstage and congratulate each other on their victories, Nicholas (Roger Rees) looks downstage at one of the poor boys who escaped from Mr...

...Instead of a sound vehicle, the playwrights and director Paul Aaron have equipped Colbert with a beautiful estate in the Berkshires where, concealed behind a sliding wall, there is a big glass-enclosed strongroom containing $15.7 millions worth of paintings...

...Since the room can double as a private gas chamber, the mystery writer apparently has an interest in chemistry as well...

...It would have been fascinating to watch Aumont and Colbert in a play that enabled them to revive the magic once achieved when she was teamed up with Charles Boyer...

...In a fit of delirium, the article added that, if necessary, one should "pawn the children" to lay hands on the $ 100 required for a seat...

...I don't know how Londoners reacted when Nicholas Nickleby opened there last year, but at the Plymouth people apparently thought they were entering into the spirit of the evening by hissing the villains and applauding when the heroes got their revenge...

...David Edgar, who did the adaptation, might protest that these stretches all can be found in the 800-odd pages of the novel...

...Where Edgar's script does do that, the effect is great...

...Then he walks downstage, takes the boy in his arms and turns toward us with an expression of sadness and reproach as the lights slowly go out...

...One is happy to see Jean-Pierre Aumont on Broadway again, the banalities he must utter notwithstanding...

...He comports himself with a sober restraint that is more than the playwrights deserve...

...She also has a penchant for dropping lighted cigars into her wastebasket and setting it on fire, and an unexpected taste for complicated electronic gadgets (which abound in Oliver Smith's handsome set...

...The reality is that boring or irrelevant or sometimes confusing stretches dissipate our interest between the splendid moments when Nicholas Nickleby actually becomes bitterly dramatic or irresistibly hilarious...

...A play should seduce us with its theatricality, not its faithfulness to every printed word of even the greatest work of literature...

...The actor and this finale certainly merit a standing ovation...

...Squeers is confined, and I loved the way the human wall parts to admit the archvillain, Uncle Ralph...

...We are given human coaches, trucks and even an omnibus...

...After all, wedo not goto the theater for a prolonged session of yoga...

...overall, John Napier's and Dermot Hayes' constructions are superfluous...

...Adding to the productioncostsat the Plymouth is the complicated scaffolding that includes a high catwalk stretching from one side of the stage to the other...

...On Stage THEATRICAL MYSTERIES BY LEO SAUVAGE I spent the full eight hours and 40 minutes at the Plymouth Theater watching the Royal Shakespeare Company's Nicholas Nickleby-not counting the one-hour intermission that just about allowed for an awful sandwich from New York's less than glamorous Eighth Avenue...

...It is a credit to her skill that she manages to extract some comedy, if not suspense, from a few of the lines in this mercifully brief play...

...Alas, Emily Richards as Kate Nickleby is quite unbearable, which is probably not her fault-dickens doesn't give the character much life to begin with...

...Nicholas hesitates, for he too has a girl waiting for him with the rest...

...The bravos have made Nicholas Nickleby such a Broadway triumph, I am almost embarrassed to say that I was not moved to join the parade...

...I would reply that we are not reading a novel...

...Indeed, in no scene is any part of the costly scaffolding used to dramatic purpose...

...the boys in Mr...

...Unfortunately, the scene should have come 60 or 90 minutes earlier...

...In one, a person is murdered and we see how it is done...

...The 40-member cast, despite their portraying some 200 characters, have little to do and not much chance to do it memorably...

...The intrigue she has been provided with nevertheless betrays no hint of Christie's flair, and its solution (if one can speak of such) does not require a single one of Hercule Poirot's "little gray cells...

...A better treatment of Nicholas Nickleby would simply concentrate on conveying the indignation, wit and satire of Dickens by other means...

...It dubbed the show "a historic theatrical phenomenon," though the label is only partly accurate: A phenomenon it certainly is, and I suppose it is historic since it transports us to a Dickensian England circa 1839...

...As a result, I could not reveal anything even if I wanted to...

...Eager to bring us every character in this book about a young man's fight against the evils of the world, Edgar fails to pay heed to how his fidelity works on the stage...

...Of the central figures, two are tops: Roger Rees gives depth to the over-nice Nicholas, and John Wood-vine richly embodies the ugly Ralph Nickleby...

...When greedy Uncle Ralph, finally losing his calm, desperately roams the streets of London only to find closed doors and closing shutters, the directors stage it beautifully, arranging the cast in various appropriate positions and proving themselves sufficiently imaginative to dispense with technical crutches...

...I wonder how...

...I say this not only because several insignificant fr'se endings precede it, but also on behalf of my numbed body...

...With the exception of operas by Wagner (and operas are something different), most masterpieces of international theater manage to cast their spells in three and a half hours or less...

...Though some of the actors tramp over it occasionally, I could not discover what it contributed to the show...

...The fuss began well before opening night...

...it is more often a display than a play...

...Had a neophyte written the same script, he would have been dismissed as lacking any future in mystery or comedy...

...After listing standbys and understudies, the Playbill for the Biltmore Theater's current production contains a producer's note:" In the tradition of the 'whodunit' and in fairness to future audiences, we request that you not reveal the plot details of A Talent for Murder...

...But A Talent for Murder merely murders their talents...

...Squeers' brutal school and froze to death in the snow...

...Still, neither she nor the directors have done anything to make Kate interesting...

...The problem here is that Nicholas Nickleby is conceived as a pageant...

...Squeers' Yorkshire school are directed as if they were the lunatics from Brook's production of Marat/ Sade...

...Stormy, often frenetic applause punctuated the performance, and at the intermission curtain as well as the final curtain there were sustained standing ovations...

...The ending, for instance, is magnificent, although you won't find it in Dickens...

...I wonder why...

...But theatrical...

...The stars are the sole attraction here...

...One last observation, concerning the New York public...

...You have to look at the newspapers to guess Claudette Colbert's age: She is still a pleasure to watch and her voice has not changed...

...Nor is there any suspense in this so-called "suspense comedy": Nothing is mysterious enough to make us wonder what is happening or is going to happen...

...A weekly newsmagazine's cover story prematurely assured us that "the RSC production seems sure to set the tone and standard for this season and many to come...

...Assuming the presence of Claudette Colbert and Jean-Pierre Au-mont manages to keep drawing people to the theater, it would be a good idea to add an explanation of what is meant by "plot details...

...David Threlfall, as the misshapen Smike, does an excellent job of twisting his body to mimic a frightening cripple and of holding his mouth open in a square...

...True, there is a plot?no, two...

...Claudette Colbert plays a best-selling mystery writer "second only to Agatha...

...What I don't like about Nunn's and Caird's direction is their occasional resort to gimmicks that passed for avant-garde decades ago...

...Having actors walk among the audience, for example, shaking their hands and talking with them, may have been an interesting innovation in the '60s (although I didn't much care for it then...