Poets on Broadway
SAUVAGE, LEO
On Stage POETS ON BROADWAY BY LEO SAUVAGE Although Continental Europe generally considers Ugo Betti a major figure in the modern theater, the Italian playwright and poet—who earned his living as...
...Because of the loose woman's proud behavior, and because on her hand the ring suddenly becomes visible to the authorities, she is seized and subsequently executed as the Queen...
...Profundity is kept to a minimum, though...
...He has been trying to emphasize the part played by Eliot's poetry in the extravaganza's genesis...
...Still, this is an important play, a morally optimistic tragedy...
...Elizabetta is apprehended in flight, poisons herself before being unmasked, and dies in the arms of Argia, whom she has given her royal ring in gratitude...
...At intermission the spectators are allowed to roam around what used to be the stage...
...The Circle in the Square revival now at the Plymouth Theater?the first drama of a Broadway season that began with the $4 million musical flop,/l Doll'sLife—is likewise winning plaudits only for Colleen Dewhurst...
...On Stage POETS ON BROADWAY BY LEO SAUVAGE Although Continental Europe generally considers Ugo Betti a major figure in the modern theater, the Italian playwright and poet—who earned his living as a Court of Appeals judge in Rome—has seldom impressed the English speaking public...
...At the last moment Argia changes her mind and pushes her prey through a door toward the frontier...
...Indeed, Napier supplies the evening's only moments of astonishment...
...It ends with the heroine's execution, yet it demonstrates that a persistent vestige of human decency, even in the most indelicate and untutored soul, can withstand the inhuman logicof "revolutionary" totalitarianism...
...Armed with abundant financing, he has transformed the whole house into an enormous, colorful junkyard...
...That way, when the phantasmagoria lags, the parents could always enjoy watching their kids...
...Argia's instinct is to take advantage of her discovery...
...now it appears that—like Nicholas II's Anas-tasia—she may have survived the massacre...
...Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, director Trevor Nunn, choreographer Gillian Lynne, set and costume designer John Napier, and lighting designer David Hersey offer an eye and earful of grandiose, perfectly engineered, cleverly computerized fireworks...
...Still, Cats is not a collaboration of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Thomas Stearns Eliot...
...and certain lengthy passages of the two-and-a-half-hour presentation come close to being, well, boring...
...Besides, she sees that she hasn't much to live for...
...The message, if there is one, is that the furry creatures, with their divergent personalities, can represent people just as well...
...Elizabetta is already dead...
...Argia will perish to defeat the man she faces, to challenge his hateful, arrogant righteousness...
...The Queen and the Rebels should not be mistaken for the standard tale about a kindly whore who makes a precipitous decision to martyr herself for someone she likes...
...When The Queen and the Rebels opened at London's Haymarket Theater in 1955, two years after Betti's death, it proved a triumph for leading lady Irene Worth, not for the author...
...Betti's characters, even dressed in berets and carrying up-to-date machine guns, clearly hearken back to early Soviet history...
...Che Guevara's hounded, pitiful Bolivian guerrillas, albeit implausibly, have over the years become the symbol for any insurgency in the Hispanic world...
...She and a former lover who happens to be on the scene contrive a rather cumbersome method of having Elizabetta killed by the rebels...
...the audience gobbles it up...
...Once she is dead, they intend to blackmail the four friends whose names the desperate Queen, unsure of her memory, carries on a slip of paper inside her blouse...
...The rebel Commissar, remarkably well played by Peter Michael Goetz, seems to step straight out of the Cheka, combining characteristics of the two antagonists in Darkness at Noon...
...Most of the lyrics are, as Nunn insists, taken directly from the Old Possum's collection "in its originally published form," barring "a few [that] have been subject to a minor revision of tense or pronoun...
...nobody could remember them by appellation...
...In several numbers, including a particularly well choreographed , gorgeously performed tap sequence, Webber ingeniously plays with alternating rhythms...
...Honestly, they could have come up with something better...
...None of the guards on duty, of course, notice the royal ring that she has steadfastly kept on her finger since being overthrown...
...Whatever the financial rewards already reaped in London by Cats and sure to multiply in New York, Trevor Nunn—being artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company—does not wish to be viewed as simply the creator of a brilliant theatrical Disneyland...
...Elizabetta, obligingly guileless, entrusts the secret list to them...
...They goggle at the invention and artistry, without discovering many of the surprises Napier has in store for Act II (or, hopefully, trampling any of the delicate machinery...
...Never mind that the pyrotechnic display and evangelical motif get confused...
...This creates an incongruity...
...He takes with him Grizabella, a glamour cat outworn by sin...
...Sat 'ats, at the Winter Garden, is a splendid exhibition of showbusiness...
...I certainly would have enjoyed watching this at Madison Square Garden...
...Indeed, the play's final moments are excellent, sharing little common ground with the average Broadway denouement...
...Thanks to Nunn and the superb cast of singers and dancers, we can distinguish one puss from the other...
...Moreover, despite the fact that she must have been a mature woman, and widely photographed, before her disappearance, the soldiers have not the slightest idea what she looks like...
...Intelligent, well-trained humans in appropriate dress—or undress—imitate the felines beautifully...
...In others he is not above reheating a few leftovers from musicals past...
...British composer Webber's music seems little influenced by the St...
...Her Majesty Elizabetta—whom Betty Miller plays too much as a hapless, nearly witless victim to possibly be a dangerous counterrevolutionary—at first easily escapes detection...
...In her confrontation with the Commissar, a series of sharp scenes where Goetz provides exactly the foil Dewhurst needs to be at the top of her form, no room is left for misinterpretation...
...Only Argia, the prostitute, here endowed by Dewhurst with an awesome dramatic presence, has no trouble guessing from Elizabetta's nervous behavior that she must be the fugitive monarch...
...On Broadway, one cannot help searching for the play that is not there...
...To conclude with a suggestion, it would be wonderful for the Winter Garden to offer reduced price matinees for children with their parents...
...Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats...
...Theaction.accordingtotheP/ovW//, unfolds in "the present...
...Louis-born British poet's words, and probably that is for the best...
...Argia dies for nobody, nor does she have a heart of gold...
...Later, an unctuous preacher cat named Old Deuteronomy ascends past the balcony on a discarded automobile tire, propelled by fire-spewing, smoke-belching rockets...
...This scene is Cats' closest stab at genuine theatricality: Nunn takes advantage of the tableau for a very humorous parody of Italian opera...
...The star contributor to what the publicists stamped a "mega-hit" before it opened is scenic wizard Napier...
...After five years in power, the rebels are running into trouble...
...In fact, she is rightly suspected to be among a group of travelers trying to leave the country on a bus that has been stopped in a hillside border village...
...She was thought to have been killed with her family...
...She then heads toward redemption via a strange metallic contraption—perhaps a 21st-century Jacob's Ladder?that drops from the ceiling to connect with Old Deuteronomy's spacewheel...
...For all the energy that cast and crew pour into Cats, the selection of verses forms no perceptible story line...
...A moonlit sky effortlessly floats earthward to reveal a flawless ship—a catboat, naturally, with a cathead projecting from the bow, encircled by aggressive Siamese pirates...
...She is bold, contemptuous, insolent, defiant...
...No setting is indicated, but Warns Hussein's direction and Jane Greenwood's costumes point to Latin America...
...It is surprising that the producers, having undertaken the commendable project of returning Betti to the English repertory, settled for Henry Reed's adaptation, already roundly criticized in 1955...
...Overall, however, in addition to its structural problems the show is marred by a stilted, overly solemn translation...
...From that premise, unfortunately, Betti had difficulty constructing a credible plot, and Hussein only emphasizes some of thescript's moredubious twists...
...Nevertheless, thanks to his depth as a poet and moral philosopher, Ugo Betti could fashion a powerful drama from a weak plot...
...Their insecurities focus on the country's deposed Queen organizing a counterrevolution from the outside...
...Having toiled in the fields for the last half decade, she is able to conceal her regal origins by presenting calloused hands to the rebel search party...
...Bringing Eliot into the act is actually more befuddling than anything else, for theatergoers are forced to contend with his 20 esoteric cat names, from Bombularina to Skimbleshanks...
...The subject is the behaviorof various types of cats, allegedly as outlined in T.S...
...Walking toward the firing squad will at least make her a real queen for a few seconds in her otherwise downtrodden life...
...On stage this saga is as unconvincing as it sounds...
Vol. 65 • November 1982 • No. 20
