On Stage
SAUVAGE, LEO
On Stage FOREIGN AID FOR BROADWAY BY LEO SAUVAGE Once again London is providing New York with good legitimate theater. Simon Gray has brought to Broadway the kind of play that doesn't need music...
...Does he fear the money would compromise the magazine's independence...
...Cheered by their success last season, Segovia and Orezzoli decided to install a second uncommon production on the Great White Way this fall—a piece they concocted in Seville prior to the birth of TangoArgentino...
...Dupuy seems capable of sorcery herself when it comes to stage technique...
...Such magazines are, of course, regularly hatched by students at various universities...
...And the theater district's commercial provincialism has indeed often had a chilling effect on deep or uncompromisingly offbeat efforts...
...Meanwhile the other characters are undergoing changes of their own, all wrought with subtle plausibility by Gray...
...In addition to Stuart and Marigold, the founding group has four members...
...Many of the spectators at Tango A rgentino were old enough to remember having tangoed in their youth...
...JLg London and Seville, Toronto is also gracing New York's fall theatrical season with a very special contribution—A Little Like Magic, now playing at the happily preserved Lyceum Theater...
...Martin Musgrove (Michael Countryman) is abourgeois sort, usefully endowed with money and organizational flair, not to mention personal modesty and an extraordinary capacity for devotion...
...Most prove ephemeral, but here and there a journal hangs on for quite some time—usually because its publication becomes a consuming passion for one of those who launched it as an extracurricular diversion...
...this, together with the fraternal though reluctant complicity of Stuart and Martin, is just barely enough to keep him off an amorous collision course...
...This is especially true in a city, not to mention a nation, endowed with a marvelous elite of black tap-dancers...
...Dianne Lynn Dupuy, to whom we owe this enchanting fairyland divertissement, is something of a visual poet: She has an uncanny knack for getting objects to rhyme, and the effect is spectacular...
...Humphry, the solitary perfectionist, abandons the book he is writing on Wagner out of self-doubt...
...Perhaps the greatest obstacle to flamenco's appeal on these shores, though, is its superficial similarity to—and hence confusion with—tap-dancing...
...Fortunately, that proved not to be the case...
...David Jenkins has designed clever sets that are faded in and out between scenes with smooth elegance...
...With each temporal leap Stuart's determination to dominate the magazine becomes more pronounced, until it finally borders on monomania...
...It is, after all, a foreign folk dance, and potential audiences might not be particularly attracted to the gitano folk who dance it (gita-no being Spanish for gypsy, a designation New Yorkers pej oratively apply to unmetered cabs...
...So it was with some uncertainty that Claudio Segovia and Hector Orezzoli brought their TangoArgentino—a genuine, unvulgarized display of the Spanish-American ballroom dance—to Broadway last year, even after its giddy success in Paris, Venice and Vienna...
...At first blush flamenco seems unlikely to awaken remembrance or inspire a feeling of discovery...
...With or without children, a visit to the Lyceum is a must...
...Yet it requires only a modicum of openness to nuances of ethnic meaning to recognize that flamenco goes beyond a visually dazzling display of heel work...
...My one carp is that the title is altogether too modest: What Dupuy and company offer us is really a lot like magic...
...Under the joint direction of Simon Gray and Michael McGuire, all the actors excel in their roles...
...With the start of the second scene, nine years have elapsed...
...He knows what he wants: his own magazine, reflecting to conception of literature and poetry, his intellectual appetites...
...Appropriately enough, Nick winds up as a TV "personality...
...Feelings of friendship also temper Stuart's editorial zeal in the opening scene, where he has little trouble in getting on with his colleagues...
...The wonderful puppets and props in A Little Like Magic are by MaryC...
...Whatever the philosophical paradoxes Gray intended with his latest title, it happens to be the name chosen by a group of Cambridge undergraduates within the play for a little literary magazine they decide to launch...
...Genuine Andalusian flamenco, free from the castanet-clapping cliches of nightclubs and opera, might be expected to have rather less appeal than tango as far as the typical Broadway audience is concerned...
...Actually, it is on Broadway and 76th Street at the Promenade Theater (built in 1928 as a Mormon church...
...The character who becomes thus identified with The Common Pursuit is Stuart Thome (Kristoffer Tabori...
...However magnificent, the dancers, singers and musicians they had assembled could easily seem out of place in the midst of behemoths like 42nd Street and Cats...
...Some strings and wheels are no doubt employed, but we are amazed to learn at the end that we have been watching a company of 13 "invisible" performers, 10 of whom are develop-mentally handicapped...
...Consequently, after a highly acclaimed stopover in Paris, the pair has delivered to the Mark Hel-linger Theater seven dancers, seven singers and six guitarists who give us an evening of Flamenco Puro...
...In the final scene the black-clad company, made visible by normal light, repeats some of the tricks that have evoked our astonished admiration—a fittingly happy conclusion...
...The remaining two members of the group form an antithetical pair, both from a literary and human point of view...
...And I believe it is fair to say that the success at the Mark Hellinger goes beyond mere appreciation of the choreography: It bespeaks a larger human understanding...
...The special training given these individuals has made them extraordinarily agile, occasionally acrobatic...
...We witness the magazine's beginnings in an extended first scene, and are poignantly reminded of its youthful founders' dreamy illusions in a brief flashback at the end...
...now a charming modern playhouse in the heart of Manhattan's upgraded Upper West Side) that we can see The Common Pursuit, a new work of observation and mood, of wit and compassion, by the author of Quarter-maine's Terms and Otherwise Engaged...
...for them it was heaven to do it again in their minds while admiring the perfection of the movements on stage and succumbing to the somber rhythms of the ban-doneones...
...With its eloquent movements of the head and upper body, its plaintive songs expressive of the ever-present sadness of the gitano's life, the Andalusian dance, instead of being an expression of exuberance, is a statement of suffering and an affirmation of resistance...
...Only toward the end do we discover the seemingly decorous Musgrove is not beyond some rather unbuttoned behavior...
...Broadway audiences made Tango Argentino a popular as well as a critical success...
...At the same time, newer generations received the stunning revelation that dance is not synonymous with wild agitation, and that sensuality is possible without sexual gesticulations...
...Perversely, the long hoped-for subvention is rejected by Stuart...
...Peter Whetworth (Dylan Baker) collects women (off-stage), and frequently has difficulty keeping the paths between them straight...
...But that, the Playbill informs us, was 20 years ago...
...the questions are left open for discussion, as it were...
...Fortunately, he is a great talker and an irresistible liar...
...This obsession is not necessarily morbid, and the playwright does not put his protagonist on theanalyst'scouch...
...Infact, the couch in Stuart's room is mainly used by him for lovemaking with his girlfriend, Marigold Watson (Judy Geeson), the only woman among the magazine's founders...
...In sum, The Common Pursuit is, an outstanding addition to the extended Broadway scene—well worth a 24-block trip from Times Square...
...The result is an absolute joy for the eyes...
...Its formidable hurdles notwithstanding, I am happy to report, Flamenco Puro is enjoying an enthusiastic reception on Broadway...
...A Little Like Magicis not the first show to use "black light" on Broadway— quite a few musicals have brought on waves of applause by abruptly shutting off the big stage lights during a dance number and thereby allowing the performers' legs to take on a life of their own in a medium of ultraviolet rays...
...near the conclusion of the play we hear that he has been murdered in the course of a homosexual encounter...
...particularly impressive is the use of facial expression and body attitude to indicate time's passage with a minimum of cosmetic artifice...
...There are, of course, those cynics who maintain that one must get at least that far away from Times Square to find really satisfying fare...
...Many Americans, moreover, are no doubt convinced they already know everything worth knowing about flamenco, having had occasion to "take it in" at some "gypsy joint" they visited as tourists in Spain...
...Thornton, and Ken Billington is due credit for the all-important lighting...
...But Dupuy puts everything under black light: Hats, shoes, brooms, animals, monsters, skeletons, even caricatured celebrities take part in a luminous ballet against a densely black background...
...Nick Finchling (Nathan Lane) is a smoking, coughing arriviste, whose involvement with the magazine stems from his eagerness to ingratiate himself with the literary set...
...the first scene of the second act takes us three years further down the road, and so on...
...The leitmotif (or A Little Like Magic is furnished by "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," that traditional tale retold 200 years ago by Goethe in one of his most famous ballads...
...Simon Gray has brought to Broadway the kind of play that doesn't need music to make its audience feel in tune with the stage...
...Or is he apprehensive that his personal dominion might be threatened...
...The playwright, unfailingly respectful of his characters as well as his audience, provides no pat answers...
...Humphry Taylor (Peter Friedman) is a philosophically-inclined introvert, possessed of unyielding ethical principles, who never appears entirely at ease with his aging yet ever-boisterous confreres...
...When not dealing with women Peter has his way more easily—as with Arts Council members who allow themselves to be talked into a grant for the magazine...
Vol. 69 • November 1986 • No. 16
