On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage THE FORTIES AND FIFTIES IN THE NINETIES by stefan kanfer Carousel opened on April 15, 1945. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Ham-merstein II had adapted Ferenc Molnar's Hungarian tragedy,...
...In "Waiting for Santy," gnomes complain about their employer, Santa Claus...
...Too many of his obituaries reprinted the heartless wisecrack: "Odets, where is thy sting...
...Two, the adaptors had found a fresh way to tell the story of Billy Bigelow, the hard-luck carnival barker, and Julie, his innocent girlfriend...
...Their wives are an unstable mix of yenta (Lorraine Serabi-an), seductress (Molly Scott) and naif (Joanne Going...
...Rivkin: Wax fruit—that's been my whole life...
...Some lines might have come from Perelman's keyboard ("With manure you want to start the new world...
...In that case, Billy is surrounded by tolerance and his rebellion against the townspeople deserves no more sympathy than a Klansman's...
...Riskin: A parasite, a leech, a blood sucker—altogether a five-star no good-nick...
...And in the Big Mama role of Nettie Fowler, Metropolitan Opera star Shirley Verrett makes "June Is Busting Out All Over" into a pop aria of epic proportions...
...The composer set it to music in two hours...
...Snow," etc...
...But Broadway was hardly the place for outrageous revisionism...
...It is as if Odets, like his per-sonae, ran out of things to say after the 30th day...
...In the production at the Lincoln Center Theater—practically a Xerox of the one on the West End —narrative takes precedence over music, and lyrics over lyricism...
...Melodies seemed to flow effortlessly from his Steinway: Billy's complex "Soliloquy," for example, took Hammerstein three weeks to write...
...As the flood commences, everyone's characteristics are magnified, and the internecine strife rises from quarrel to outright war between the generations...
...The late Sir Kenneth MacMillan supplied vigorous if derivative choreography (the humdrum love dance in Act II is passionately performed by Sandra Brown and Jon Marshall Sharp...
...it ran for 890 performances in New York, toured the country for several years and became a hit film...
...Here, however, making Carrie black and her husband white, and their children Caucasian, Negro and Oriental, raises uncomfortable questions...
...They need that most elusive of all attributes, consistency...
...Then Odets provided his own parody of Odets when he wrote scenarios like The Big Knife: "Half-idealism is the peritonitis of the soul—America is full of it...
...Again it failed, even with music by the redoubtable Richard Rodgers, and Danny Kaye in the starring role...
...There is, as yet, no Mt...
...Those skirmishes provide some amus-ing moments...
...He recalled an incident that sadly summed up the political hysteria of the period...
...Perelman set the style with his lampoon of Odets' proletarian onslaughts...
...Snow (Eddie Korbich...
...Three, Richard Rodgers was at the apex of his powers...
...Panken: Here, have a piece fruit...
...his race is irrelevant to the action...
...Noah wants no such thing...
...Briskin: All day long I'm painting "Snow Queen" on these Flexible Flyers and my little Irving lays in a cold tenement with the gout...
...He also employed persons of color to emphasize Carousel's universality...
...Still, the energy of the writing, and of the playing, spends itself long before the doves return with branches in their beaks...
...Such rewrites were not unknown in the Yiddish theater, where a company had recently presented King Lear reconciled with all three daughters...
...Richard Rodgers and Oscar Ham-merstein II had adapted Ferenc Molnar's Hungarian tragedy, Liliom, furnished it with a score, transferred it from Budapest to the Maine coast, and tacked on a sunny ending...
...Then, in the manner of a guilty Clifford Odets character, Clifford Odets plunged out into the street...
...The others seem less at ease, except for Mostel, who has grown in come-dic skill (and also in avoirdupois) with each succeeding appearance on and off Broadway...
...Early one morning he was awakened by an insistent ringing of the doorbell...
...It was Odets' conceit to make the sons and daughters-in-law represent various human foibles...
...Stella, tonight I'm telling your old man...
...Director Nicholas Hytner was acutely aware of all this, and his London revival underlined the show's darker aspects, stressing the social as well as the personal problems of the common folk...
...Sally Murphy makes a pale, pretty Julie, but she too has a thin and unconvincing voice...
...Under his direction, the revival at the Lyceum Theater seems less a tribute than an obsession...
...Well, I'm through...
...Esther, Mrs...
...The 29-year-old Michael Hayden is too callow for the role of the sexually magnetic Billy...
...Noah, is Wallach's real wife, Anne Jackson...
...Ray Recht's low-budget sets wander between Chagall and summer camp...
...Predictions of disaster could be heard all around town...
...In the manner of Tevye, Noah carries on a conversation with the God he regards as a benign tyrant...
...The caller stayed just long enough to whisper, "I named you...
...Japheth insists on tying a rudder to their vessel, to guide it through storms...
...Is this a color-blind New England town...
...As for her second solo, anyone circulating a petition to replace "The Star-Spangled Banner" with "You'll Never Walk Alone" has my signature...
...Ruskin: Hey, Karl Marx, whyn'tcha hire a hall...
...He was never the same after that, producing a few forgettable movie scripts and one self-justifying play before his death in 1957...
...As things turned out, the musical became a prodigy of critical and popular success...
...Without it the NAT will continue to founder like Noah's ark...
...Moreover, lyrics like "My little girl is half again as smart/as girls are meant to be" is hardly in tune with the Zeitgeist...
...The show's other assets belong to the eye, not the ear...
...Panken: You said before it was the mumps...
...Nonetheless, there are several improvements...
...Instead of the traditional head-on manner, love songs were based on contingencies: "If I Loved You," "When I Marry Mr...
...so, alas, do Theoni V. Aldredge's costumes...
...As Don Pedro in the recent film of Much Ado About Nothing, for example, Denzel Washington is outstanding...
...Actually, the sting had vanished years before...
...a minute later, his dockside is watery, complete with lighthouse, boardwalk and waves...
...This is not to say that the production lacks vocal talent...
...Imitations...
...And overpraise...
...Ararat in sight...
...But the public is not in an optimistic mood, and Carousel's once daring techniques have been improved upon by hundreds of other musicals...
...In the role of Noah, Menashe Skulnik's vaude-villian style didn't help, and the production was short-lived...
...When I was interviewing performers for a book about the Eisenhower era, I ran across the late Tony Kraber, a folksinger who had been blacklisted out of show business...
...First the parodists had their way with him...
...But those works need more than good intent and a beautifully refurbished theater...
...Or are we not supposed to notice hue and ethnicity...
...Starvation wages we get so he can ride around in a red team with reindeers...
...That score remains a bolt of pure melody, as appealing as it was 50 years ago...
...Esther's death, which should be moving, is only a break in the inaction, and the family's philosophical arguments seldom rise above the level of kitchen kvetching...
...Shem, who has no interest in anyone but Shem, only aggravates matters...
...The virile troubadour of '30s radicalism, the scion of the Group Theater, the playwright who seemed to create his works, as one approving critic said, "with a baseball bat," had meekly acceded to the demands of the House Un-American Activities Committee...
...He can't play mumblety-peg with two human beings...
...Bob Crowley's costumes are highly evocative, and his brilliant sets, abetted by Paul Pyant's lighting, range from a dark, satanic mill to the sun-soaked precincts of heaven, where Billy is given a chance at redemption...
...Crowley's romantic hilltop is earthy...
...For in his efforts to be postmodern, Hytner reversed the spirit of Carousel and turned it into a Hammerstein and Rodgers musical...
...Peering out into the hallway, he saw a man hovering in the shadows...
...The lyricist for that show was Martin Charnin, and he has brought The Flow-ering Peach back to Broadway, this time in its original form...
...His final work for the stage, presented in 1954, did little to refurbish his image...
...The Flowering Peach brings to a close the National Actors Theater's quirky season...
...Too often the director opts for actors who stay on key, rather than for singers who can read a line...
...There were three reasons for the triumph...
...In that case, why was the multiracial policy given ceaseless self-congratulatory publicity in London and New York...
...Odets had turned in his colleagues of the Old Left in order to rescue his fading career...
...the slapstick movements of the carnival roustabouts are hilarious?even if every step recalls Michael Kidd's athletic ballets...
...Its declared aim, "to bring to the public the serious plays which are seldom, if ever, seen on Broadway," remains as admirable as ever...
...Hytner can't have it both ways, and neither can the audience...
...I am a fan of multiracial casting in the right property...
...Once again, there were warnings of disaster...
...the Almighty will do the steering, thank you...
...The buffeted but uncorrupted Noah (an obvious stand-in for Odets) is played by Eli Wallach...
...Stool pigeon...
...These two have become the most polished and amiable couple in the theater, and their affectionate squabbles are worth the price of admission...
...In the lesser role of Carrie, Julie's best friend, Audra Ann McDonald possesses great warmth and purity of tone...
...Yet no amount of design and dazzle can hide a central liability...
...Only one of those reasons still applies...
...Charnin, who directed the Wallachs in last season's retrospective, In Persons, is clearly comfortable with them and they with him...
...As Jigger Cragin, the Iago figure who leads Billy to a fatal robbery attempt, Fisher Stevens looks and sounds like a wharf rat gargling with salt water...
...Ham (Steve Hofvendahl) is a relentless womanizer, Japheth (David Aaron Baker) a temperamental activist, Shem (Josh Mostel) an entrepreneur out for the quick shekel...
...What it can have is a dozen of the best tunes ever written for the stage...
...One, the Allies were on their way to victory (V-E Day occurred three weeks after opening night) and audiences were in the mood for upbeat theater...
...In the end it is those R&H antiques, rather than Hyt-ner's innovations, that make this Carousel spin...
...The organization hit its stride with a splendid Timon of Athens, stumbled with The Government Inspector, and marks time with The Flowering Peach...
...Sixteen years later Peach returned as a musical entitled Two by Two...
...She also reveals a comic gift, especially in duets with her uptight husband, Mr...
...Briskin: The mumps—the gout—go argue with City Hall...
...Ham and Japheth exchange insults, and then wives...
...Company spy...
...Riskin: Scab...
...As the rain increases, propinquity leads to bigger trouble...
...once again the production was showered with praise...
...The Flowering Peach told the Biblical story of Noah and his family as if they were middle-class Jews from a Long Island suburb...
...Substitutes...
Vol. 77 • April 1994 • No. 4
