On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage PLAUTUS REDIVIVUS BY STEFAN KANFER "OUR REASON for putting it on was an affectionate one. Low comedy and farce in America are rarely done." The speaker was the late Burt Shevelove....
...A contemporary historian, Francis Meres, noted: "As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage: for Comedy, witness his Midsummer night dream...
...without ever losing his working-class dignity, he made every speech into a collection of punch lines...
...When the fairies came, they descended in a huge umbrella that seemed more of a gimmick than an enchantment, and when the lovers rose into the night, they did so in big pieces of cloth that resembled the diapers used to enwrap babies in stork cartoons...
...Noble's other significant departure from tradition was in the casting of the play's central commentator...
...In order to buy it, he concocts an elaborate scheme involving, among others, Senex'son Hero (Jim Stanek), the youth's girlfriend, a young prostitute named Philia (Jessica Boevers), and a conquering hero, Miles Gloriosus (Cris Groenendaal...
...Anthony Ward's set provided little more than a bare stage and a few red doors—hardly the stuff that dreams are made on...
...1) Theseus and Hippolyta, royal Athenians, who are about to marry...
...I doubt that a high school freshman could miss a nuance...
...no "moon, like to a silver bow...
...James Theater has been a case of third time lucky...
...He described the experience as "like being hit by a truck that backed up and ran over you again...
...Jerome Robbins, who had fully cooperated with huac, worked with brilliance...
...Here, it was played by Barry Lynch, a large athletic figure in a grotesque wig...
...Tony Walton's appalling set and costumes are tacky without being witty—most of the outfits appear to be recycled pajamas—and Paul Gallo's lighting obeys the rules of the TV sitcom: put it in a box and make it bright...
...Worse than anyone feared, as it turned out...
...At the head of the line is Lane himself...
...Phil Silvers, playing the Mostel role, fell ill early on and the show collapsed with a 100 per cent loss for its investors...
...The film died at the box office, and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum disappeared into theatrical history, one of those legendary works that everyone fondly recalled but no one wanted to revive...
...As Hippolyta/Titania...
...The current production at the St...
...Well, nevermind...
...A Midsummer Night s Dream is one of four literary classics to take place in a dreamscape (the others are Lewis Carroll's two "Alice" books...
...Next door lives citizen Senex (Lewis J. Stadlen), his gorgon of a wife Domina (Mary Testa), their abject slave Hysteri-um (Mark Linn-Baker), and a second far more devious servant, Pseudolus (Lane...
...Stadlen, normally an expert farceur, is reduced to walking in a bent-over posture to project old age, and to growling in a manner that merely obscures the lyrics...
...and Jonathan Tunick's arrangements grant the Sond-heim songs a new life...
...his disdain was almost as sharp as Duncan's cheekbones...
...Gelbart, 34, went on to a big career as a comedy writer...
...the musical has an enormous advance sale and may well exceed the original 964 performances...
...As Plautus himself observed, Tumdenique homines nostra intellegimus bona, quom quae in potestatehabuimus, eaanhsmus—"We mortals realize the value of blessings only when we have lost them...
...More than honor, of which he has none, and money, of which he has less than none, Pseudolus loves freedom...
...Those who think of Sondheim today as a cerebral, tuneless experimenter have only to listen to the album: Of the 11 songs there is not one that couldn't be hummed by a stone, and not one that can be listened to with a straight face...
...George Abbott, already famous for five decades, directed with masterly aplomb: it was his last big hit...
...He had two exceptionally creative partners in the 1962 Broadway musical: Larry Gelbart collaborated with him on the book, and Stephen Sond-heim composed the music and lyrics for this romp set in ancient days, based on the classic Roman comedies of Plautus...
...and, of course, to Sondheim's bright numbers...
...What, then, is wrong with this production...
...The third effort might have come directly from some brassy Vegas venue...
...Vibrata, Tintinabula, and Gymnasia...
...Yet these are merely superficial problems...
...anatomizing the riotously successful first run of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum...
...4) The "Rude Mechanicals," a band of very real, very earthy Athenian workers who rehearse a playlet they intend to present at the wedding...
...I well remember Mostel...
...And difficulty...
...Lindsay Duncan conveyed an appropriately regal air (although it often seemed more appropriate to the second Elizabethan London), and a voice born to articulate iambic pentameter...
...A thick scrim of nostalgia appears to have clouded the vision of many of those ticket buyers, along with an uncritical affection for the revival's rising star, Nathan Lane...
...Forum seemed to be sailing with a curse, and no matter what other Sondheim shows were restaged, it remained on the shelf...
...Until now...
...The initial, best rendition of Forum is gone forever, and this one is all we have...
...Gelbart saw the adaptation in London...
...As Nick Bottom, Desmond Bar-rit led the way...
...This has been Nathan Lane's year...
...Far more troubling is Jerry Zaks' star-absorbed direction...
...3) The fairies of the wood, led by Titania and Oberon, who impudently toy with those sleeping lovers...
...He would also be accurate...
...In the center of ancient Rome lies the bawdy house of Lycus (Ernie Sabella...
...The concept was not un-amusing, just perverse—like the production that surrounded him...
...Playing opposite her as Theseus/Oberon, Alex Jennings tended to curdle...
...Rob Marshall's choreography tells its own jokes, the spoken gags are as durable as the Appian way ("Was One a good year...
...to a series of pratfalls and pig-bladder encounters...
...On the other hand, the great clowns Zero Mos-tel and Jack Gilford, blacklisted for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee (huac) in the '50s, returned to the Main Stem with hurricane force...
...Every word rang clear, every image sang through the air and remained in the mind...
...There he shared top billing with Robin Williams in The Birdcage, a remake of La CageAux Folks, the French farce about two aging homosexuals...
...En route to the joyous conclusion, the audience is treated to a parade of knockout courtesans with names like Panacea...
...In recent years—most notably with Peter Brook's brilliant Broadway staging in the late 1960s—a great simplification has taken place...
...Audiences felt much the same way...
...His credits include TV's long-running MASH, and the Academy Award-winning Tootsie...
...The lovers, Emily Raymond, Monica Dolan, Kevin Robert Doyle, and Daniel Evans, had charm and youth to spare...
...Unfortunately, the set did not prove to be a happy place, and word went out that songs had to be cut in the name of expediency...
...no "decking with pearl the bladed grass...
...The eccentric, gifted actor had scarcely finished appearing in Love...
...The changing facets of personalities, the strange turns of events, are carefully delineated...
...Puck ("What fools these mortals be...
...The standard presentations of Midsummer offer a superabundance of per-sonae and subplots, and all too frequently sense takes a back seat to declamations...
...IN 1598, Shakespeare's name was linked for the first time with his Roman predecessor...
...Yet the Royal Shakespeare Company could not be faulted for its diction or its dedication...
...It was this spring's top grosser...
...The role is customarily given to a gamin (see Mickey Rooney in Max Reinhardt's surprisingly effective 1939 film...
...Director Adrian Noble of the Royal Shakespeare Company has taken up where Brook left off—with a strong difference in interpretation: He stresses lucidity over lyricism...
...With their rich rural English accents, these delightful performers turned the epic of Pyramis and Thisbe into high drollery...
...Still, with a big budget and many of the Broadway personnel retained, studio optimists carried the day...
...For veteran performers David Burns, John Carra-dine and Raymond Walburn, the show marked their Broadway finale...
...There was no forest on the Lunt-Fontanne stage...
...The evening is divided neatly into four groups of actors and actions...
...the young couple, the chorines, soldiers, second bananas, and all other supporting players are essentially required to stand aside for the two-hour star turn...
...Its slam-bang scenes, chorus line of pretty girls and bolts of pure melody, all un-derthe direction of Richard Lester—who had been responsible for the films A Hard Day's Night and Help!—practically guaranteed a winner...
...Sabella wrings a few laughs out of his job as whore housekeeper, but he...
...West Side Stoiy (with Leonard Bernstein) and Gypsy (with Jule Styne), but this was the first time a producer had allowed him to create an entire Broadway score...
...The look, for one thing...
...As for the youths of the group...
...The book contained even more japes, so it was no wonder that Forum was eagerly acquired by United Artists Pictures...
...at a party, indicating the choreographer and loudly referring to him as "Loose Lips...
...Let us get on with it...
...What was missing from this limited engagement, however, was the magic...
...First time out on stage, and even the second...
...2) Various young men and women, who suffer the pangs of unrequited love...
...were the Mechanicals...
...The actors who play Theseus and Hippolyta also play Oberon and Titania...
...Forum represented an extraordinary confluence of talent descending and ascending...
...Baker, who has been doing notable comedy since the 1982 film My Favorite Year, is limited to one shtick: He is perpetually out of breath...
...The 32-year-old Sond-heim had written the lyrics for two smashes...
...But the real stars of this production, as in so many before it...
...Forum had a professional sheen...
...Finally, in 1972, Gelbart directed a rerun at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater...
...last season when he was whisked to the Coast...
...Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, and James Joyce's Finnegan s Wake...
...Nothing runs smoothly, and as one scheme backfires and another is improvised, exits and entrances go on frantically...
...Given the ingredients, they argued, how bad could the movie be...
...It was fine for Elizabethans to believe that once asleep they were possessed by alien characters...
...A reviewer would be obdurate indeed to point out the many disappointments in this much-lauded presentation...
...And why not...
...Beaming, preening and mugging with narcissistic vigor, he steals the show— and much of its spirit...
...The farce may be gossamer, but its laws are made of drop-forged steel: The lovers and their enemies, the conniving slaves and their owners always manage to miss each other by a heartbeat...
...Compassion...
...The others, Tom Snout (Howard Cross-ley ), Robin Starveling (Robert Gillespie), Francis Flute (Mark Letheren), Peter Quince (John Kane), and Snug (Kenn Sabberton) were almost as funny and every bit as upright...
...Valour...
...We know all too well that the rulers of our imaginations are ourselves...
...new-bent in heaven...
...Now he is headlining his first major musical, and the legion of fans grows longer every day...
Vol. 79 • May 1996 • No. 2
