On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage FLESHED-OUT AND WORN-OUT BY STEFAN KANFER The Schwann Catalogue lists more than 50 recordings made under the baton of Wilhelm Furtwangler. Unquestionably, he was the premier conductor...
...Freed, the murderesses become a popular nightclub duet, making crime pay big-time...
...Yes, yes, he could have gone abroad...
...To him all Germans are culpable to some degree, and the reputation of this imperious figure cuts no ice at all...
...He invites anyone to examine his dossier...
...As Martin Gottfried notes in his biography, All His Jazz, the director-choreographer's hunger for applause was unappeasable...
...There, neglected vehicles are performed in concert versions—the pop equivalent of an oratorio instead of an opera...
...The record will show that he never joined the Nazi Party—as did his rival, Herbert von Karajan...
...The rest is a series of obvious sketches, predictable sight gags and galvanic choreography made up to resemble a Broadway show...
...For Taking Sides he squeezes the critical postwar period into a few months of 1946...
...Two women, Roxie Hart (Ann Reinking) and Velma Kelly (Bebe Neuwirth), knock off their shady lovers and get marched off to the state pen...
...Much has been made—justifiably—of Daniel Massey 's bravura performance, granting a humanity and intellect to a basically unsympathetic role...
...End of story...
...It also has Fred Ebb's lyrics, which display the Brechtian bite denied the rest of the show...
...Should Furtwangler have become an emigre like Thomas Mann and Fritz Lang and Marlene Dietrich and so many other Germans who were in no personal danger, but who protested the Third Reich by voting with their feet...
...Their jealousies mount until the entry of a slick defense lawyer, Billy Flynn (James Naughton), who could give lessons in jury manipulation to Johnny Cochran...
...You will not find anything like it in film or on television...
...Bobbie directed that rendition as well, and with very little padding the producers brought it down to the Richard Rodgers Theater in hopes of making their own killing...
...In 1973 Bob Fosse became the first director to win a movie Oscar (Cabaret), a Broadway Tony (Pippin) and a television Emmy (Liza with a Z) in the same year...
...Much has been said about the new relevance of Chicago in the O. J. era...
...In my view, the musical's emphasis on Roxie and Velma cheating the hangman pales by comparison to what the producers are doing to audiences by charging a $70 top to see a skeleton...
...In his hands Chicago became a kind of born-again vaudeville with, as he described it, "a Bert Williams type number, a Helen Morgan type number, an Eddie Cantor type number," etc...
...After a near-fatal heart attack and complicated bypass surgery, he plunged into a downhill slalom of overwork, boozing, smoking, and womanizing...
...This is only partly due to Harwood's dialogue, which sometimes seems to be written in capital letters...
...One of the few exceptions, "Class," is a raunchy lament by Roxie and Velma: Everybody you watch Got his brains in his crotch What a shame...
...The producers tended to blame timing—it opened in 1980, the same season the nonlinear Chorus Line made its sensational debut...
...But each woman sees herself as the headlin-er and her rival as the stuff of page three...
...on the other, those who believed that a poet who made pro-Fascist broadcasts is no more exempt from moral obligations than a grocer or a soldier...
...He never truckled to power, never paid attention to current events, only to timeless music...
...Playwright Ronald Harwood is fascinated, not to say obsessed, by such questions...
...But Ed Harris should not be overlooked...
...If he can see the value of this upright, aging but still dignified figure, why can't the Major...
...He owed it to his country to keep the flame of civilization alive...
...Lewis and Grey wring major laughs from minor parts...
...But something else was at fault here...
...The production's real strength resides in David Jones' crisp direction, and in the authority of his cast...
...Major Arnold has other flames in mind: the fires in the death camp ovens...
...The free world had many important conductors, Germany only a few...
...He was 60...
...Now the show has been trotted out once more, ready to impress those who confuse energy with originality and cynicism with sophistication...
...At the Brooks Atkinson Theater, Harris, as he puts it, finds "a lot of complexity to this guy," who is considerably "more intelligent than he lets on...
...He knew how to create big parts for his fellow gymnastic soloists and eccentric singers...
...Major Arnold, he insists, must allow musical genius to assume its rightful place on the podium...
...With a silver tongue (and some silver crossing the right palms) he elicits the magic words "not guilty" for both women...
...On one side, the art for art's sake crowd...
...Raised in Germany before the War, Lieutenant David Wills (Michael Stuhlbarg) was once taken to see the maestro lead the Berlin Orchestra...
...What benefit would that have brought...
...After Ezra Pound won the Bollingen Prize, the intellectual community found itself split down the middle...
...The current revival has preserved his vision...
...What it does not have is anything new to say or sing or dance...
...She and her onstage rival Bebe Neuwirth possess, in Woody Allen's memorable phrase, legs that not only don't quit, they don't even take a coffee break...
...The time is the late 1920s, when the City of Broad Shoulders is run by corrupt politicians and organized criminals...
...During these worst of times he conceived what was supposed to be a revolutionary "concept" musical...
...Ironically, it is another American who best articulates Furtwangler's case...
...When the pianist Walter Gieseking came to Carnegie Hall, the Jewish War Veterans ringed it with picket signs reminding New Yorkers that he had performed for the Nazis...
...Wills (Weil, originally) is a Jew...
...Reporters descend, turning the fading bimbos into overnight celebrities...
...In 1987 it all caught up with him...
...John Kander's music deliberately apes the old styles: "When You're Good to Mama" is a more explicit version of Sophie Tucker's specialty pieces...
...Fosse, along with lyricist Fred Ebb, adapted Maurine Watkins' straight play (the same vehicle was used as the basis for the 1942 Ginger Rogers movie Roxie Hart...
...As it turned out, Chicago had a difficult birth and very mixed reviews...
...Among the more colorful wrongos: The Diesel-driven jail matron, "Mama" Morton (Marcia Lewis), the crossdressing sob sister Mary Sunshine (D...
...The most foolish is Roxie's cuckolded husband Amos (Joel Gray), who wears a suit two sizes too small, white gloves, and the wan smile of a nebbish who could lose a bass viol in a phone booth...
...Moreover, Karajan enthusiastically gave the stiff-armed salute before each concert...
...Sabella) and a bunch of semi-tough jailbabes...
...As a result, the audience doesn't have anyone to root for—or against...
...These Chicago has in overplus...
...Chicago suffered from an excess of surface, as Fosse privately admitted when he perused the handful of favorable notices and chortled, "We really razzle-dazzled those bastards, didn't we...
...A Little Bit of Good" is reminiscent of Marilyn Miller's showpiece, "Look for the Silver Lining," and so on...
...Ann Reinking was involved with Fosse in his last years and she carefully retains his trademark routines—the strut under the bowler hat, the arrogant, thrusting hips of the ladies on parade...
...James Naughton has energy and style...
...Therein lies the problem...
...Early on, Fosse had been one of the show business "gypsies"—performers who survive by moving from one musical to the next...
...What became Of class...
...This trio of awards should have signaled a time of triumph and assurance...
...Or was he making a private statement, attempting to preserve a shard of civilization in a barbarous time...
...The event remains central to the officer's life—a civilizing experience that seems larger than politics and more significant than war...
...The drama and film both contained witty exchanges and three-dimensional people...
...It would be pleasant to state that this gaunt version is a reaction to bloated musicals like Sunset Boulevard and Phantom of the Opera, in which the swimming pool and the chandelier, respectively, mean more than the score...
...Here ends the list of assets...
...In the winter and summer of that year Furtwangler (Daniel Massey) confronts Major Steve Arnold (Ed Harris), a righteous, by-the-book Army officer who has no room on his schedule for intellectual debate...
...The two men are ably supported by Stuhlbarg, and by Elizabeth Marvel as a good German, Norbert Weisser as a bad one, and Ann Dowd as a confused one...
...Similar protests greeted the Wagnerian soprano Kirsten Flagstad everywhere she sang...
...But the fact is that Chicago II was done last spring as part of City Center's "Encores" program...
...Putting flesh on ideas is what theater was meant to be—and all too seldom is...
...As the argument escalates the inquisitor becomes increasingly furious, while the conductor grows more disdainful with each encounter...
...Taking Sides personalizes the debate and makes it as seem as relevant as the latest CNN dispatch...
...The conductor is too proud to bend to the conqueror...
...Walter Bobbie's direction places heavy emphasis on minimalism, and his wishes are echoed in William Ivey Long's stark black costumes and John Lee Beatty's pared down set...
...The dancing is indeed kinetic...
...They were all instrumentalists, not common people, but what more could one do in a totalitarian state...
...Fosse, who was never far from a theater, collapsed and died outside of one in Washington D.C...
...David Jenkins' set tries to juxtapose the severe military rooms and the blasted rubble of postwar Berlin, and for the most part succeeds...
...When he finally realized what was happening to the Jews he helped several of them escape...
...Then again, neither do the limbs of any of the chorines...
...It was anything but...
...The British production, as he observed, made the Major "the stereotypical ugly American versus a cultured European...
...Fosse had no use for these traditional resources...
...Furtwangler would have none of this...
...For the nation was Nazi Germany, and the time was the 1930s and '40s when he headed the Berlin Philharmonic...
...Taking Sides has flaws but no longueurs...
...He wants him tried and punished like a common war criminal...
...The problem is, in almost every case the original numbers were better...
...No sympathy is squandered on the personae, and no time is wasted on character development...
...In this benighted town, all are knaves or fools...
...Cellophane" is a restatement of "Me and My Shadow" made famous by Frank Fay...
...Theoni Aldredge's costumes are, as usual, apposite, and Howell Binkley's lighting and Peter Fitzgerald's sound design are almost as important as the characters...
...However, that would have left his country without its greatest interpreter of Mozart and Beethoven and Bach...
...Controversies of this kind once heated the cities of Europe and America...
...The American has visited Buchenwald and seen the mass graves...
...Unquestionably, he was the premier conductor of his nation and his time...
...As a matter of fact the younger musician joined it twice: once in Austria, once in Germany...
Vol. 79 • November 1996 • No. 8
