THE STAGE
Weales, Gerald
ONLY CONNECT THE STAGE The traditional revue, that thing of songs and sketches, has pretty much passed away to be replaced by either the musical retrospective of a single artist's work (Side by...
...At first glance, Elizabeth Swados's Runaways may seem to have those qualities...
...Coming home from Working, I found myself singing "Joe Worker" from The Cradle Will Rock--or trying to, since Marc Blitzstein's music, as difficult as it is indelible, is not made for nonvoices like mine...
...The most recent of the theme shows is Working, which Stephen Schwartz put together from material in the Studs Terkel collection of interviews that carries the same title...
...ONLY CONNECT THE STAGE The traditional revue, that thing of songs and sketches, has pretty much passed away to be replaced by either the musical retrospective of a single artist's work (Side by Side by Sondheim, Ain't Misbehavin') or the thematicaUy conceived show in which music may (The Club) or may not (For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide~When the Rainbow Is Enul) be...
...In a program note, she calls the show "a collage about the profound effects of our deteriorating families...
...Jones" has been pulled in from Sing Out the News, an appropriate period Rome song but not Pins and Needles...
...Not only are the sketches, which Rome did not write, missing from the production, but "F.D.R...
...If being a runaway describes the human condition, then Swados's lost adolescents are variants whose special situation cannot elicit the sympathy and concern that her initial interest in such children would seem to demand...
...For one thing, the show was infected--very specifically in one of the songs--with the idea that the world is peopled with runaways...
...Although individual numbers were effective (Craig Carnelia's "Just a Housewife," sung by Susan Bigelow), I carried away a sense of sameness which stays with me even when I stop and say, oh yes, that was a recognizable Micki Grant song, that one sounded like Mary Rodgers...
...Joy in Working is likely to turn into comic shtik, in Runaways into compulsive punching...
...that makes it an example of the retrospective revue I mentioned in my opening paragraph...
...of central importance...
...It is now being called "Harold Rome's ILGWU Musical Review," which it was not in the 1930s...
...Schwartz wants his audience to "take a look" at the men and women who check their cars and hats, he told the New York Times (May 14), and "start to realize what the connections are...
...the song and the dance are comment as decoration...
...Still, a number of distinctive musical voices working together and a less amorphous ideational line were expected...
...I do not suggest that unrewarding work and the disintegrating family be treated as fun problems, but both shows do have comic numbers which are somehow leaden, earnest, solemn...
...It certainly has a demanding drive, a beating insistence as though it were trying--musically, physically--to force itself into the playgoer's brain, heart, consciousness...
...Take "Millwork," for instance...
...Now about those connections . . . . GERALD WEALES Commonweal: 499...
...The production is a flaccid one, the staging vacillating between awkward and cute, but occasionally, when a performer is allowed on stage alone (Daniel Fortus, singing "When I Grow Up"), the wit of the songs comes through...
...I was aware that I was being manipulated, often sentimentally (as in the scenes with the doll), and, although I admired a number of the performers very much (Ray Contreras, Jessie de Guzman), I too often found myself facing a stage full of energetic young people who began to seem more like show-biz kids in situ than runaways in extremis...
...More disturbing than this ideational push toward abstraction is to the insistent sense of a show in performance...
...the strength, the pain in the number come from the worker's own words and the simulation of the deadening repetition those words describe...
...In intention and in intensity, Runaways should have worked on me in a way that it never did...
...What I found, even in this insufficient Pins and Needles, was a sense of self-mockery, and when one remembers that the ILGWU member~ performed the show originally, joking about their union even as they embraced it ("It's Better with a Union Man"), some sense of what is missing from Runaways and Working becomes apparent...
...Since Working has more composers than a TV special, it can hardly have a single musical voice as Cradle does and since this is 1978 not 1938, it can hardly have the same kind of political message...
...That's nice and the show's nice and the material cries out for something tougher, meaner, bigger...
...As such, it is an opportunity to give flesh and immediacy to a frightening phenomenon which in the pages of so many newspapers and magazines has begun to take on the look of an abstract PROBLEM...
...If this is a truth, it is a meaningless one, like Jack Gelber's addiction metaphor in The Connection...
...Runaways also has--as Working does not--the stamp of a strong organizing personality, not only in the music but in the show as a whole, which is a little odd considering that it is the product of months of interviews, improvisation, workshop sessions--that Swados had to find the line on which to hang the disparate dreams and nightmares fed to her by her informants and her performers, who are sometimes the same young people...
...The attempt was a spontaneous reaction:, to the blandness of the new show...
...4 August 1978:498 On the assumption that I am some kind of new conservative old radical, I wandered into a preview of the Pins and Needles revival at the Roundabout to see if I could find in it what was missing for me in Working and Runaways...
...As the individual voices that Terkel recorded merge into the musical chorus of Working, a book "about violence --to the spirit as well as to the body," becomes a musical aimed at transforming the audience in the soRminded way one would expect from the creator of GodspeU and .Pippin...
...None of them manages the exasperation, the joy, the outrage the occasion calls for...
...The show is at its best when it borrows directly from Terkel's book (the fireman's speech, for instance), at its weakest when it does what it set out to do, use the working situations as song cues...
...Although some of the satiric points still have force, it is essentially a nostalgia show for those who remember the first production or, like me, know the songs from the 25th anniversary recording that Columbia Records issued in 1962...
Vol. 105 • August 1978 • No. 15
