Media

...The presence of Che Guevara, as a cross between a master-of- ceremonies and a political lecturer, is supposed to insure such a reading...

...Peron, lifting her arms to speak and sending the diamond bracelets sliding, had to wait for the "expensive clatter" to stop before she could begin, "We, the shirtless...

...There have fallen behind something like 13-0 by the third inning, and were delegates at this year's GOP convention who were still Bud Detter's work, slogging on to the last out, would be very floating on the waves made by Reagan's speech sixteen years hard...

...Unlike that other Prince show, Sweeney Todd, Evita has the shape of a success story...

...He is by no means simply an "actor...

...The principal gued that Jesus had spoken the truth was quickly becoming a Gentile enterinspiration for Van Buren's theological when he announced, "No one comes to prise...

...A LOOK AT 'DUTCh' REAGAN i lN KANSAS in the 1930s I would sometimes listen to what was called a "re-creation" of baseball games played on Ithe road by our local team, an ineffectual Pittsburgh farm club whose only distinction was its name, the Hutchinson Larks...

...Children of a Lesser God seems to want to elicit that kind of sympathy and, because Sarah is so attrac- tive a character, it can certainly do so...

...My problem with the play is that I do not know how to react to it...

...Sitting alone in a bare studio, with nothing but this ticker, a Commonweal: 596 wife and show biz family at Rancho del Cielo above Santa he regularly does when telling about his father being fired on Barbara, travels the Ventura Freeway to a Hollywood studio, Christmas Eve in 1931 or about America as a shining city on a and tapes an appeal to the old Main Street values far more hill...

...The author, profoundly im- promises, except through Jesus Christ...

...the simulation or re-creation of ago...

...or the Springfield (Missouri) Cardinals or the Fort Smith (Arkansas) Giants, the radio an- nouncer who gave a play-by-play account of their triumphs and disasters would take himself not to Oklahoma or Missouri or Arkansas, where the game was actually being played, but to the Hutchinson radio station...

...Tim Rice's lyrics may have undercut Andrew Lloyd Webber's music, making Evita the political musical Prince says it is, but if you cannot hear the words, how can you know...

...One's reaction to that scene depends on whether Mrs...

...Reagan had spent heighten, simplify, fill it with personality...

...The Christian doctrine of God and honors Jewish religion in the com- of Israel to the Gentiles...

...For years giving that very speech...

...Harold Prince has several times pointed out that Evita is not intended as an exemplary heroine, that the musical is a satiric account of her rise to political eminence and a sardonic comment on a public that embraced her image...

...who was substituting for Phyllis Frelieh when I saw Children, were excellent, expres- sing an emotional range that allowed me to move beyond the didactic to the more complex human drama that I wanted to find in Mark Medoff's play...

...Make it up...

...I want the play to be more complicated than that...

...The details of this position are worked tion, has made a major theological effo'rt out with great originality and inner to re-think and re-interpret Christian Gregory Baum coherence...

...Christians experienced God as pre- mrve is drawn from German Jewish the Father except through the Son...

...The sent to them in the Spirit...

...James, attracted to Sarah, breaches the wall she has built around herself and takes her into a marriage which at fLrst seems idyllic but which contains the seeds of its inevitable collapse...

...That gave an idea, of course, to famous 'cross of gold' speech...

...Dramatize, could hear his powerful but unaided voice...

...Evita also offers problems in perception...

...drab year -- butone senses that he would have exchanged it for When he got his chance in the big league politics of the one of the leads in Treasure of the Sierra Madre, or Humphrey television age he was ready...

...She decides not to let eithel" her husband or her hearing-impaired friend--with whatever affection--impose a preconceived role on her...

...There he would find a Western Union ticker sputtering a laconic report of the game's events...

...David Broder and Stephen Hess wrote that that speech games by men of talent like Bud and Dutch could be more "was the most striking political debut since William Jennings engrossing than mere reports done by lesser announcers physi- Bryan electrified the 1896 Democratic convention with his cally present at the game...

...The man who wants to help his wife becomes her oppressor, not allowing her to be herself, to create her own place in the world...

...At Evita, on the contrary, I was completely undone by the technical inefficiency of the produc- tion...

...Yet, the musical form in this case belies the inten- tion...

...Rosenzweig ar- records the experience of the church that mon era until our own day...

...InsOfar as it is about Sarah's discovery of herself, it is a standard didactic play unusual only in that the hearing- impaired are the new misunderstood minority...

...Hold the audience: The broadcast's the thing...

...Thurs., Fri., Sat.: ACTION...

...I have been told for years that I cannot possibly understand because I am not female, Black, Jewish, Catholic, homosexual, under thirty...

...The play ends with the separation of husband and wife and with the suggestion that a reconciliation may become possible if each of them can admit a need for help from the other...

...Simulate all the way...

...moment of silent prayer...

...My own sym- pathy goes frequently to the exasperated husband...

...Why have had the distinct inconvenience of reaching only those who a game...

...And in the '50s, as the new this story went around Hollywood: A man said, "I really and still more powerful medium sprouted its aerials across the didn't need a nuclear submarine, but I have one now...

...At the same thinker Franz Rosenzweig who, half a Jewish people, having received the coy- time, they realized that this presence did Commonweal: 598...

...GERALD WEALES Media RE-CREATING MAIN ST...

...pressed by the negation of Jewish exis- Paul Van Buren This is the key to Van Buren's theology...

...As always with a Prince.show, there were richly con- ceived scenes and a remarkable sense of vibrancy, but the sound system was so bad that I could seldom understand Patti LuPone as Evita, and Mandy Patinkin, as Che, became in- comprehensible when he lifted his voice or speeded up his delivery which he almost always ~lid when he reached the satiric point of a passage...

...Since no marriage--however close, however loving--can make two people one, can bring full understanding, can avoid the intrusion of ego, the special cases of James, as teacher, and Sarah, as unwilling pupil, can become metaphors for any marriage...

...As a practiced actor he can bring tears to his eyes on cue, as WILLIAM LEE MILLER I It I H • "Books: IN THE LIGHT OF NEW EVENTS I T I HIS is an important, carefully rea- DISCERNING THE WAY enant, were already with the Father...

...teaching so that it respects the Jewish The God of the church, Van Buren people as God's chosen race, retains a century ago, saw in the Christian religion argues, is the Trinity, Father, Son and sense that salw/tion comes from the Jews the extension of the wisdom and worship Spirit...

...But Williams Jennings Bryan many a satirist, and perhaps to many a sponsor, too...

...what he thinks is love, she believes is ego-fulfillment...

...The marriage is not only en-dangered by what the two people bring to it, but by the fact that Sarah, as a member of a minority, is accused by her activist friend and ally of sacrificing the cause to a selfish desire to find comfort and acceptance in the hearing world, an accusation which, as uncletomism, was once a clich6 of Black drama...

...he was a movie star, In the days when he was doing the General Electric Theatre, in the era of movie stars., when Warner Brothers and MGM and Reagan once did an institutional advertisement about General Paramount ground out feature films for all the world --Sun., Electric's role in making the nuclear submarine, using the Mon., Tue., Wed.: ROMANCE...

...His speech about the United States being the last "Island of Freedom" in the world moved conservative legions of the television audience to ecstasy, brought in millions for A last word about the Larks...

...The play is a conventional one, familiar enough in the feminist drama of recent years...

...the heroine appears to have the "star quality" one of her songs promises, to embody a kind of vitality which--on stage at least--is obviously a positive qual- ity...

...In attempting to see the play in those terms, however, I may simply be showing my oppressor's sympathy for the husband and making Sarah's case for her...

...suburban developments and sprinkled its spooky blue rectang- In the twilight of his career Reagan is playing a fairly good les into every living room, General Electric and Borax gave role --a conservative Republican candidate for president in a him a role as a television host, actor, speaker, and persuader...

...When the Larks would go forth to do their best against the Muskogee (Oklahoma) Reds...

...a genuine media talent reality can be a nuisance...

...And he had spent interesting...

...It had been noticed thai...

...next same winning and persuasive manner he employed in selling week MYSTERY and TERROR...

...Keep the action his lifetime with microphones and cameras...

...The performances of John Rubinstein and A. Linda Bove...

...Evita offers that same leeway for response...

...A short review will not be able to do REALITY access to the God of Israel and the divine it justice...

...tence in the Christian theological tradi- Seabury, $12.95, 207 pp...

...tion in Los Angeles he hit one into the upper deck of the center field stands...

...Peron's aplomb be taken as an example of style or evidence of social and political irresponsibility...

...He did it again at the end of his acceptance speech this persuasive than those of his rivals, born-again squares from year when he couldn't keep himself from asking for that Plains, Georgia, and Rockford, Illinois...

...Fairly often, alas, they would Goldwater, and established Reagan as a political star...

...certainly the play, bound in by the need to translate, cannot begin to convey that silence...

...In that most un- likely how-to book, How to Have a Life-style, Quentin Crisp describes Eva Peron as the "greatest political stylist the world has ever known," and describes an occasion in which Mrs...

...He came back to radio as a GE appliances...

...I know, being male and WASP, that no one who is not male and WASP can understand me, but sympathy on stage is directed to the oppressed minority rather than the presumably oppressing minority...

...At the 1964 Republican Conven- Bogart's role in Casablanca, orGeorge C. Scott's in Patton...

...but soned book that deserves close atten- A THEOLOGY OF THE JEWISH-CHRISTIAN the Gentiles, those far away, had no other • tion...

...There are a number of good satiric moments--for in- stance, the game of musical chairs that brings Peron to power--but the total effect of the show is to gain audience sympathy for the little girl who screwed her way to power and then died young: Although Children of a Lesser God and Evita posed idea- tional questions that bothered me, my reaction to the produc- tions in both cases was unequivocal...

...Lou Cannon of the Washington Post says that conservative political spokesman...