Stage
Weales, Gerald
tance was moved to join him. Today he is not much celebrated evan in his own village, and his story is not well known even in the peace movement. We who do know the story of Franz Jaegerstaater,...
...Given the circumstances in which she sings it --to her husband just before he deserts her and to her daughter shortly before she runs away -- the conventionality of Kander' s music and the embarrassing obviousness of Ebb's words seem almost intentional, a satiric touch...
...But, at that moment, what will come of it is not the ~oint...
...The second of these is the whole plot of The Rink...
...It was characteristic of the production that after lifting the audience up with the spirited "In His Own Good Time," the first act curtain came down to the extended whine of "Every time We Call It Quits...
...Amen Corner, which came and went quickly in the Fall, was the first of this season's family musicals...
...It even turned up in Doonesbury...
...The feeling in the gut of Gandhi as he burned his passbook, or in the gut of Rosa Parks as she refused to surrender her bus seat, or in the guts of the eight as they smashed the warhead nosecones, is the same cold feeliqg of fear and exhilaration for all...
...The resistance of Franz Jaegerstaater illustrates this point with such force and clarity precisely because it had no social utility: the Nazi state was powerful enough to suffocate any such reverberation...
...At the moment when wrong laws are broken, those who break them are not privileged to experience in advance their vindication...
...They all rally round in a teary bout of mutual understanding, and the curtain comes down with the four of them doing a reprise of "Class Act," the club number that the mother, the uncle and the ghost of the grandfather did in Act I. The daughter of The Tap Dance Kid has a number of fat-gift songs (done with a fine belting style by understudy Tracey Mitchem the night I was there) which indicate that she wants her father not only to recognize her embryonic legal mind but to tell her she is pretty...
...For Angel, it is a symbol of an imaginary past she would like to create...
...The point, at that moment, is to cease contributing to that which is wrong, to cease participating by inertia in the maiming activity of the state, to stop being on the state's side in wrongdoing...
...There is vigor in the shout songs Garry Sherman wrote for the church scenes -- as one might expect from the composer of Purlie -- but the plot songs are tedious...
...Ruth Brown coming in on "In His Own Good Time" and "Leanin' on the Lord" to lift those already jubilant numbers to new heights...
...Something in both his reasoning and his courage is alien to us...
...So we are led to look elsewhere for the source of the meaning and validity which we cannot deny We are led to discover the broadly religious foundations of the impulse to resist state crimes...
...The woman who ran away to find herself and the now grown deserted daughter meet, trade recriminations and begin to understand one another...
...We who do know the story of Franz Jaegerstaater, however, mu~lt wrestle with the question of whether his resistance, his act of civil disobedience, had any validity...
...for Anna, it is a lifetime of being put upon...
...COMMONWEAL ASSOCIATES Patron Member $200 or more , Charter Member $ i00 Sustaining Member $50 Commonweal Associates, 232 Madison Ave...
...Commonweal: 210 If Amen Corner was based on a standard maturation play, maturity in several other musicals was encased in an even more familiar plot -- parent gets child, parent loses child, parent gets child...
...Although talking things out may sometimes work in therapy sessions, talking at cross purposes is the verbal life blood of theater...
...If the meaning and validity of an act of civil disobedience is equal to its contribution to positive social change, then the act of Franz Jaegerstaater had no meaning, no validity...
...Tragedy, irony, real wit (as against mask-over-angst smart talk) dried up in plays in which presumably serious dramatists confused their job with that of counselors...
...In the course of this long, painful number, he counters the showbusiness dreams of his son and brother-in-law with his own dream about achievement that will enhance the status of the blacks...
...What one remembers from the shows are performers...
...With rare exceptions, musicals have happy endings which, in this context, means that parents and children can embrace and erase a lifetime of misunderstanding with a few words or a song or, as in The Rink, an uplifting silhouette of the generations joined...
...Although it helped form some of our most important plays -- Death of a Salesman, The Glass Menagerie -- it carried the seeds of its own corruption, a tendency to analyze the drama to death...
...When the musical comedy began to turn serious in the 1940s, to use the book as more than a skeleton on which to hang songs, it was inevitable that the material would echo straight plays...
...Two Guatemalan refugees are emerging from a harrowing trip through a sewage tunnel between Tijuana and the United States...
...10016 Stage 'DON'T AH ME ME' MUSICALLY SPEAKING B ACK IN 192 I, Sigmund Romberg could still dish up a Schubertian "Song of Love" in Blossom Time...
...By~ 1937 a working girl in Pins and Needles would insist, "Sing Me a Song with Social Significance...
...its central characters are a brother and sister -- an unromantic twist on Hollywood formulas -- named Enrique and Rosa, who flee their village when soldiers murder their father for talking up land reform...
...It is'a troublesome question because, i suspect, most of us are made rather uncomfortable and even frightened by someone who would do what Franz Jaegerstaater did in those circumstances, for those reasons...
...In the end, the women are reconciled, the past laid to rest, the rink torn down...
...Angel (Liza Minelli) comes home to the skating rink which her mother (Chita Rivera) has just sold...
...But El Norte verges on the cliche only to redeem it: the bathos only underlines the earnestness, the desperateness of the migrants' desire...
...GERALD WEALES l l I Screen TRUE NORTH A THIRD-WORLD FIRST O NE SCENE from El Norte sums up its rare surprising strength...
...El Norte is unusual" although made in Hollywood, eighty percent of the screenplay is in Spanish, showing how seriously its makers took the realities of migrant life...
...The stem, cold lawyer father does not want his son to be a dancer like his uncle (without whom there would be no show) and does not even notice his overweight, overwrought daughter who wants to be a lawyer like Daddy...
...It is of immense importance to us who ask it...
...Most plays that bring down the curtain in a wash of new understanding are dramatically unsatisfying to me -- all tell and no show -- and it hardly helps matters for the characters to sing their family grievances...
...That is what I would like to believe -- harking back to the Ebb and Kander of Cabaret and 70 Girls 70 -- but The Rink is a flaccid show like their Woman of the Year...
...On one level, the scene is bathetic, almost vapid" we know this plastic paradise is no magic fairyland...
...No one knows for sure what will come of it, if ianything...
...The generation gap, to use the easy label, is one of the persistent themes of American drama (or any drama: v., King Lear...
...It stuck close to the James Baldwin play on which it was based, a coming-of-age drama in which.young David finds his own way after negotiating the troubled territory between his life-denying mother, a storefront preacher, and his life-embracing father, a jazz musician...
...Liza Minnelli belting out her numbers as her fans expect, the sob of regret or defiance under the boom, and the admirable Chita Rivera denying the victimized Anna just by the way she takes the stage...
...The children are not yet grown in The Tap Dance Kid, but for most of the evening they appear to be neurotics in the making...
...We cannot, I think, affirm the validity of Franz JaegerstaaIer's witness without acknowledging the essentially and irreducibly religious nature of saying "no" to the state...
...It is not that we discover that Franz Jaegerstaater was a religious man, for we knew that already, and it may not have any significance...
...It is hard not to fall in love with their naivetb, and feel both pity and fear for its consequences...
...Beyond that, I venture, even for resisters who do not believe in God, all is in God's hands...
...Rational analysis has no place in a consideration of "William's Song," however...
...The priorities of Amen Corner were clear, the sentimental drama over the musical...
...It is understandable if wrong-headed that he should find dancing demeaning to his race, but it is difficult to understand why that should lead him to a preoccupation with material goods and appearances, to a tendency to condescend to his wife and daughter and to an inability to hug his children...
...El Norte' s power is thus not political, but personal...
...The best that the score has to offer are some affectionate aggression duets that are momentarily sprightly but end up feeding the bromidic mushiness of Terrence McNally's book...
...Hinton Battle, the uncle in The Tap Dance Kid, leading Alan Weeks (the ghostly grandpa), Alfonso Ribeiro (the boy) and the chorus in celebratory tap numbers...
...all this with the aid of a helping of musical treacle called "Mother...
...Fred Ebb and John Kander provide Anna with a chin-up number called "We Can Make It...
...Autres temps, autres moeurs - that's French for you pays your therapist and you takes your choice...
...It looks like a simple case of the dictatorial father, the old curmudgeon who is ripe for a heart-wringing cure, when suddenly at the end of the second act, the father gets a chance to unburden himself to the considerable surprise of everyone on and off stage...
...Perhaps part of the appeal of Peter Brooks's production of la trag~die de Carmen at Lincoln Center is that Carmen and Don Jos~ do not sit down and talk/sing their troubles away...
...not just in Jaegerstaater's case, but universally...
...This is the season of "Sing Me a Song of Family Counseling...
...But that is not true...
...The answer to this question is of no importance to Franz Jaegerstaater...
...takes place...
...Garry Trudeau's attempt to make a musical out of his cartoon characters was not particularly successful...
...New York, N.Y...
...Despite an occasional sharp one-liner, the satiric heart had gone out of the material...
...When they finally climb out -- after surviving darkness, stench, rats, and the border patrol -- they see the lights of San Diego's freeways spread out before them and their eyes dilate with happy wonder...
...Yet something in us wants to stand up and cheer...
...It was just a case of the likable Doonesbury kids getting together for a song--an impression heightened by Elizabeth S wados's innocuous music --and it was about as pointed as You're a Good Man Charlie Brown...
...The two siblings pass through Mexico to reach Los Angeles and there, despite setbacks, combine luck, hard work, and unconscious charm to win comparatively decent jobs...
...What we discover is that acts of civil disobedience are inherently religious in nature: not just in Jaegerstaater's mind, but, as it were, objectively...
...Behind every such "no" authentically uttered to the state lies a "yes" to a sacred reality which supersedes the state, and which is prior to all considerations of social utility...
...it is enough that his family be able to see the aching heart beneath the pin stripe...
...So much positive power trapped in saccharine therapy sessions...
...There's no propaganda in the movie, just visual poetry, suspense and 6 April 1984:211...
...I do not know what happens in the Louise Fitzhugh novel on which the show is based, but her title, Nobody' s Family Is Going to Change, is not very prophetic...
...I mention it in this familial context because in the middle of the second act, the long promised confrontation between Joanie and J.J...
...The scene, like the whole movie, gives us new eyes...
Vol. 111 • April 1984 • No. 7
