ICEMAN & THE ROPE-DANCERS

...the positive image (a sign of intelligent life...

...It appears an imposition on the satiric material of the play, sustained only by the personality of the performer when, exuding exhilaration, she returns as herself at the end of The Search...

...Now the actor and the director are back with a new and even more impressive Iceman...

...I found myself thinking of Madame Saqui, the celebrated nineteenth-century rope-dancer described by Robert Storey in his admirable Pierrots on the Stage of Desire...

...Since the music is by Andrew Lloyd Webber, the songs are as pedestrian as Emma's life, although I assume that such is not Webber's intention...

...Tomlin is still presenting a wide variety of characters, establishing them quickly with changing voices and mannerisms (and the amusing help of Otts Munderloh, the sound designer), but now the characters cross one another's paths, are joined, thematically rather than dramatically, through the repetition of images, even of jokes...

...D'Amboise plays one of Emma's lovers, and at the end she moseys on stage, dances an awkward step or two, and Webber brings the disparate sections of his concert-cum-play together in an ending as happy as the joining of two unwritten characters could be...

...GERALD WEALES / November 1985: 611...

...That I hardly noticed may be an indication not only of the quality of the play and the production, but of my taste in theater...

...Iceman runs for nearly five hours...

...Stage UPBEAT, DOWNBEAT ICEMAN & THE ROPE-DANCERS IT IS ALMOST thirty years since the revival of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh at the old downtown Circle in the Square, a production that confirmed the importance of that theater and established the reputations of Jason Robards and Jose Quintero...

...The first act ends with Agnus Angst, the teen-age punker, crying out that pain hurts...

...I would like for it to be considered a play," says Jane Wagner, the author of The Search (New York Times, October 4...

...Robards's performance is the stronger for being at the center of a production in which there is uniform excellence in the casting, not simply in the other leads (Barnard Hughes, Donald Moffat), but in all the contributive smaller roles...

...There is now a kind of gravity to Hickey's false playfulness that increases the sense of the salesman as malevolent savior...

...The play wants to be something more than funny...

...They are the occasion for a great many sci-fi gags and also for standard perceptions in which the obliquity of the outsider puts the familiar into sharper focus (v...

...This is particularly noticeable in the long first act, before Hickey takes the stage, when the play sprawls in its not really aimless aimlessness, introducing the audience to each of the regulars at Harry Hope's, establishing the atmosphere of the place and the play, and setting out the theme with the repetitive deliberateness that anti-O'Neill critics deplore...

...I am willing to sink into the play, knowing that a production as good as this one will demonstrate that O'Neill is only apparently saying the same thing over and over...

...she performed mimodramas on the high wire, playing all the characters...

...Unfortunately, what they are asked to do seems as ordinary as the songs of Act I would be without the presence of Peters...

...There is no substance to Emma except the wit and intensity that Peters brings to the songs that recount her advenCommonweal: 610 tures...

...that replaces Agnus's first-act curtain is a shared moment involving several other Tomlin characters...

...Bernadette Peters and Lily Tomlin are so good at what they do that it is almost a misfortune that the notoriously downbeat ending of The Iceman Cometh is so much more fulfilling than the modified upbeat of the Peters and Tomlin vehicles...

...I like a well-peopled stage, which may be why I grew restless at both Song & Dance and The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe although I admire the artistry of both Bernadette Peters and Lily Tomlin...

...so call it a play...

...Although Trudy describes herself as a dropout from the rational world (the old cliche about the mad seeing more clearly than the presumed sane), her chums from outer space are as real as Lynn's husband and lovers, the writer interviewing the prostitutes, any figure whom Tomlin does not embody...

...Christopher d'Amboise is the lead dancer and the only character in Act II of the show, but he has the assistance of a group of talented dancers...

...The rope on which Lily Tomlin performs is more substantial than the one on which Bernadette Peters manages her precariousfooting...

...She decides to revert to her earlier self, a decision which, like everything in her story, is arbitrary and a little foolish...

...Trudy, the bag woman, is eager host to a group of extra-terrestrials who have come to investigate life on earth...

...Oddly enough, the thematic movement in that act lies outside Lynn...

...Much of the attraction of the show lies in funny lines, simple jokes, or pointed aphorisms ("It's hard to be politically conscious and upwardly mobile at the same time"), and in the Wagner-Tomlin familiarity with the shifting trendiness of American life...

...Somehow she manages to become a highly successful hat designer (I kept wanting to hear the old Danny Kaye number, "Anatole of Paris") and discovers one day, looking in the mirror, that she has become as hard and brittle as the world she moves in...

...I am not one of them...

...Robards's Hickey has lost some of the frenetic quality that he had in 1956 (that is what thirty years will do), but the actor has retained many of the character's salesman-preacher mannerisms and paced them more slowly...

...Her Emma is an English girl who comes to America and carries her attractive vulnerability through a series of disastrous love affairs...

...It is not a gathering of self-contained sketches, as Tomlin's previous shows have been...

...Wagner says that she began with "the quantum inseparability principle," but the connectedness she celebrates is a social and psychological desideratum, not a scientific fact...

...Agnus does not appear in the second act, which is mainly given over to Lynn's account of her life and her friendship with the man-hungry Marge and the radical lesbian Edie...

...Oliver Goldsmith's Citizen of the World...

...He is actually piling line on line, crushing the playgoer with the emotional weight of the work and what it has to say about the need for illusions, and at the same time letting the audience see the intricacy of that deceptively ungainly monument sitting on each one's chest...

...Bernadette Peters plays just one character in the long solo performance that provides the first act of Song & Dance...