Stage:
Weales, Gerald
vocalize. Some strong minor characters, like the school prin- seldom appeared on the Broadway stage and with minimal cipal (Phillip Bosco) and Martin's mother (Piper Laurie), are success...
...He does so with such tion, a nice combinationof boyish charm and knockabout comenthusiasm that everyone on stage, Cockney and aristocrat edy...
...how the show was re-created, stories of determined research There is also a line between adaptation and dilution...
...Says playwrights are generally dedicated to ing something new and unrehearsed on Giacomo Rizzo, one of last summer's performance, production, and spectacle...
...It is a English audiences, and they were performed by stars like murder farce, a mixture of mayhem, slapstick, and gentility, a Jessie Matthews, Jack Hulbert,,and Cicely Courtneidge, who genre more popular forty years ago than it is now...
...Traditionally speaking, "to voice amplified entirely by architectural Aristophanes, Plautus, and Neapolitan improvise" on the stage connotes creat- rather than electronic means...
...current musical theater might see the number as a borrowing These days, when seriousness is hardly a requisite on Broadfrom "The Best of Times" scene in La Cage auxFolles...
...Hurt's love of Bach was in 1937...
...In this production, directed by heightened and cumulative laughter...
...It Teatro Grande's repertoire...
...I B.C...
...But in this loca- the audience...
...But the script was the proper decade for a return of his father's most successis over-heavy with rock songs and teenage behavior...
...Of course, the result is not really a re-creation since Stage the book, as I indicated above, has post-100s allusions, and a number of Gay songs from other shows have been added to Me and My Girl...
...The ancient thea- formal Italian, whereas the rehearsed On another side of the Mediterranean, ter, a semi-circle of high granite steps asides and improvised remarks of the improvisation of a different sort makes whose seats are softened somewhat by comic slaves and servants were often its home at Jerusalem's Khan Theater...
...After way, a show like'Me and My Girl, which is amusing, spirited, all, there are direct references to works that came long after and undemanding, is sure to find its audience...
...The ugly ducklings, who are not remotely imagery is deepened, poetically, with some beautiful scenes of ugly to begin with, turn into swans by the end of the show, and Martin's nude swimming...
...But the water imagery is over- final curtain is not sustained by complexities of plot and done, especially in a stupid scene where Hurt "descends" into character (there are none), but by amiable tunes, likable dancher pool...
...and extended physicalization have asked the question on both sides of of his five-play season...
...At It is a standard tale of cultural dislocation (cf., Ruggles of Red first her touch is light, with mood scenes showing Hurt's trip Gap) in which the joke lies in the juxtaposition of two stanby ferry to the peninsula where the school is located...
...The water dards of behavior...
...So it Also uneven is Haines's use of music...
...Last year I saw of the acting style, a necessary device in the Atlantic...
...So it is in revival...
...Only that it has three acts, in addition to flashy curtain lines, and a Tony Roberts was somewhat stinted in applause the night I was somewhat laborious way of building its comic effects and there...
...never get Kesselring's chestnut properly roasted...
...Since I am as 1937, when Me and My Girl was first produced in London - susceptible to stylish triviality as the next high-minded critic, I particularly to My Fair Lady - and Robert Lindsay sings can only wish it well...
...the suggestion is even made that she the resident swans pick up a number of duckling virtues on the has developed other, extraordinarily sensuous capacities as way...
...By According to Guidi, who also directs an 1972 it began to limit its productions to MIMI D'APONTE teaches theater at Baruch acting school in Naples, such interrup- those of Jewish or Israeli writers...
...The happy ending is de rigueur, but the journey to the compensation for deafness...
...Some strong minor characters, like the school prin- seldom appeared on the Broadway stage and with minimal cipal (Phillip Bosco) and Martin's mother (Piper Laurie), are success when they did...
...GERALD WEALES POMPEII JERUSALEM, & NEW YORK Improvisational notes MIMI D'APONTE cated fourteen miles south of Naples...
...It is an old-fashioned play in Honor), and Abe Vigoda (Barney Miller) as old friends...
...As I Teatro Grande, designed originally by Guglielmo Guidi, parsimonious old Euc- can attest, all three are erupting lavishly the Romans c. 150 A.D., rocks with lio's pronouncements were delivered in in modern-day Pompei...
...the Roman dramatist, as the staple "Bravo...
...It was one of the few songs by Noel Gay to become - a bonafide American artifact - awakened memories of my popular in the United States...
...In using im- surrounds the actor, making his work are three distinct characteristics of provisation to recreate ancient and clas- play...
...Lindsay, whose credits are more classiclares his allegiance to his Cockney upbringing by cal than acrobatic, is rubber-jointed in the Lupino Lane tradidemonstrating "The Lambeth Walk...
...with the audience, evidenced by numerWhen does a classical play in the hands He relies heavily on the comedies of ous interruptions of the performance with of a new generation of theater artists Titus Maccius Plautus (c...
...There is a ful musical...
...There is an employss modern lighting techniques for assonance between classical and IMPROVISATION...
...The result was an occasional funny line and, and rhythm and who ignore the specialty aspects of the char- in Holliday's case, the real suggestion of a character, but no acters and work as an ensemble...
...direct rapport years, a new question arises as well: ducing classics in these revitalized ruins...
...productions of which are also part of the pany plays for about ten months a year at Commonweal: 502...
...The Khan was established in 1968...
...Save us...
...Roman comedy, all of which relate to sic plays for contemporary audiences, as Since 1951, Franco Natalino, director improvisation: Spontaneous dialogue, in I have seen done increasingly in recent of Pompei's tourist board, has been pro- the form of frequent asides...
...For one thing, it is handsomely done - amusing sets that win applause every time they change shape or direction, colorful AT THE END of the first act of Me and My Girl, Bill period constumes, a good American company to back up the Snibson, the newly discovered Earl of Hareford, de- talented English star...
...ing, and an abundance of occasions for physical comedy...
...and his attempt to teach some of his students rock music Richard Armitage, Noel Gay's son, decided that the 1980s through rhythmic vibrations are deftly exploited...
...Anyone coming fresh to the show from the nothing to say about class distinctions and social pretensions...
...In an era when actors its performances under the stars, but, as Neapolitan comedy which exists with the become mayors and even grander its modern performers will explain works of Aristophanes and Plautus, but politicians, such a theatrical concept animatedly, it offers that rarest of mod- not with Terence," says Guidi...
...is that a comment on his association with Woody Allen...
...the spot before an audience...
...Its ten-member repertory comter...
...The only 26 September 1986: 501 play of Kesselring's that was ever popular, it is set in a All-star these days means movie and television perVictorian house in Brooklyn which means that it takes place in sonalities, and the audience greeted Jean Stapleton (All in the a Broadway theater, populated by comic types and a great Family), Polly Holliday (Alice), William Hickey (Prizzi's many jokes about theater critics...
...A second thing in the show's favor is that it is not at all alike, is drawn in by the infectious song and the strut-dance serious...
...Joseph Kesselring's play opened early in 1941, but, despite a Never one of the Noel Coward-Bea Lillie-Gertrude Law- few references to Hitler and the war in Europe, in has no more rence transatlanticians, Noel Gay wrote English musicals for to do with that year than Me and My Girl does with 1937...
...with the dancing crowd at Connersville (Indiana) Junior High...
...I find that I can still name most 1938, one of a rather odd collection of popular songs he did on of the cast of the road company I saw in Indianapolis, in which the Brunswick label, and - in an even greater cultural leap - Erich von Stroheim played the wicked Jonathan Brewster and I learned to do the Lambeth Walk so that I could be up-to-date the Boris Karloff lines were rewritten to refer to the new star...
...Brian Murray, who did finished show...
...ance's actors must refer, not only as tion, the audience comes to the actor, Drama historians point out that there touchstone, but as ballast...
...A number of newspapers have carried accounts of line between appealing to adolescents and pandering to them...
...creating suspense...
...Yet dramatic stars, "Acting here is the best experience The result of such assonance is that one improvisation may also imply a pre- possible because the actor must usually can create a deep communication with existing text to which any given perform- dominate the audience...
...twentieth-century seating pads, is lo- spoken in the modern Neapolitan dialect...
...Armitage and his associates are candidates for a new edition of TOM O'BRIEN The Scholar Adventurers, should Richard D. Altick have one in mind...
...While invites not only discussion but perhaps ern dramatic phenomena: the human Terence is always strictly tied to the text, redefinition...
...Now let me tell you about that production in somewhat better with Hay Fever last year, and his all-star cast Indianapolis...
...The revival was an immediate success in London, where it is still playing, presumably because it tapped the ME & MY REVIVAL nostalgia market, but how can American audiences be nostalgic for a kind of show that ngver played here...
...his production of Plautus's The Pot of classical comedy because of the theater's Each summer for the past thirty-five Gold, forerunner of Moliere's The colossal size, but also a means of evoking years, Pompei's brilliantly renovated Miser...
...his career as a silent-film comedian had been almost forgotten...
...laughter and applause...
...An efficient play of its type, it can only Although all these performers have had solid stage careers, come alive in revival if its limitations are accepted and used by they played like refugees from other media, each in business a director and a cast who have a firm sense of the play's shape for him/herself...
...And College and at the City University of New tions are , also common in early since 1984, all works are performed in York's Graduate School and University Cen- twentieth-century Neapolitan comedy, Hebrew...
...Unfortu- and chance discoveries complicated enough to suggest that nately, Children of a Lesser God often crosses both lines...
...Yet, "The F Me and My Girl set my junior-high dancing feet atingle, Lambeth Walk" was already crossing cultural lines in its I the other current Broadway revival, Arsenic and Old Lace heyday...
...Me and My Girl was produced by and also left undeveloped, as though Haines had to hold the story to starred Lupino Lane, a fixture of English musicals long after a strict diet of characterization...
...Duke Ellington recorded it in early experiences as a playgoer...
...Unlike Pygmalion or even My Fair Lady, it has that goes with it...
...Leaning on a Lamppost" as though he had just taken a crash course in Fred Astaire's sentimental wryness...
...254-184 bursts of applause and shouts of yield genuine improvisational theater...
...Still, it looks a ROASTING OLD CHESTNUTS likely candidate for Broadway success for two reasons...
...Moreover, Haines uses landscape symbolism unevenly...
Vol. 113 • September 1986 • No. 16
