Stage

...There have always been producers who took chances on unusual works--not good ones necessarily-that outsiders, with the wisdom of the uncommitted, could recognize as sure losers...

...avid Hirson's La B~te is about as unlike Mule Bone as one could imagine...

...Barrymore materializes in the person of Nicol Williamson, trying for parody roguish charm in the Peter O'Toole vein...

...They finally fight over her, one knocking the other out with the titular mule bone, an event that leads to a trial which is mostly a confrontation between rival churches, an epic trading of insults which provides the main vitality of the piece...

...This moral terror permeates a film which is also filled with the physical terror that any good espionage movie must have...

...Mule Bone may be a special case since it was produced by the Lincoln Center Theater, heavily financed by foundation grants, but it was at the Ethel Barrymore because the Lincoln Center's own main stage was filled by the long-running Six Degrees of Separation--a Broadway play, if I ever saw one...

...Mule Bone was written in 1930 by Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, a collaboration that dissolved in disagreement, and it did not find its way to the stage or the page for more than halfa century...

...But later, when a fellow agent with whom Nikita has worked closely and whose humanity she cannot deny is butchered in her presence, the blood seems to drench us while Nikita cowers in a coiner...

...But the violence he stages is calibrated according to what is happening to Nikita's mind...

...How funny is it really when a young woman in a Renaissance gown lifts her skirt to reveal that she is wearing sneakers...

...It was familiar even when works like Death of a Salesman andA Streetcar Named Desire were Broadway hits, but no one ever knew precisely what it meant...

...Unlikely to disturb the patrons...

...If you accept those two definitions even as only partial ones, then what military leaders demand of the intelligent soldier is that he or she be a living, anguished paradox...

...Readers of spy fiction by le Carr6 and Len Deighton are familiar with the perception of espionage as the dreadful girder of society, but La Femme Nikita amplifies this perception by showing us a literally hopeless murderess restored to humanity precisely so that her murderousness may be perpetuated for the sake of (Western-world) humanity...

...For Hurston, presumably, it was still another of the works in which she wanted to present black life anecdotally in black vernacular...

...Even now, with fewer and fewer plays on Broadway, there have been some odd creatures turning up and, for the most part, disappearing before I could get a review into print...

...Mule Bone ran for a few months, buoyed by its tremendous sense of fun and by a setting that drew black audiences who presumably had no desire to check out La B~te or I Hate Hamlet...

...It is a foolishness about a television performer, just off a 10ng-running series, who is about to play Hamlet in Central Park and who, not so coincidentally, has rented the famous John Barrymore apartment, the "Alchemist's Comer" that he designed as a kind of medieval retreat...

...If you think that Nikita's case is too special to apply to common humanity, consider the insistence of military leaders (a sincere insistence, I'm sure) that they don't want stupid, ill-educated recruits going into battle...

...It would be ironic if it should turn into a hit, proving that, after all, Valere was right about what audiences want...

...Is it knee-slappers like that that define a Broadway play...

...Mentally, we cower with her...

...the way she slightly tips a plate on a cafeteria table when "Bob" refuses to give her a furlough from training and the tension of her entire body seems to flow fight into the seesaw motion of the plate...

...At the end, everyone forgets that the bone-wielder has been banished from the town, and the entire cast gets together for a musical finish which celebrates community that transcends any local quarrels...

...When she shoots a woman from a high window, Besson doesn't move the camera in for a close-up of the victim...

...for Hughes, a poet who shared Hurston's concern with black language, it may have been an opportunity to turn to theater, a dream that would continue to draw him for the rest of his life...

...That means that he doctored the original 1 June 1991:373 script into stage life, greatly helped by the music of Taj Mahal...

...Most of the first act consists of a nonstop monologue by Valere, a tour de force that demands a consummate performer...

...And that's what Nikita is...

...A great performance...

...There are obvious reasons for this...

...Movies like Die Hard and The Terminator work you over...

...Commercial...

...The tuition for Nikita's education has fallen due...

...In the end both men reject the woman--who expects the man who gets her to take a real job--and stick with one another, their friendship, their music, and their freedom being more attractive than sparking which might turn into the trap of marriage...

...The three plays I briefly consider here, however, were presumably hoping for old-fashioned Broadway success...

...after she takes out her karate teacher with some unorthodox moves...

...And that's the theme of the movie: entry or re-entry into civilization through the perpetration of uncivilized acts...

...La Femme Nikita works into you...

...And one definition of a soldier in combat may be this: someone who obliterates other consciousnesses under orders...

...Since seeing the film, my brain has been playing and replaying many of her best moments: her feral outcry in the court when she receives a life sentence...

...RICHARD ALLEVA STAGE TO HATE OR NOT TO HATE 'MULE,' 'LA BETE' & 'I HATE HAMLET' or years, the phrase "Broadway play" has been a favorite pejorative in critical circles--academic ones, particularly...

...The serious point of Hirson's elegant comedy is that in the marketplace of artistic ideas vulgarit~ will inevitably triumph...

...To the role of her trainer and not-quite-lover, Tcheky Karyo brings a serenity that is more frightening than any overt toughness could be...

...You are zapped while you watch it and then find yourself, days later, actually thinking about this ultraviolent mutation of the James Bond genre...

...Writer-director Luc Besson can stop your breathing any time he wants...

...This version of the play has been given a prologue and an epilogue by George Houston Bass, who according to a Playbill biography, is "responsible for melding the 1920s sensibilities of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston with those of the audience in the 1990s...

...GERALD WEALES 374: Commonweal...

...Rudnick did not intend that ending for a joke, but, given the quality of much of the comedy in the play, it would have been a step ahead of dumb-Hollywood-director jokes, male-genitalia-in-tights jokes, cigarette-addicted agent jokes (Celeste Holm with a German accent), twenty-nine-year-old-virgin jokes...

...Nikita is played by Anne Parillaud...

...Those insults were never more than grand rhetoric, appreciated by insulter and insultee alike...

...It was not the Pied Piper that Hirson had in mind, but Moli~re, who is represented here by the anagrammatic Elomire...

...There was some wit in the piece and a theme worth any playwright's attention, but the most impressive thing about the production was Richard Hudson's stark white oblique setting beautifully lit by Jennifer Tipton...

...For one thing, it was written ~ , , A m in rhymed verse, and I haven't heard anything like that since Van Johnson played the Pied Piper of Hamelin on television in the late fifties...

...The controlled rawness of her acting makes everything she does here unforgettable and I intend the adjective to be taken almost literally...

...Bob" tells her to wait until he has left before killing the well-dressed couple at the next table...

...her rag-doll dance of victory (to the strains of Mozart...

...Thrillers that provoke thought without curtailing physical excitement end up being called classic thrillers...

...At this point in her career, Nikita is keeping her mental distance from the atrocities she commits and Besson makes us share her detachment...

...When the distant body falls, it looks like a rag doll flopping over...

...But one definition of an intelligent, civilized person may be this: the possessor of a consciousness that recognizes that other consciousnesses exist and are as precious as one's own...

...Come to think of it, most of the things I review are gone before my comments appear, but that is because much of the interesting work today is produced by nonprofit organizations for limited runs...

...As the movie progresses, she becomes more and more aware of the contradiction that she is, and she starts to crack under fire...

...Predictable...

...her terrified, hunched-shoulder invasion of an embassy while disguised as a male diplomat...

...Yet a moment of success in the general disaster makes Andrew see the glory of the stage and he turns down a multimillion-dollar offer from the TV mavens to build the kind of sotid stage career that Barrymore years before abandoned for the movies and the bottle...

...The question of where to put the camera is always answered by Besson in reference to the moral stage his heroine has reached...

...The play is a very slight tall tale--not unlike many of Hurston's stories--in which two friends, joined by the music one plays for the other to dance to, are split apart by a flirtatious young woman who likes the attentions of both...

...At that point, I felt a lump in the throat which turned out to be my gorge rising...

...As I write this, Paul Rudnick's I Hate Hamlet is still running...

...Or any other recent D play, for that matter...

...Elomire's company, a band of serious comics who, through Prince Conti's support, have worked themselves up from street fairs, find themselves menaced by Valere, whose buffoonery has amused the prince and whom he sees as the man to bring new vitality to a group of artists he believes have begun to go stale...

...Any or all of those, I suppose, but Broadway has never been quite the pigeonhole that play sorters have imagined it to be...

...So said most of the reviewers, meaning that Tom McGowan was not up to the task, but he did well by the piece and would have done better had he or the director (Richard Jones) not saddled him with repetitive cute gestures...

...Barrymore is there to help young Andrew master the role, but the performance is a flop...