Stage
Weales, Gerald
And you can't not watch the damn show: it connects that intimately with what we really think "winning" is all about, these days. I hope you've seen Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, one of the...
...And occasionally the movie is better than that, as when Sand petitions her Polish 9 August 1991:485...
...to which Franz replies, "Yes...
...Did I injure you in another life, Will Scarlet, that you harbor such ill will against me...
...His diction, bearing, and sense of character are all equally slack...
...So there are the novel features of the new Robin Hood: multiculturalism, feminism, and gleeful sexual sadism...
...Not quite repulsive but getting there: this is a politically correct Robin Hood that doesn't know what to do, dramatically, with its own raised consciousness...
...Indeed, it never ceases...
...Mastrantonio on the flagstones, throw her skirts over her head, force her legs apart (this last being played strictly for laughs), and strain over her supine form as she shrieks and kicks helplessly...
...So it is with Casanova, where scenes chase one another off stage, the actors quick-changing for their multiple roles as though vaudeville were reborn...
...When the rather reedy Sheriff Rickman simply places the robust Ms...
...As the play progresses, however, it is obvious that she is there as lover as well as accuser...
...Azeen the Saracen returns with our hero from the Third Crusade so that the movie can be multicultural...
...I hope you've seen Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, one of the most important films of the last decade...
...Therese, Casanova's neglected wife, comes back from the dead to act as a kind of presenter--pulling curtains, making announcements--who will lead the audience through Casanova's life, an infecting female point of view undercutting the male voice that sounds in the famous History of My Life...
...Despite the almost unanimous dismissal of Congdon's play by the reviewers, Casanova was (and presumably will continue to be in other productions, other towns) a rich and complex work, now bitingly satiric, now lyric, now almost slapstick...
...This season, however, that "brief" has often become minuscule...
...The old man glories in the young man's sexual triumphs, urging him on...
...He's trying to fulfill a prophecy about his heirs...
...Congdon has never made it easy for her audiences...
...There is the matter of focus...
...Bobo is Casanova in reverse--both absorbed with their 484: Commonweal sexual roles--and in the final ball scene they waltz together, artificial figures in a world that no longer has room for them...
...Because in the era of data, history is showbiz, and if you're fast enough on the synapses, the world is your postindustrial playground...
...You have to watch that Constance Congdon...
...True, the California space cadet dialogue doesn't help...
...Casanova is played by two actors...
...This paragraph is intended not as a sermon but as a lament from a playgoer who has gone to the Public as often as possible since that first season (1967-1968), when Hair and Hamlet and Havel indicated the range and the ambition of the new venture...
...A disgruntled playgoer walked out of the Philadelphia Drama Guild production of Tales of the Lost Formicans, complaining that Congdon was making a joke of Alzheimer's disease--this in the face of a superb performance by Alan Mixon as the disoriented father...
...A joyful sex scene like the one in which young Casanova and the girl romp in the garden is colored not only retroactively by what the young man and we see later of his older self, but by the scene that immediately follows in which the young man becomes part of a sexual smorgasbord that destroys the girl's innocence...
...Was this musical battering an overcompensation for Kevin Costner's phlegmatic performance in the title role...
...where a direct or implied criticism of masculine power (some reviewers saw the play as a doctrinaire feminist statement) runs up against scenes of female complicity in male dominance...
...The casting of Seitz--his ability as an actor aside--underscored the fact that sexuality is more than profile deep and--particularly in the case of Casanova--that the appeal of reputation is as strong as visual impression...
...The Public is presumably having money problems (A Chorus Line could not keep it afloat forever), but that does not soften the feeling that Papp was simply waiting to find out whether or not Casanova was going to get the Frank Rich seal of approval (of course, it didn't) before he pulled the rug out from under Congdon's play...
...Mastrantonio under his arm like a football and runs with her, you may wonder what happened to the amazon who entered the film in full armor and nearly cleft Robin in half...
...Then the press is invited and the production settles in for its--sometimes brief--run...
...The shifts and the overlapping in No Mercy, Congdon's play about the making of the atom bomb, demand complete attention on the page (the only place I have seen it) if one is to be aware of the relationships among images...
...Now a promise of death...
...Thus, Robin the Buddhist Zen archer to an unruly follower...
...The director, Kevin Reynolds, even cheats Freeman of his (potentially) most interesting moment: when King Richard, back from holy warring, puts in his traditional appearance at the end, the Islamic warrior recognizes his most hated enemy and oppressor while everybody else is dropping to knees in rapture...
...then we must simply relax and enjoy the dumb fun...
...True, today's precocious kids might not be impressed by the traditional cliff-hanger in which the villain merely tries to marry the heroine before the hero arrives, but will you really feel comfortable letting your kids watch Alan Rickman dump Ms...
...And a lament, too, for those people who did not get to see Casanova...
...Just as Freeman seems about to develop his reaction into an interesting moment, Reynolds (or somebody on the producer's staff) cuts away...
...Blood gushes from Casanova's crotch, spreading across his white costume, a startling image that recalls the nosebleeds of Casanova as boy which his Grandmama sees as a promise of sexual prowess...
...In it, Bill and Ted, two heavy-metaled-out California high school students, pass their history final not by learning anything, but by using a time machine to bring Socrates, Genghis Khan, Billy the Kid, Joan of Arc, Freud, Napoleon, and Abraham Lincoln back to their school auditorium to put on a show...
...Which brings us to the truly repulsive: this movie, targeted primarily at children and adolescents, features not only handlopping, flaming arrows shot into foreheads, close-up batterings on faces and skulls, but, at length and fairly explicitly, an attempt by Nottingham to impregnate Marion by rape before Robin can rescue her...
...But this device burdens the admirable Morgan Freeman with a character who, between bouts, can only stand around looking stiffly noble when he isn't rescuing babies with superb Caesarean surgery...
...When this movie is being unabashedly sophomoric, as when Chopin shouts, during a keyboard duet with Liszt, "Chromatic glissando...
...Why do the politically correct always end up being so brutal...
...he James Lapine-Sarah Kernochan movie about George Sand's pursuit of Frederic Chopin, Impromptu, reminded me at best of fairly bright, artsminded teen-agers putting on a charade in someone's back yard, a charade consisting of consciously half-baked, deliberately silly notions of how great artists of the nineteenth century lived and loved...
...The wings of a butterfly...
...But they've, literally and figuratively, retrieved the past, and that's good enough...
...True, the grandiose special effects turn this version into something closer to a space opera than a medieval ballad, but, after all, the kids in the audience have been brought up not only on Star Wars and Indiana Jones but on preshow concession-counter trailers in which the soda sizzles like the unholy brew in a witch's caldron and the popcorn thuds into cavernous boxes with the audibility of dropped cannonballs...
...how much more demanding it must be in production...
...GERALD WEALES SCREEN IGNORANTS ABROAD 'EOBTN' & 'IMPROM?TU' hen Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves sticks to high jinks and stunts, it entertains...
...Initially portrayed as a lass who can buckle her swash with the best of the lads, she suddenly becomes helpless at the climax just so Costner can get to perform a conventionally heroic rescue...
...The champion of the quick close, however, was Constance Congdon's Casanova, which finished the week it opened...
...The other two main characters are Sophie, Casanova's daughter, and the transvestite Bobo (impressively played by Jeff Weiss at the Public), who--as M. Elizabeth Osbom, dramaturge on the production, said in TheaterWeek (June 3-9, 1991)--"is at once mother, father, and companion to Sophie...
...Both Casanovas are often on stage at the same time, watching one another in action...
...Just like SoHo artists, heavy metal rockers, or drama department undergrads, only in frock coats and lace cuffs...
...Ditto the feminist treatment of Maid Marian...
...At the Public, the conventionally handsome Ethan Hawke was the young Casanova, the slightly pudgy John Seitz the mature and the old Casanova...
...Bill and Ted pass--happy ending--as preternaturally dumb as they were at the beginning...
...FRANK McCONNELL STAGE PUBLIC DISMISSAL CONGDON'S 'CASANOVA' oseph Papp's Public Theater has always kept its own counsel about such matters as official opening nights of its productions, playing previews to the Public regulars until a work is as ready as it is likely to get...
...the young man is horrified as he watches his older self in scenes which illustrate the cruelty, the violence, the manipulation that sex can be--the penis as instrument to power, to money, to a mechanical keeping of score...
...where a joke--maybe crude, maybe corny--will be swallowed by a cry of pain...
...Every gesture, every nod of the head, every raise of an eyebrow is underscored by the flaring and swooning accompaniment...
...But you've got to be real fast: fast enough, say, to be able to forget what lies on the other side of the playground's fence...
...But there are some elements in this version that are objectionable and others that are downright repulsive...
...David Greenspan's Dead Mother and his production of The Way of the Worm came and went so quickly that, being a critic who has to juggle schedules in two cities, I never got to them at all...
...Alas, just as you can't uninvent the hydrogen bomb, you can't expect the latest generation of moviegoers to accept a modestly exciting Robin Hood...
...That is not an unusual phenomenon on Broadway, where fight budgets quickly disintegrate in the face of bad notices, but the Public has traditionally been a place in which unusual and difficult plays have been put on stage and left there long enough for their audiences to find them...
...But, playing opposite the well-spoken, beautiful, even formidable Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Costner seems so inadequate in every respect that his Robin Hood constantly threatens to turn into Robin Nerd...
...And that may be, not the market value of information as an end in itself, but its real cost...
...Sophie is preoccupied with Casanova, who has always ignored her, and at the point where she seems to have reached a stand-off with her obsession, she welcomes the return of a lover who, over her pleas, once again walks away from her bed--as her father would have...
...And how did Chopin and Sand and Delacroix and Liszt live and love, according to the kids...
...I enjoyed the flaming arrows whizzing by like meteors, the tree-to-tree vine-swinging, the cudgel bout between Robin and Little John that starts out per tradition on a footbridge but is soon extended into a sort of white-water rafting contest without rafts, Alan Rickman's brilliant rendition of the Sheriff of Nottingham as the hapless but irrepressible coyote of the Road Runner cartoons, the use of Robin's treehouse as a sort of arboreal playboy's pad where he woos Maid Marian, the catapulting of Robin and his Saracen sidekick over a high stone wall, and, indeed, everything else in this movie that is purely kinetic, swashbuckling, silly, childishly fearsome, or deliberately sophomoric...
...There is the matter of tone...
...I did get in for one of the last performances of Tony Kushner's A Bright Room Called Day, but I kept expecting someone to start dismantling the set before the play was over...
...First, the merely objectionable: Michael Kamen's music, though not itself contemptible, is overused...
Vol. 118 • August 1991 • No. 14
