Stage

...Brad Pitt makes some- thing amazing of the con artist: always pliant, never rebuffed by any rebuff, always promising to leave but never quite leaving, always seeming to give way but always taking and using, he turns this utterly worthless drifter into the psychological equiv- alent of a Judo master...

...Rogers, as I may not have told you, have fourteen children, all named Pat...

...It is Thelma who insists on stopping at the dance joint where they encounter the would-be rapist, and it is her naivet6 that makes her ignore Louise's warnings against him...

...Fields, Eddie Cantor, Fannie Brice, Bert Williams...

...and Mrs...

...They began to pound their chests, then swooped their arms up above their heads and reached from the pits of their stomachs through expanded chests and out through their arms into their fingers, and with an athletic "second effort," reached up a tad more, and shouted, "I love the sky...

...but there are no featured singers and dancers and Will Rogers is the only famous comedian on hand, although in the real Follies he regularly shared the stage with the likes of W.C...

...The rest of the cast was just as good, and the company boasted a class director (Gene Saks) and design- er (Peter Larking), whose charming set resembled giant and very fluid children's building toys...

...If this is not quite Rogers, it is also not a Zieg, feld Follies...

...They all bent over and touched the floor, shook their heads and bounded up and bellowed, "I love the earth...

...Soon the children began to jump, scoot, turn, twirl, stomp, stop and start, leap and bound into the air, onto the ground, in lines and clusters and circles of all lengths and sizes...

...What stay in my mind are Keith Carradine's performance and the imaginative staging by Tommy Tune, which pays tribute to the Follies form even as it goes about its business of making a 1990s' musical of a genre which had its best days before World War I. Carradine is an extremely personable per- former, suggesting both the folksiness that went into the Rogers persona and the calculation that created it...

...Scott makes the shot that kills the rapist echo on the soundtrack like the roar of doom...

...Not the least of Scott's achievements is to give the landscape through which the women move such an aura of masculinity (oil pumps vertically thrusting, weight lifters working out at filling stations, deserts that seem haunted by the ghost of John Ford) that their very passage through land so phallocentric becomes an act of defiance itself...

...When Louise tentatively negotiates with Keitel, it is Thelma who hangs up the phone and asks Louise, "You're not going to give up on me, are you...

...Just before the police close in, Thelma declares that "some- thing's crossed over in me" and that she's never felt so wide- awake...

...Thelma's amends is her robbery of a store, but this crime makes the police all the more eager and able to capture the pair...

...It is Thelma who insists (again against Louise's advice) on picking up the con artist who will steal the money the fugitives need for their escape...

...I had no suspicion of how important the man is," said Bernard Shaw, who met Rogers when he was playing in London in 1926...

...The choreography is by Edmond Kresley, who was one of the teen-agers in the original show, and he deserves commendation even as one suspects that Tommy Tune had a hand and a foot in the staging of his own numbers...

...Louise can plan (an escape route) while dippy Thelma sunbathes by a motel pool...

...The dance concert they were about to present was Martha Graham's last present to the world, to be opened after her death...

...When Louise shares a tender parting with her boyfriend in an eatery, Scott places some waitresses in the background of the shot so that their giggling, delighted faces seem perched on the heads of the lovers they are spying on...

...Khouri would stoop to such a ploy shows how eager she is to demonstrate Thelma's destructive contribution to the friendship...

...Peterson...

...It is the first feminist film that is also a work of absolute nihilism...

...The resurrection is simply a device, one that allows the playfulness of songs and sketches to refer to Rogers's per- sonal and public life without even the pretense of accuracy that conventional show-business biographies (Funny Girl, Sophie) regularly violate in their search for the sentimental...

...And this background, a land claimed so emphatically by and for men, helps make the suicidal finale tolerably plausible...

...I am suspicious of made-for-touring revivals with a star turn (The Fantasticks with Robert Goulet confirmed my worst forebodings), but the new Bye Bye Birdie, which I recently saw in Philadelphia, turned out to be a delightful production of a show that I have liked since I first saw it more than thirty years ago in a pre-Broadway try-out, also in Philadelphia...

...Thelma andLouise is a cultural milestone...

...Rogers had been a Ziegfeld star...

...Yet, as far as her relationship with Louise goes, Thelma might as well be called Thanatos...

...Even the foul trucker is portrayed as only a laughable satyr who shows the courage of his abom- inable convictions when he refuses, at gunpoint, to apologize for his obscenity...

...And the per- formances of Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon beautifully com- plement each other: the former with her zigzagging vocalism and space-cadet dreaminess, the latter with her emotion-scored face and her formidable command of concentrated anger, despair, compassion, quizzicality...

...like others, I had a personal reason to be there...

...There are the girls, of course...

...Rogers's celebrity, however, was not that of the opening number...

...in a profile in Collier's back in 1929, Ring Lardner wrote, "Mr...

...Really, he is as important as I am...

...He is unfortunately given mini-sermons---on ecology, for instance--which, although perfectly fine in what they have to say, rob Rogers of his comic method--deceptive statement following deceptive statement, upended finally by a barbed closing line...

...Although Ann Reinking, the other star, had left the cast, her replacement, Lenora Nemetz, was attractive and accomplished and even looked a little like Chita Rivera, the original Rose...

...hen Tommy Tune received his Tony awards for best direction and best choreography, the television show cut away from New York to the West Coast where Tune was appearing as Albert Peterson in Bye Bye Birdie...

...Graham introduced students, 516: Commonweal...

...Besides, Rogers was always fair game for fantasy biographers...

...GERALD WEALES DANCE BREATHING IN & OUT MARTHA GRAHAM, R.I.P...

...Someone (perhaps Peter Stone, who did the book) had the interesting idea of presenting Rogers's biog- raphy as an edition of the Ziegfeld Follies...

...Neither of the new songs, presumably by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams, seems up to their original score, but that may be because I could sing-along with the other numbers...

...The Follies pretty much ignores the real making of Will Rogers...

...Suddenly, the children were facing the audience, standing stone-still in rows from stage apron to back wall, each child about an arm's distance from the next...

...And the final catastrophe is brought on by Thelma's plea, "Let's just keep going," when there's nowhere to go but into the Grand Canyon...

...There is a new song for Tune to sing and dance, "A Giant Step," celebrating Albert's escape from his possessive mother, and "Spanish Rose," Chita Rivera's fine number, has been replaced by "He's Mine," a duet between Rose and Albert's mother...

...The sepulchral Mr...

...The intimate of the rich and powerful, the idol of ordinary people, the "Cowboy Philosopher," as he----or his publisher--sometimes called him, built his fol- lowing through radio, lectures, his newspaper column, finally the movies...

...Ziegfeld (Gregory Peck's voice issuing from somewhere at the top of the theater) calls Will (Keith Carradine) and the other principals back from the grave to perform one last Follies...

...Harvey Keitel, finally employing an accent that doesn't defeat him, gives his best performance in years...

...There was no attempt to update the show---except for one throw-away line--and Michael Stewart's book is as funny as ever...

...At the start of their trip, it is Thelma who brings along a revolver she doesn't know how to use but which Louise certainly will...

...It was a specially invited audience...

...The show does try to indicate the fame of the man with an opening number, "Will-a-Mania," that unhappily suggests that his was the fame of a pop star or--more likely--a soft drink, peddled through a hard-sell musical TV ad...

...But the heart of the movie is the relationship between the title characters, and it is the portrayal of this relationship that both propounds and confounds the notion that the attachment between Thelma and Louise can serve as a feminist model of female bonding...

...It is characteristic of Tommy Tune's energy that with two Broadway successes running at once (Grand Hotel is the other), he had become a performer again, taking his tapping feet on the road in a revival of a 1960 musical...

...RICHARD ALLEVA STAGE THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT 'ROGERS FOLLIES' & 'BYE BYE BIRDIE' I I Life in Revue" is the subtitle of The Will Rogers Follies, the still thriving show that this year won more Tony awards than any other, including one for best musical...

...It is a show that I enjoyed even though I find now that I remember little of Cy Coleman's music or the lyrics of Betty Comden and Adolph Green...

...What we have here is a lively song-and-dance show, 13 September 1991:515 in which a love story (Betty and Will) is combined with a cheerful caricature of the performer's Oklahoma beginnings and a nod toward his progress from rodeo performer to vaudeville to the Follies...

...Khouri's juicy script gives director Ridley Scott the opportunity to do his best work since his first feature film, The Duelists...

...That is to say, you're not giving up on our outlaw life...

...a dance class, a Martha Graham dance class...

...I remember feeling a little cheated back in 1960 when there was no song for the marvelous Kay Medford, who originally played the part...

...The show is neither ghostly nor metaphysical...

...He always knows how to visually and aurally weight each moment in the story...

...It is a device that would have served Carradine, too, even though he makes no attempt actually to imitate Rogers...

...But it is Thelma who can act (rob a store) when the fatalistic Louise falls into despair at the theft of their funds...

...Yet, because only disbelief in men, not rage, powers this film, none of the male characters, except the rapist, is characterized as truly evil, only as doltish (Thelma's husband), well-meaning but ultimately helpless (Jimmy, Keitel's lawman), rigid (the FBI agents), or dishonest but sexually alluring (the con man picked up by Thelma who robs her...

...Dismayingly, unde- niably, it's a lot of fun, too...

...That Louise would trust the money with Thelma in the first place is an outrageous plot twist, and that the talented and usually inventive Ms...

...n a Monday afternoon this past June, one month after Martha Graham died, thirty-two boys and girls between the ages of eight and twelve strode confidently onto the stage of New York's City Center to be greeted with a rousing ovation...

...These friends may take turns driving, but, insofar as their adventure is a death-trip, Thelma is at the wheel all the way...

...Tune is, as usual, a beguiling performer, and if his Albert is more on the surface than the confused, harried character that Dick Van Dyck played, he is still a joyful presence in an admirable revival of a first-rate American musical...

...Because their characters are drawn by scriptwrit- er Callie Khouri with some tang and humor, the actors can bring their talents into play rather than merely serve as macho strawmen...

...Perhaps "Spanish Rose" was dropped because the 1990S felt no need for the mandatory Spanish number that graced 1950s' musicals, but I suspect that the substitution was put in for the sake of Marilyn Cooper, who plays Mrs...

...Indeed, he was one of the best known Americans of the 1920s and '30s...

...It was a signature Graham exercise, by means of which Ms...

...By general request from those around me, I did not...

...Certainly the women give each other the sort of sisterly mutual support so extolled nowadays...

...the needles he gave to celebrity worship have not blunted with time...

...My recognizing the distance between the man and his depiction in the Follies is not intended as a criticism of the musical...

...At least while you're watching the movie...