Stage
Weales, Gerald
Eastwood, accompanied by an old pal, Nate, and a young wannabe shootist, the Schofield Kid, takes on the assignment. But wait. We have seen the knifing of that poor whore and Munny hasn't. One...
...There is a running gag about his writing their lines, even when they appear to break away from their potted speeches to puncture him with sharp one-liners...
...I won't shoot...
...Falsettos is a Broadway musical that William Finn and James Lapine put together from their earlier, short off-Broadway pieces, March of the Falsettos (1981) and Falsettoland (1990...
...Clint Eastwood has turned "the last gentleman" into a monster...
...The appeal of the play probably lies in the fact that Alan Alda is playing Jake with the self-deprecating sincerity for which he is celebrated...
...This lyric was the ludicrous high point of a new musical that makes a foolish hash of Tolstoy's novel...
...The deputies loading their guns in thejailhouse make such a clangor that we think of swords and armor as well as bullets and shotguns...
...Every shot expresses the momentary intention of the writer...
...Munny looks not so much remorseful as exhausted, limp, disgusted...
...It is an atmosphere in which the confusion of the adults (Marvin, Whizzer, Trina, Marvin's psychiatrist Mendel, who courts Trina), their distrust of and compulsion about commitment, makes Jason's adjustment all the more difficult...
...Clint Eastwood is no longer a surprisingly good director...
...The tone-despite Whizzer's death--is noticeably upbeat and not simply in the Jason plot...
...But Falsettos moves on to the second act, and the chirpiness of Falsettoland takes over...
...Yet Little Bill is also a brave man who faces armed opponents without flinching...
...Surely the honorable Munny won't deliver this repentant, blue-eyed boy to Mr...
...On the train from Philadelphia the other day, a suburban couple exchanged information with a group of equally suburban ladies and all of them were on their way to see Falsettos...
...but his hand has her wrist in a vise...
...GERALD WEALES Commonweal 9 October 1992:23...
...Then he kicks a man's head half in or beats a woman for information and we detest him...
...Count Vronsky sang those lines--or lines very like them---to Anna Karenina when, no longer able to contain her supposedly seething passion, she turned up at his apartment...
...What sort of a hero is this...
...Thus the new theater season limpingly began...
...It is presumably a form of therapy which will allow him to save his second marriage by putting his first one to rest...
...Death...
...Their grandmothers would have been on the way to see the Lunts in O Mistress Mine...
...This can be seen not only in the often frenetic company numbers, but in "I'm Breaking Down," a solo for Trina, who loses Marvin to Whizzer, and in Whizzer's "The Games I Play...
...While quieting down the protesting madam, Daggett softly inquires, "Haven't you seen enough bloodshed, Alice...
...The mother-in-law was right...
...I will turn instead to two holdovers from last season--at least, they are holding on as I write this--which I did not review when they were new...
...Director Eastwood cuts back and forth between an extremely close view of the agonized, crawling body and a medium close-up of Munny coolly, almost meditatively taking aim, missing, aiming again...
...And, fined in horseflesh (thoroughbred horses surrendered to the brothel's whoremaster), the youth brings an extra mount to the girl herself, hoping that she will forgive his role in the maiming...
...then a train's whistle sounds, smoke appears on the horizon, and both men suddenly know that the news will carry...
...Nobody's easy to figure out in this movie...
...I have no quarrel with the success of Falsettos, but the first act suggests that Finn and Lapine could have produced a more sardonic work...
...One cowboy did indeed, scar the girl, but his friend Davy, hardly more than a boy, at first held the girl down, then immediately repented and tried twice to save her from the brute, only to be hurled aside...
...The horrible account of a murder is rendered all the more horrible for being told by a sweet-faced girl...
...Even the last moment here, Mendel's return to "Welcome to Falsettoland" which opens the act, is almost a throwaway line, not quite casting a retrospective irony over the act's sprightliness as happened with Fasettoland when I first saw it...
...who comically catches a glimpse of immortality when a dime novelist quizzes him on his experiences and opinions...
...The titular "March of the Falsettos," an eerie, almost expressionistic number, is at once comic and frightening...
...I kept waiting to hear the choppers coming in so that the characters could scramble into action and do something more important than chatter about Jake's ersatz angst...
...Supine, shot in the stomach, the wicked villain Daggett looks up into the face of the equally wicked hero Munny and mutters, "I don't deserve to die like this...
...ake's Women is another of those Neil Simon plays, like Chapter Two, in which bits of autobiography adhere to an uneasy mixture of comedy and soap opera...
...Although "Father to Son," the curtain number of the first act, suggests that Jason is beginning to sort out his problems and that Marvin is less of an aging adolescent than he usually seems, the play--if it stopped here--would remain openended, carrying the suggestion of complexity that marks most of the act...
...the visual rhythms are always in sync with the needs of the story...
...I'11 see you in hell, Munny...
...I did not see March of the Falsettos in its initial production...
...At such times, it's hard to dislike Little Bill...
...In other hands and with other intentions, the device might have been able to play philosophically with the creative process and with the way imagination impinges on reality...
...He has become a master...
...In Gene Hackman' s superb performance, brutality of action is swathed in an avuncularity of manner which somehow makes the action all the more repellent...
...Finally, a bullet finds the mark and Davy lies dying, pleading for water...
...who is cheerfully and ineptly trying to build a porch onto his house so that he may sit peacefully and enjoy the view...
...I do not like assassins or men of low character," Daggett dictates to his cut-rate Boswell and we can almost see his ego swell up like a frog's gullet as he achieves what he considers to be a lapidary phrase...
...But he does...
...And, since the script is a subtle one, so is the direction subtle...
...RICHARD ALLEVA STAGE FALSE NOTES 'FALSETTOS' & 'JAKE'S WOMEN' iss me as hard as you dare./I have to know that you're there...
...who is genuinely concerned that his wretched little town grow into some semblance of prosperity or even civilization...
...The troubled five characters of the first act are joined by a cheerful lesbian couple who are there mostly for laughs, although they sound the first AIDS warning in "Something Bad Is Happening...
...Running through the act is the insistence that love can be as painful as it is fulfilling...
...Eastwood stops shooting and cries out, "For God's sake, give him some water...
...Such balancing and counterpointing of traits is characteristic of David Webb Peoples' s complex, dextrous script: the madam is both a caring woman who defends the dignity of her girls, and a screaming harridan who flings clods of mud at the repentant cowboy...
...And, a moment later, when the cry rings up from the canyon, "You murdering bastards, you killed our Davy boy...
...Deserve has nothing to do with it," sneers Munny...
...The pimp assures Little Bill that news of the bounty won't reach as far as Texas...
...There seems little reason to dwell on this disaster although one might wonder what it was doing at the Circle in the Square and why so much grant money went into the making of it...
...For that reason, I was unprepared for the force of the first act of Falsettos, which is presumably March reborn...
...Nate is a lovable comrade, a wise counselor, a skillful surgeon--and a man who jumps at the chance to be an assassin because he misses the adventuring of his youth but doesn't realize, until too late, that he no longer has the stomach for killing...
...His cowboy friends, pinned down by gunfire, are too frightened to succor him...
...Here it is little more than a gimmick, one that quickly grows tiresome, and neither Jake nor his women, as he and we see them, have much substance...
...I hesitate to call Unforgiven the first Calvinist Western because I don't know enough about Calvinism, but somehow the tag sounds right...
...In a superb scene, Munny, perched on a crag, aims very carefully down at Davy, who, disabled with a broken leg, tries to drag himself to the safety of some rocks...
...When he pauses in flogging Nate to interrogate the tortured man, it is with the concerned air of a high school principal calling a truant student on the carpet...
...And what do superb script and direction add up to...
...Jake is a writer (novels not plays) who conjures up his women--his present wile, his dead wife, his daughter at two different ages, his sister, his psychiatristand creates the scenes he plays with them...
...Surprisingly, since it dates from the innocent gay days before AIDS was clearly perceived as the horror it has become, the first act is darker, tougher, funnier, more inventive than the later work...
...And what kind of a villain is Sheriff Daggett, whose legal arbitrariness initiates the violence and who is certainly brutal enough to earn our hatred...
...Perhaps that is why the show has caught on with such a large and diverse audience...
...Yeah," agrees the good family man, and proceeds to blow his helpless enemy away...
...I postponed going to the new show because Falsettoland, which I reviewed in these pages (December 21, 1990) was so relentlessly lively that it seemed to trivialize both the comingofage play (Jason's accepting his father's homosexuality and 22:9 October 1992 Commonweal the death of Whizzer, his father's lover) and the AIDS context in which the action takes place...
Vol. 119 • October 1992 • No. 17
