Stage:

...Many of the apparently casual lines that these characters speak have deeper resonance, at least in retrospect...

...and advised "any playwrights in the audience" to consider writing a libretto themselves...

...At one point, a workers' recreation center is mentioned by Hoffa...

...the double bass is too big to invade the human bass's Thelonious Sphere Monk who played piano...

...GERALD WEALES her situation (the restraints John and Jennie put on her) or-in the case of the nursemaid, the handymen, the realtor and his MEDIA daughters-to contrast the presumably ordinary world with her distressed one...

...He's not only the hero...

...Among them were John Gillespie who played trumpet, Spring, 1992...

...Did everybody fall asleep in the editing ers has altered the canon in so many colleges...

...are there, but the force is lost...

...Well, maybe...

...Douglas Fairbanks is her heroine, she escaped...

...In the last scene, as Charlotte ding, changed the world as we hear it...

...And if you believe, as I is led out, they sing a secret song, snatches of which they have do, that jazz-not literature, not dance, not drama, but jazzsung before, about a little girl who would not obey, who would is the American Sublime, then I needn't try to convince you only please herself, and who "flew very high, very high, very that the passing of John Birks Gillespie, born 1917 in Cheraw, high...

...When filmmakers nod off, why shouldn't the audience Congdon said that working on the piece had been fascinating do the same...

...There aren't any The narrator/protagonist of Gilman's turn-of-the-century other characters, only the mannequins whose story is a woman suffering from what she calls a "temporary function is to evoke some show of emotion from The Great Man...

...But the Great Man always defies the voice of caution and ed nerve specialist S. Weir Mitchell (as was Gilman until, unlike remains true to himself and his art...

...The events Epiphany, January 6, 1993...

...Finally, stand- signed-and had come to be called "Bebop...

...Perera's is an eclectic score, moving through no dammit, it's revelatory-that the American establishment Commonweal 12 February 1993: 17...

...End on the re- a pretty stupid name...

...The morning after our annual Twelfth Night party I woke here is something particularly attractive about open- up and after the requisite coffee and cigarettes played, not anying an opera with a trio-a bass and two bassoons...

...Would the playwright...

...the next second he sneers STAGE at the idea himself...

...turn into a has-been so that Charlie can show compassion...

...It's a contraption, not a characteriza- does at least as well as Jack Nicholson in capturing the physition...

...that...

...In comic sequences, we meet his father and his first things in common: they were all African-Americans, they were piano teacher, both dead, and his Eurydice, a reluctant student all unknown and very likely to remain so, and they were, asof the viola...

...Still, in both cases, the music and the libretto you call Mozart's music, say, "Doodly-doop...

...When the editor of Chaplin's au- and is creeping around and around the edges of the room, havtobiography asks Charlie why he has said so little about Lita, ing been driven mad by her husband's loving but oppressive the reply is, "Because I detested the little bitch...

...This movie makes a show of getting at the human roots of mendacity, but its only real concern is with the flourishes and trappings of cor- LILTING LIBRETTOS ruption...

...Mitchell is mentioned in the story brought to brief, dazzling life by splendid Kevin Kline only to and appears as a lecturer on the edge of the action in the opera...

...thing by Gillespie, but my tape of Milos Forman's Amadeus...

...too: in New Orleans, circa 1900, it was simply a local variant It is probably perverse to discuss opera in terms of libretti, on the f-word (the only word in English, by the way-ask any but it is Congdon's fault-that remark about opera's appeal to Chicagoan-that can serve as all eight parts of speech...

...By the end of the decade the bass woos, wins, and loses his soprano (the nameless char- the music they forged had become widely accepted and admired acters are identified in the program only by voice or instrument) by white folks-the very people for whom it had not been deand rescues her from hell only to lose her again...

...Attenborough seems never to have asked himself what there To get the precise feel of the Gilman story, a dramatic piece was in this woman that left Chaplin speechless in his enmity would have to be a solo performance, like Sorry, Wrong Number so many years after the marriage...

...But then we have a reverse story, which has become a staple of American literature anangle of the smiling Hoffa acknowledging the cheers-and the thologies and courses since the growing interest in women writcar isn't in motion...

...Craig Lucas Chaplin...

...The second act turns somewhat more serious as tonishingly, all possessed of genius...

...this stage business may come from director Kirsten ways they could make their music better, make it more their Sanderson for there is no hint of it in the printed text (Bomb, music...

...ing with Perera and director Mark Harrison, chose to go outside he's too busy genuflecting before him...

...Busby's is as exuberant and to the unnamed protagonist of the story) sings, "I'm in a room as light (in all senses of the word) as Lucas's libretto...

...A new century, a new be- listened to his music, you don't even need to have read this ginning...

...experience, but the Manhattan School students-particularly The characters-even her husband John and his sister Jennie- Peggy Kriha as Charlotte-served Perera and Congdon and are largely stereotypes, but they are used either to dramatize Gilman extremely well...

...And that's cure...

...the only thing in the movie...

...wrote, "Dizzy is a cosmic force": that was not hyperbole...

...Pulling away from the festivities of a Fourth many genres, from folk song to reasonably complicated maof July picnic, Charlotte (Congdon has given Gilman's name nipulation of his five-note theme...

...his renters, keeps saying, "We can do that for you," a line that grates in the memory as soon as we realize that Charlotte is invalided by not being free to do for herself...

...They had a few territory...

...company this contemporary Orpheus as he toss- In the early forties, in New York, a bunch of young musies and turns in his bed trying to fall asleep...

...The split perspective in the opera means that it never achieves izzy Gillespie died on the Feast of the the intensity of the last horrifying scene in the story...

...BEBOP TAKES A HARD SHOT In the first scene, the busybody of a realtor, intent on pleasing DIZZY GILLESPIE, R.I.P...

...Robert Downey Jr., who the room, to create a world beyond the character's isolation, if 16: 12 February 1993 Commonweal only to heighten it...

...That's what where exactly does the money go...

...So Orpheus in Love begins...

...Big, baleful men in dark suits slip cholic...

...December at the Manhattan School of Music, Example: the convicted Hoffa is driven to jail in a police Ronald Perera (music) and Constance wagon on a highway lined with grateful Teamsters who cheer Congdon (libretto) explained the strategies their fallen hero...

...the last image is of the startled nurse paragraph...

...It's significantwork together...

...he's virtually had done the libretto to Gerald Busby's music...

...RICHARD ALLEVA ets or into his union projects...

...The night after I saw The Yellow and only hero of Richard Attenborough's Wallpaper, I saw Orpheus in Love at the Circle Rep...

...At one point, room...

...This promise that women would not always be trapped South Carolina, is a moment of high solemnity in the secret, in yellow wallpaper is underlined by the fact that Congdon has psychic history of the republic...

...The view of the crowd through the car's win- they used in making an opera of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman dow is, of course, a traveling shot...

...The bassoonists ac- Let me tell you why...

...If Orwherever I am./I'm in a room wherever I go...

...WALLPAPER' & 'ORPHEUS' DeVito's direction seems driven by sheer desperation: arty camera angles, tricky editing, meaningless use of slow-motion photography, inappropriately heartwarming music every time there's a melee (do DeVito and his composer think that a pick- t a seminar before the first of three performet-line brawl expresses the heartland of America...

...The cians found themselves gigging together occasionally, running first act is very funny, musically and verbally, but physically into one another socially, and talking a lot about music and the as well...

...But then, "jazz" is a pretty stupid name, plenishing sound of the viola...

...The The protagonist is to rest, exercise, eat heartily, take tonics, but various wives and mistresses all put in three-minute appear- she is to avoid any kind of excitement, which means no work, ances just to evoke our hero's kindness and/or frustrated long- minimal conversation, no writing (the story is what she has writings...

...At one point three-fourths of a string quartet share Charles Christopher Parker who played alto saxophone, and his bed...

...Partly that is intentional or, as Now you're going to read, or most likely have Congdon suggested in the seminar, a happy accident of having already read, a lot of testimonials to Dizzy that introduced the two little girls...

...At first appalled by the ugly wallas music hall impresario Fred Kamo seems to have an exis- paper, she becomes obsessed with it, tries to follow the pattern, tence apart from Chaplin's, partly because Thaw is first-rate and comes to see that the pattern behind the pattern is a woman but mainly because Karno's ego was as massive as the young (or a group of women) trapped by the exterior design...

...So where does that leave us...

...Now "Bebop" is ing with the dead, she returns him to his music...

...end, she has ripped the wallpaper from the walls to free the The movie's shallowness is fully revealed in its treatment of woman-to escape because she sees herself as the womanthe second wife, Lita Grey...

...In the picnic scene, at their fa- will tell you that, in the mid-1940s, he and ther's insistence, they sing a song about a little hen who Charlie Parker virtually reinvented jazz-which is to say, vir"washed up the dishes,/And kept the house clean," a school- tually reinvented American music-which is to say, no kidhouse vision of the role of women...

...in and out of cars transporting suitcases filled with money, but Charles Chaplin would have loved this movie...

...nervous depression-a slight hysterical tendency" and a comic Brother and business manager Sydney is always around urg- character in the opera called "Neur-as-then-i-a...

...At the genius he hired...

...But Attenborough isn't interested in testing his hero...

...She feels much pheus was more impressive in performance than Wallpaper, it closer to the women in the wallpaper (the women's chorus), may have been because the professional cast had much more particularly to her other self who often moves in sync with her...

...The movie ances of The Yellow Wallpaper given last is sometimes embarrassing even at the strictly technical level...

...I think it was that good man, Nat Hentoff, who once staring in confusion at the notebook Charlotte left behind...

...If he had, he might have had or The Human Voice...

...Her docing Charlie to be cautious, to betray his art for the sake of prof- tor-husband has put her on a regimen devised by the celebratit...

...Into Hoffa's private pock- is wrong with it...

...Only John Thaw (Inspector Morse on PBS's "Mystery") ten in her secret notebook...

...cal characteristics of his assignment, ends up giving a skillful In fact, the whole movie is a contraption that pretends to be performance not of a genius but of an endlessly forbearing melana serious study of corruption...

...One playwright who was not in the No one can say that Charles Chaplin isn't the one audience had already done that...

...there has apparently been such a musito create scenes in which a real man faced off against a real cal piece although I have not seen it...

...Congdon, however, workwoman...

...And, of course, if you've ever moved Gilman's 1892 story to 1899...