Stage:
Weales, Gerald
STAGE she gets a word right-as in the charming duet with Amy, her ...
...If COMMONWEAL has meant something to you, over the years, won't you consider conferring it on someone else...
...Especially after they discover what other Rights, Privileges, and Honors come with a B.A...
...In another song built on a scene from the be able to make anything of their bodies, they are contrasting original, Billy (Ross Lehman), one of the therapy group, sings physical types, and they play contrasting clown types as wella repeated verse about his cheesecake recipe, each time end- the amiable Irwin, the ferocious Shiner...
...I did manding, two performers share the part...
...if you do not, there is still time to win your own orientation that signals the stroke and then the transitions in Wings...
...Besides, Billy's triumph is shared by the group, all night...
...Gardner is in evidence in some of the scenes in Wings, tougher Kopit, who has turned his hand to musicals on occasion (Nine now and not for a moment winsome, but time and experience and the non-Webberian Phantom), seems to have done noth- and a strong part give Gardner the force and intensity that Emily ing with this adaptation except provide the source...
...Oddly, the music underand lyrics, sticks close to the structure, the intention, and often cuts the beauty of Emily's last long speech, insisting that this the words of the play...
...They just forget to tell you...
...It is difficult to realize that it has been almost effect all through the musical...
...It is a comic scene, but as Ora Jones plays it, with Shiner, whom I had not seen in his earlier appearances descending on Emily like a benign harpy, the song is as fright- with the Cirque de Soleil...
...The most interesting change that the musical works on the STROKES OF GENIUS play comes at the beginning when Emily suffers her stroke...
...That is a needs...
...And they'll thank you for it...
...If he seems a bit too articulate they join forces frequently, even at one point borrowing one in the verse itself, we can accept it by remembering how an- another's trademark disaster exit...
...adaptation except provide t...
...So, why not welcome your favorite graduate to the real world with a journal of real opinion...
...I probably couldn't, but his was certainly a legitiand it is a comic variation on the excitement Emily feels when mate response...
...IV One of the Rights, Privileges, and Honors long coveted by discerning college graduates has been a subscription to COMMONWEAL...
...Working from a brief exchange in the original play, Lunden few words from me as the two performers need no words at all...
...1 X11 year's s°b~~pr or 1 prefer a 1 0 TO all The Very Expensive vniversif.Y to who, these letters The Trustees and p, smell carne Gr hawho have cnn by virtue df the au ~ `h' afthe University g s this future C pty vested 1n them s sari ~ IQ and sfactorily pursued the F...
...I saw the production with a other Billy (in the opera Billy Budd) could musically transcend friend who muttered as the lights went up, "I could watch them his stammer...
...umph in its own right...
...and Perlman have written a yum-yum-yummy song for the nurse, Irwin has taken to words recently, as in his fascinating perforwho, like too many nurses, treats her patient as a child, trying mance in Joseph Chaikin's production of Samuel Beckett's Texts to coax her to eat while the inarticulate Emily is not yet able to for Nothing at the Public last fall, but here he shares silence shout her horror...
...It had been enthusi- were barnstormers, bringing their aviation act to fairs, and she astically received at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago was a wing-walker (in the musical, as in the play, wing-walkand it carried its reputation with it to New York...
...I hate critics who describe musical as it was of the play...
...The charm of that of the original...
...Here she puts an old record on the wind-up victrola, a went to Wings at the Joseph Papp Public Theater with song that was used to introduce her and her family when they more curiosity than anticipation...
...STAGE she gets a word right-as in the charming duet with Amy, her therapist, in which she remembers the name for snow...
...Each does his own rouing with a mispronunciation until he finally succeeds in cor- tines, often with the help of willing audience participants, and rectly saying/singing "cheap...
...In this, they are working rather as music (Herb Pilhofer) and sound (Tom Voegeli) did Fool Moon (at the Richard Rodgers) is theatrical enin the original Yale Repertory production of Wings which, like tertainment of a very different kind, but it is a trithe Goodman musical, found its way to the Public...
...I might as well have left my again to the very young Rita Gardner, insouciant as The Girl misgivings at home, for the new musical has much of the power in the first act, petulant in the second...
...Reader passed th Fu,e E es Degree they fa nations with egree ofBachel the all the Rights °" of Arts there ~rtvileges, andhranars unto Ppertaining Given on this day, ninete Ayay twenty foe e , n hundred and ninety-three...
...GERALD WEALES 24: 9 April 1993 Commonweal for r AL ~~ w York, N. tch Street' Ne 11 issues for $12• S pa Trial Subscription offer1 1 1 I Maine 1 Address i 0tv, state, 7,19 at 3...
...In 'WINGS' & 'FOOL MOON' the play, she is sitting reading, and it is the variation in the ticking of the clock that provides the sound indication (there is a light and shadow signal too) that something is happening in her mind...
...and listen ing final vision that was her death...
...fifteen years since Wings first played in New York because the Although the secondary characters in Wings are important play and Constance Cummings's luminous performance as Emily to the texture of the piece, the role of Emily is the heart of the Stilson are still vivid in my mind...
...The music my memory of the original Wings, there is still time to test it and the sound design by Richard Woodbury provide the dis- at the Public...
...The cheerI am suspicious of musical adaptations of straight plays, ful, ' tinny song is doctored into incomprehensibility as the particularly of plays that I admire as much as I do Arthur Kopit's stroke attacks her, and it recurs in various forms and to good original Wings...
...If you share in their credits to prepare one for the quality of Wings...
...Considering that both men seem to ening as it is funny...
...Perlman and Jeffrey Lunden, who did is the big aria, where Kopit's spoken words-in Constance the music, have worked together for years, but there is nothing Cummings's mouth-simply engulfed the listener...
...Eventually...
...A clown show starring Bill This Wings, true to its genre, has songs, set musical num- Irwin and David Shiner with the strong support of bers...
...I saw the piece at a not want music to soften or sentimentalize Kopit's tight, clean, matinee, which is when Rita Gardner plays Emily, and a very lyrical account of Emily's stroke, her struggle to reassemble impressive Emily she is...
...and out of intelligibility for Emily...
...Perhaps because the role is so deperformances as luminous, but Cummings's really was...
...For the most part, they serve both the play and the musi- The Red Clay Ramblers, it is a delight that needs cal...
...If the final scene does not work as well for me as it did major contribution since Arthur Perlman, who wrote the book in the play, it is not Gardner's fault...
...Take out your original cast recording the verbal fragments in her mind, and the strangely exhilarat- of The Fantasticks (doesn't everyone have a copy...
...Still, ing provides the metaphor for what she is undergoing...
...We would be grateful...
Vol. 120 • April 1993 • No. 7
