Capeman Black Snow

...The cheery do-wop music that accompanied the stabbing didn't help either...

...Ultimately, it couldn't be helped: The Cayeman had to open...

...A November article in the New York Times Magazine ruthlessly documented Simon's micromanaging perfectionism...

...Simon and his colleagues had taken a story that was, at best, fleetingly dramatic, and systematically deflated it...

...With the exception of the odd set, the highlight of this embarrassing production was Simon's score--innocuous global village pop with a Latin twist...

...How did so many distinguished artists concoct such a calamity...

...While most directors (and actors) would probably disagree, sometimes the making of a play intrigues us more than the play itself...

...Agr6n emerged as a cryptic figure in act 1, which sampled his early years in Puerto Rico, his family's relocation to New York City, his initiation into a gang, and the senseless murder in a basketball court of two teen-age boys...

...The spectacle at the Marquis Theater, and the preceding press reports, suggest that Simon put too little faith in his collaborators...

...Among the brilliant characterizations were John Hines as a business manager with a crazed look in his eye, and Greg Stuhr as the mysterious nighttime visitor who vows to p u b l i s h S e r g e i ' s novel if t h r e e words--"apocalypse," "archangel," and "devil"--are deleted...

...Bad pacing obscured the character...

...Other compositions, though interesting, were less effective: a statuesque, blue-robed figure representing the biblicai Lazarus (Nestor Sanchez), whom Agr6n apparently revered, wandered onstage periodically, to no metaphorical purpose...

...Making the character still more remote, the script stressed destiny over free will...

...Finally, the reformed prisoner is released, but the play fizzles to an end so anticlimactic it seemed like a practical joke...

...The Capeman's score seems to have been written first, and the drama patched in afterwards...

...A Commonweal 2 5 April 10, 1998...

...marvelous satire of theatrical collaborations recently lit up the Judith Anderson Theater, when the Gilgamesh Theatre Group mounted the play Black Snow...

...As relatives of Agr6n's victims lined up demonstrations to protest what they saw as glorification of a murderer, the situation began to resemble a soap opera customtailored for readers of Variety...

...As the first theatrical venture of the celebrated songwriter, this biography of the murderer Salvador Agr6n attracted notice from its inception...

...Capeman's leads--Ruben Blades and Marc Anthony--are superstars in the world of salsa music...

...Witness, for example, the premonition that heralded Paul Simon's musical The Capeman, which opened in January and closed in March...

...A misshapen script, parked like a tank across the inroad of our sympathy, made Agr6n by turns inscrutable and boring...

...A quixotic dream sequence, whose billowing pastels give the stage the feverish look of a psychedelic rock video, tug dutifully at the theme of freedom but trail off...

...Adapted by Keith Reddin from the comic novel by Mikhail Buigakov, Black Snow depicts the woes of a fledging Soviet writer who turns his epic into a play for a prestigious theater company...

...In particular, set designer Bob Crowley devised a remarkable mural to represent the prison: the heads and shoulders of identical mannequins jutted out of a white wall, so that viewers felt they were looking down on a jail cafeteria...

...By hinting that Agr6n was passively submitting to destiny, rather than acting as a moral being, and by giving Commonweal ~4 April 10, 1998 us the Ch'ffs Notes version of his adolescence, the play effectively squashed the drama of the murder scene...

...Audiences who ascended to the Marquis Theater--a soulless auditorium situated inside a hotel--witnessed a failure of breathtaking proportions...

...Later, the onstage presence of Blades, as the repentant older criminal looking back on youthful errors, underscored the irreversible quality of the past...

...He suffers when weeks of rehearsal are frittered away on acting exercises involving imaginary bouquets...

...Bulgakov's writings, including his masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, were repeatedly banned by the Stalinist regime...

...Acts 1 and 2 foundered in different ways, deftly thwarting the talents of both Anthony, who played Agr6n aged sixteen to twenty, and Blades, who played him as an adult...

...Drawing on his experiences with the Moscow Art Theater, he packed Black Snow with grotesque bureaucrats and vicious artists, but his novel still captures the intoxicating atmosphere of the theater world...

...The cynicism increased when Simon dismissed his first two directors and hired as replacement Capeman's choreographer, Mark Morris, who had never directed a musical before...

...Fault rests with the interpreters, as well as the creators: betrayed by shoddy direction, the actors stood awkwardly on the stage, hands by their sides...

...Sergei suffers when an imperious director (based on the legendary Konstantin S t a n i s l a v s k y - - t h e role was played by Sal Mistretta) rewrites the play so as to eliminate all the gun shots...

...Nelson Rockefeller commutes the sentence, with the unfortunate consequence that Capeman has an act 2. Jumping ahead seventeen years, the musical slows down enough to acquaint us with the wiser, self-educated protagonist, whose adventures have limited interest at this point because he is locked in prison...

...And the directors erred greatly in incorporating historical newsreels which made the play's own action seem all the more vague and lifeless...

...Other celebrities who came on board brought still greater visibility: Derek Walcott, collaborator on book and lyrics, is a Nobel Prize-winning poet...

...overemphasized anecdotes from AgrOn's childhood--when he apparently had no personality--led to the disastrously rushed sequence in New York, which glided over his delinquency and the murder without revealing his feelings, qualms, or understanding of the world...

...his relationship with the theatrical establishment was discordant as well...

...A few noteworthy visual images did buoy above the tide of blunders...

...Staging a play, and especially a musical, requires the coordination of talents: if the production team does not work in concert, giving the proper weight to direction, script, design, and all other elements, they risk producing an ungainly mess...

...In an exuberant production directed by Ralph Buckley, The Gilgamesh Theatre Group hit on just the right mixture of hilarious, deadpan comedy and Kafkaesque foreboding...

...it exhilarates, tempting initiates and the foolhardy to continue staging plays, no matter how tempestuous the process...

...Lyrics of stunning banality--"It's the time of year when I shop for clothes" is the text of one rousing chorus--might belie Walcott's contribution, were his name not on the program...

...Popping on and off a frugal set whose red surfaces recalled constructivist art, the superb cast juggled several roles apiece (except Christopher Duva, who played the hapless Sergei throughout...

...An epistolary romance with a beautiful Native American leads nowhere...

...The mystery of the theater transcends the squabbles and intrigue of individuals...

...In an initial scene, a santero (Ray De La Paz) sees crime in the future of seven-year-old Agr6n (Evan Jay Newman...

...Nevertheless, noting that Simon's production team had little experience with Broadway's harsh realities, pessimists glimpsed trouble ahead...

...Convicted of the killing, the sixteenyear-old Agrdn is sentenced to death...

...When the premier was postponed three weeks, when veteran directors were rumored to be offering advice, and when one of those (Jerry Zaks) was hired for a last-minute overhaul, gossip flew...

...And yet, despite everything, he still feels drawn to thespian life, "'pinned to it like a beetle to a piece of cork...