Jumpers Bombay Dreams Assassins
Wren, Celia
on Boone's extra-innings homer off Tim Wakefield. For Red Sox fans it's 1946, 1967, 1975, 1978, and 1986 all over again. How could we have let ourselves hope? Stricken, Angry Bill snaps off his TV....
...the gold tassels, white spangles, glittery beaded bodices—observing the brilliant color, lavishness, and sheer quantity of the costumes (which Thompson also de-signed) makes one wish the producers had removed some money from the fabric budget and used it to spruce up the clunky book (by Thomas Meehan, co-writer of The Producers, and Meera Syal...
...Vince Lombardi's dictum about winning—that it isn't everything, it's the only thing—has long been a staple of coaching inspiration in American sports, but only recently has it become the structuring reality of baseball's economy and management...
...This dark, brilliant musical explores an eerie landscape that might be a Secret Service agent's concept of hell: an assembly of the men and women who've tried to murder U.S...
...statistical comparisons across the ages are the lifeblood of its hard-core fans, and changes to its rules (in contrast to foot-ball and basketball) occasion anxiety and harsh resistance...
...Assassins drives this point home via the richly textured score, an ironic pastiche of upbeat American musical genres (marching-band tunes, carousel melodies, bright ballet-friendly sonorities a la Aaron Copland) subverted with dissonance and minor keys...
...But the scaffold also looks like a half-built hall, and as Assassins unfolds, its deconstruction of American optimism explains the imagery...
...Used to be, you rooted for your home team no matter what...
...and characters as flat as paper...
...How could this have happened...
...you went out to the park, whether they were champs or bums...
...That would have been unthinkable just a decade ago, but baseball has experienced a radical attenuation of patience, among owners and fans alike...
...ebullient choreography (by Anthony Van Laast and Farah Khan...
...Aiming at fame PHOTO CREDIT: JOAN MARCUS Commonweal 2 3 June 18, 2004...
...They have gathered at a seedy fairground where one arcade game—a shooting gallery—offers the prospect of assassinating America's top politician...
...O'Hare portrays Guiteau as a crazed oddball, with a lisp and childish mannerisms, like the way he flourishes a book of theology he published, smacking the volume against his palm...
...In an era when surebet revivals multiply like gerbils and producers frantically hedge their bets by casting celebrities (Ashley Judd in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, anyone...
...Here, more desperately unhinged than ever, are killers and would-be killers, from John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln's nemesis...
...For a certain type of individual, the attraction is irresistible...
...Nowadays, however, when a team languishes, so does attendance, often drastically...
...lyrics by Don Black (whose credits include several James Bond theme songs...
...individualism...
...In an era in which the idea of winning has transfixed America's imagination and imperiled its soul, the Sox remind us that life is a trial: that it raises hopes only to crush them cruelly...
...the autonomy of the press, which in-directly fosters a culture of celebrity—are the very values that molded Lee Harvey Oswald and his fellow desperados...
...It is hard to really care about the characters in this handsome National Theatre production, directed by David Leveaux and designed by Vicki Mortimer with snazzy visual echoes of the lunar theme (curvy furniture, a disco ball, etc...
...And if you don't believe that, well, go root for that soulless juggernaut in the Bronx...
...Bombay Dreams boasts an exotic setting (Bombay...
...Baseball, far more than other professional sports, cherishes continuity...
...His romances, with a bratty diva (Ayesha Dharker) and an earnest director (Anisha Nagarajan) exhibit all the naturalness of a slab of wallboard, and a perfunctory sentimentality governs his rap-port with his friends from the slums...
...Well, a hint might come from another piece of exorbitant whimsy that opened around the same time: a revival of Tom Stoppard's 1972 play Jumpers...
...You live, you die," reflects Angry Bill, "and the Red Sox are part of how you grow up...
...The causes are many, but the bottom line is that we have lost our understanding of losing...
...But while glutted with conceptual exCommonweal 2 2 June 18, 2004 has sold 200 million albums worldwide...
...After all, wild theatrical conceits—ideas as far-fetched as the aesthetic of a Bollywood film—can make stunning theater: witness the Roundabout Theatre Company's mounting of Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman's Assassins...
...Designer Robert Brill has set the assassins' fairground beneath a ramshackle dome-shaped scaffold, which the stair-case ascends and which, at least one critic has noted, resembles the underside of a roller coaster...
...The excel-lent actor Simon Russell Beale waffles on deliciously as the mild-mannered philosopher George, who's toiling over a paper on the existence of God, but the character's windy metaphysics early in Act I ("To ask, 'Is God?' appears to pre-suppose the existence of a deity who, perhaps, isn't...
...imaginative risk seems intrinsically admirable, so it was all the more disappointing when the long-awaited musical Bombay Dreams, a tribute to the over-the-top aesthetic of Indian "Bollywood" movies, turned out—bizarrely—to be a little thin...
...As such, the Red Sox constitute an invaluable—and seemingly eternal—spiritual re-source...
...Sondheim's parable is set in a fanciful limbo, where a pot shot at the president can score you a stuffed animal, but this carnival is really not remote from our daily lives...
...dissipates the play's narrative momentum, as does George's dispassionate rapport with his blonde-bombshell wife Dorothy (Essie Davis...
...Of particular note are the loudmouthed comedian Mario Cantone as Samuel Byck (who tried to hijack a jetliner and crash it into Nixon's White House, in 1974), and the extraordinary Denis O'Hare, as Charles Guiteau, who slew James Garfield in 1881...
...Instead, the clothes, and the Taj Mahal pageantry of Thompson's sets—movieset temples, a real fountain, a billboard-encrusted slab of Bombay slum bedeck a cliche-ridden narrative about an impoverished youth, Akaash (Manu Narayan), who lucks into a career as a movie idol, loses his values, and gets them all back again...
...That was the only conclusion to draw from some of the wild flights of fancy that skidded to a landing on Broadway this spring...
...The United States promises its residents the freedom to achieve and to choose, the music reminds us, and some residents choose fame at the end of a rifle...
...Our gospel of freedom and opportunity produces these assassins...
...The dome is half-built because we're constructing it ourselves...
...The swirling red saris...
...And since the fantastical world of Bollywood movies is evoked only in passing, it's hard to see Bombay Dreams as any-thing but a missed opportunity...
...the fairground's proprietor sings at the start of the show, "Don't know what to do?...C'mere and kill a president...
...Sondheim and book-writer Weidman's touch of genius is to posit that this sinister amusement park is, in some way, a version of the American Dream...
...STAGE Celia Wren RECONSTRUCTIONS 'Jumpers,"Bombay Dreams' & 'Assassins' travagance (we might mention the naked woman swinging from a chandelier), Jumpers lacks a few dramaturgical essentials, like suspense and a protagonist whose welfare is in jeopardy...
...Don't have your kids watch sports," he says in disgust...
...In short, Jumpers shoots off Stoppardian pyrotechnics without building a sturdy play to catch them in...
...presidents...
...And, as the title of Still, We Believe implies, this demands of us not a cessation of faith, but a continuation...
...A similar nuts-and-bolts problem mars Bombay Dreams, a musical spicily scored by the Bollywood composer A. R. Rahman, who Philosophical gymnastics <h~Y PHOTO CREDIT: HUGO GLENDINNING S ometimes too much just isn't enough...
...the lengths of saffron shawl...
...the revival the Roundabout had scheduled for 2001 was postponed in the wake of the September 11 attacks...
...The values our society has treasured—liberty...
...They're not going to win, but you root for them anyway...
...Or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say "as flat as nylon," because textiles are the real star of this show...
...Hey, pal—feelin' blue...
...that it ends badly...
...Hence the necessity of the Red Sox...
...equality...
...One little remarked-on revolution in the game, or perhaps in the culture of the game, has been a sharply diminished tolerance for losing...
...Time seems only to have burnished the musical's chances: Joe Mantello has crafted a mesmerizing production, lucid and sinister, and populated by theatrical aristocrats like Neil Patrick Harris (who played Doogie Howser on television...
...To make matters worse, the show's dialogue features implausible lines like "Bombay is a rat race, and I had to mix with the vermin...
...Consider the ex-ample of Grady Little, a serious contender for Manager of the Year, yet fired nonetheless after the loss to the Yankees...
...to John Hinckley, whose crazed infatuation for Jodie Foster led him to shoot Ronald Reagan in 1981...
...Assassins had a brief run at New York's Playwrights Horizons in 1991, but the show has never before reached Broad-way...
...Featuring murder, theology, a moon landing, an agnostic archbishop of Canterbury, and a team of philosophy professors who double as gymnasts, Jumpers should by all rights be another prodigal display of Stoppardian wit, like his recent Invention of Love...
...In one especially memorable scene recreating Guiteau's walk to the gallows, O'Hare dances up a staircase, warbling a ballad...
Vol. 131 • June 2004 • No. 12
