On Stage
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE By Joseph T Shipley Off Broadway And into the Park Simply Heavenly. By Langston Hughes. Directed by Joshua Shelley. Presented by Stella Holt. At the 85th Street Playhouse (150 West 85th...
...Outstanding among the character parts is the work of John Bouie as Melon and Claudia McNeil as Mamie, vivid whether she is singing "I'm a Good Old Girl" and "Did You Ever Hear the Blues...
...There should be an eager audience for these musicals, reached by a short and pleasant walk into Central Park...
...Not that it dodges problems...
...and others equally well drawn from the teeming life of Harlem...
...It is a picture of Negro life from the inside...
...usually such a venture proves ill-starred...
...Its basic story, of the "bad" woman Zarita who almost breaks up the gathering romance between Simple and Joyce, is ripened corn, but everything around it rings true—the mood of the writing, the sets and direction, the range of performance...
...The record-holder in this regard is The Three-Penny Opera, an English translation of Brecht's German adaptation of the English Beggar's Opera by John Gay—to which I still prefer the original version...
...There is irrepressible Mamie, who at once scorns and leads on the ardent watermelon vendor, Melon...
...At the 85th Street Playhouse (150 West 85th St...
...Now off-Broadway has again given us access to evening in the park...
...there are Bodiddly, his well-named wife Arcie and their early-ripened son...
...Lively figures round out the inner triangle...
...but it is also art...
...Marilyn Berry does well with the honey role of Joyce...
...The Tall-chief-Eglevsky ballet, followed by the stylized Koner-Limon modern dance or the ha-chaole of Carmen Amaya, with interspersed solo song from musical comedy, gave us numbers separately pleasant but not woven into a coherent pattern...
...Exceptionally good reviews have more than once tempted a play to move from the "little" theater to the main stem...
...We therefore welcome the coming of the musicals, starting with the Gershwin-Romberg Rosalie, which put the park project in line with other outdoor summer ventures...
...in warm weather, hundreds of persons slept in the park all night...
...Melvin Stewart excellently conveys the muddled urges in Simple...
...the preoccupations of the Negro in a "white man's world" find expression, but expression natural to the persons involved and saved from sentimentality by sharp turns of wit...
...Uptown off Broadway, Langston Hughes's Simply Heavenly, with its ballads and songs and its homey spirit, is a mellow bit of Harlem come to life...
...More likely to last are commercial-theater engagements by individual directors, designers or players who have shown their worth in the little houses...
...Off-Broadway is now reaching out to another range, once more opening Central Park to evening enjoyment...
...And the New York premiere of Bernard Shaw's In Good King Charles's Golden Days flows with a smoothness of 17th-century artificiality and wit (transmuted by Shaw's 20th-century irony) that makes it richly rewarding and won my vote as the best foreign play of last year...
...The Louis Wollman Memorial Skating Rink has been converted to a summer theater, under the stars, amid the trees, beyond the bird sanctuary and the lake...
...This is not, as too often with all-Negro plays, propaganda directed at a white audience...
...The work suffers a sea-change, or the different audience has different expectations...
...What is challenging the commercial theater is the quality of the off-Broadway theater...
...With no thought of moving into the "commercial" realm, however, an increasing number of off-Broadway productions are proving not only their artistic worth but their ability to draw continuing audiences...
...it is superb entertainment...
...For many years, the paths and lawns of the park were a summer haven...
...It is no interruption, but an added thrill, to watch the wild duck fly across the sky or behold the moon climbing as the music flows...
...pathetic Gitfiddle, who strums his guitar for stray coins but is beaten by the jukebox...
...Often, indeed, the very critics who gave the off-Broadway production the warmest welcome turn cool when it transfers...
...The players, the production and the play are often hilarious, often touching, and continuously sound...
...and Ethel Ayler, especially when she sings "The Men in My Life," gives rich color to the siren Zarita...
...But recently the fear of "mugging" and other dangers has discouraged this...
...The most important of such moves has been that of Jose Quintero, whose downtown production of O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh won him the bid to present on Broadway the American premiere of Long Day's Journey into Night...
...The first two weeks of the park productions, "Manhattan Magic," might have been called "Producers in Search of a Format...
...The culprit is not television...
...The Broadway theater is being more drastically challenged than in many years...
...The triple set, with Simple's room on our right, Joyce's on our left, and Paddy's bar in the middle, suits the action, as Simple engages in the process of growing to maturity and responsible will, and finally "takes a wife...
...or shouting down her sweet-boy suitor...
Vol. 40 • June 1957 • No. 26
