On Stage
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE By Joseph T. Shipley Anouilh Suffers a Sea Change; 'Saratoga' Comes Out of the Trunk The Fighting Cock. By Jean Anouilh. Adapted by Lucienne Hill. Directed by Peter Brook. Presented by...
...The Fighting Cock is a gamer piece than the present production ever aliows us to see...
...second, to restore a sense of honor to a world that has become greedy and shameless...
...From the novel Saratoga Trunk by Edna Ferber...
...The story, from Edna Ferber's Saratoga Trunk, is the familiar one of two rogues joining to help one of them to a wealthy marriage, which is confounded because the two rogues happen to fall in love with one another...
...We watch an old-fogey World War II general trying to form a local conspiracy to retain the past...
...It begins with stage directions for silence "as long as the audience can stand it...
...The daughter, we discover incidentally, has had two previous lovers...
...DaCosta...
...The Fighting Cock, with an English director and an English star...
...the tunes lack both freshness and the folk quality of, say, Show Boat, also from a story by Edna Ferber...
...Presented by Kermit Bloom-garden...
...this is "a Morton DaCosta production . . . dramatized and directed by Mr...
...The choreography is likewise routine, save for an unconvincing and discordant slow-motion battle of cowpunchers and city hoodlums...
...At the Winter Garden...
...THERE PROBABLY was a serious and important idea in Anouilh's Hurluburlu, but in its English adaptation...
...But also, he'd lived with his fiancee before he'd had the General's daughter, hence he knows that sexually they will get along all right...
...Some touches of dialogue suggest the wit of the original, especially in the General's offhand remarks to his children...
...Unfortunately, Rex Harrison plays the General with all the solemn earnestness of John Bull blundering through, instead of the French suavity that allows a glimpse of the buffoon beneath the pompous ass...
...Yes, that enters the boy's thoughts...
...The French have an ability to be genuinely gay when they are truly desperate...
...We are left with the idea that there is not much honor left in the world, and that the new generation is not bothering to seek a substitute...
...Then there's the General's clever argument against the principle of the Sanctity of the Greatest Number, as though values were measured by quantity, as though 320 widows, say, are sadder than 297...
...And this may suggest their substitute for honor: nothing...
...Dramatized and directed by Morton DaCosta...
...it has suffered a sea change...
...Greater division of activity might have given scope for wiser counsel...
...One name is prominent on the program...
...At one point the young folks plan to put on a play...
...He has two major objectives: first, to destroy the maggots that arc corrupting the world, the worms disguised as commonplace, ordinary mortals who are breaking down all values...
...At the ANTA Theater...
...It's only red blotting paper, but it works—if you believe...
...But nothing in the music or the lyrics attains distinction...
...The combination, a basic irony, is lost in the current adaptation and production...
...When his daughter's boy friend becomes engaged to another girl, the General discovers that his girl is the boy's mistress...
...The play is an "antidrama...
...While the shocked General is trying to collect his thoughts, his friends, remote from honor and integrity, withdraw from his conspiracy...
...In this quest, the General brushes away his children and bores his young wife...
...Wisest counsel would have been to let this version of Saratoga remain locked in the trunk...
...Only two minor figures, an old priest and a local tinker, retain a touch of the Gallic gaiety that Oscar Wilde—whose first play was written in French—pointed up in the remark that life is too serious to be taken solemnly...
...The sets and costumes by Cecil Beaton are colorful and costly, as they move from New Orleans to Saratoga in 1880...
...And there's that strange substance, minnestofia, that the General eats to get courage...
...And Roddy McDowall swaggers in youthful, fatuous cocksureness instead of easy nonchalance...
...He starts to work on the boy, but instead gets a long lecture on today's mores...
...The General sweeps that play aside, but his play, the one we hear, gives lengthily the opposite of silence...
...Money...
...And little else...
...Saratoga is another one of those musicals blessed with a tremendous advance sale...
...What should be a witty play, glancing with surface brilliance into intellectual deeps, is broken into a series of lectures on disparate themes with over-solemn persons...
...The words lack the cleverness good musicals have made us expect...
...Lyrics by Johnny Mercer...
...Presented by Robert Fryer...
Vol. 43 • January 1960 • No. 1
