On Stage

...It is Christmas...

...he would be missing too many chances...

...He gives of his best but it is nowhere near enough...

...This is not true in the theater...

...But the film did get itself distributed before the beginning of World War III...

...Another drawn-out sketch serves as illustration: A group of Tommies crouch in their trench...

...Bertrand Russell and Bernard Shaw, after all, were condemning the 1914-18 holocaust almost as soon as it started...

...He has evoked a brilliantly apt lighting pattern from Jules Fisher and a blinding array of costumes from Patricia Zipprodt and Martha Gould...

...The song is followed by a pair of sausages and other seasonable offerings...

...Oh What a Lovely War (at the Broadhurst Theater) is not so lucky...

...As an antidote to the boom it seems even feebler, brindled as it is by nostalgia...

...Antonio is not to be blamed for the error...

...and ending with Faustus' "hellish fall...

...continuing with the conjuration of sundry minor devils, Mephistophilis, the Seven Deadly Sins, and Lucifer, half-day excursions to "Jove's high firmament" in a chariot "drawn by the strength of yoky dragons' necks," and to the extremities of civilized Europe...

...It may thus be regarded as a deterrent of sorts in its own right...

...Lou Antonio is a competent, clearspoken, unavoidably 20th-century American who makes no contact at any time with the character of the medieval doctor-sorceror "glutted with learning's golden gifts...

...But I doubt whether a director ever visualizes the play through the eyes of a moralist...

...Could this be the reason why the show seems discursive when it should be incisive, devoid of imaginative eruptions, elementary as political precept and amateurish as entertainment...

...What metteur-en-scène could resist so many temptations...

...He has found James Ray, an authoritative actor whose cool expressions and fine diction (not unlike Michael Redgrave's) do justice to the difficult role of Mephistophilis...

...In one lengthy sketch a gang of international profiteers is simultaneously shooting grouse and talking deals...

...Not Word Baker...

...It has missed out by some half a century...

...On the stage a director like Miss Littlewood needs the cooperation of a writer's brain, preferably one that is bold and disciplined, if she intends to condemn a war (or anything else) at the same time as she is celebrating it...

...The only other performer of note is Barbara Windsor, the beefy little blonde who appeared in the movie version of Sparrows Can't Sing...

...The best fragment of the evening is the opening 15 minutes during which Victor Spinetti, as the master of ceremonies, tweaks the consciences of the latecomers by welcoming them demonstratively...

...They make what is essentially the same crack five or six times: They are selling to both sides at once...

...I liked her a lot better in the movie—which strikes me, in fact, as Joan Littlewood's most interesting work to date...

...He points out their seats with unnecessary solicitude and elaborately describes the single number that has gone before...

...Even in productions like The Hostage and Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be, which gave credit to an author, Miss Littlewood obviously had fings all her own way, script included...

...She has a forceful personality but seems to be constantly congratulating herself on her cuteness...

...The show turns up on the tail, or possibly in the middle, of a Great War boom in publishing...

...By far the most gifted member of the company, Spinetti puts several sharp interpolations into the sluggish activities...

...The solidarity of the oppressed as well as the oppressors, you see, overlaps borders...

...Maybe it was the nostalgia that made it a hit in England where wars die hard...

...There are two principal and opposing ways of looking at Marlowe's play...

...even so, his material is not up to his ability...

...Most of the production, however, is a matey affair, ostensibly a pierrot party in which the members of the cast wear black and white silk, sing, cavort, and switch their accents between Cockney, English County and Graustark Gruff...

...But he has made a dismal choice for the enactment of Faustus...

...First, it assails the ineptitude and callousness of governments and the cupidity of armaments makers...

...He can hardly even hint at the man's scholarly presence, majestic folly, or skill in disputation...

...And why not...

...A musical attacking the car—that could do some real damage...

...In that medium it is the director who shapes and clothes the work...

...As a contribution to the boom it isn't much more than a reprise of a couple of dozen pleasantly twanging old songs...

...As propaganda Lovely War creeps forward on three fronts...

...the writer becomes an adjutant...

...it refused to take itself altogether seriously as an institution, and delivered better jokes and more telling punches...

...At the Phoenix Theater The Tragical Historie of Doctor Faustus is being dealt with less as a tragedie than as a small extravaganza...

...Red, white and blue lights blink an accompaniment to the story-within-a-story, which is characterized as "the war game" and proceeds in erratic jumps from 1914 to 1918...

...The whole thing is reminiscent in spirit of the revues that used to appear at the Left-wing Unity Theater in London in the late '40s, except that the Unity was tiny, intimate, costumeless, unsupported by David Merrick...

...The Tommies, vanquished by this demonstration, round up a few of their own humble possessions which they throw back to the "Gerries...

...Third, it advertises the rolyproley-pudding cheerfulness of the working-class (of all nations) who became the shell fodder...

...A hedonist can say that if, one day, he must feel the whiff of brimstone in his nostrils, he may as well go all out to earn it: Ecstasy is for now and to hell with damnation...

...How about an adaptation of John Keats's The Insolent Chariots...

...The impulse to war had so weakened that the testban treaty had been signed and the White House itself was inveighing against nuclear pollution of the atmosphere...

...This point too is made several times more emphatically than is needed for a spectator to feel the prod of it...

...Perhaps the cinema gives more opportunities to her freewheeling style...

...Marlowe strikes a nice balance between the moralist and hedonist interpretations, and he doesn't nudge...

...It is hardly an act of courage (or an extension of Mother Courage) for Joan Littlewood to fling war casualty figures in the millions across a lighted screen at a time when the doom statisticians assure us that the automobile is mankind's most lethal weapon...

...He has filled many of the more modest slots with good players, notably David Margulies as a fumbling Pope who keeps losing his hands in his robes and Tobi Weinberg as a throaty, sardonic Evil Angel...

...Strangelove included raising the hackles of the warlike and promoting mistrust of our defense system, it arrived, I would say, about eight or 10 years too late...

...A moralist can take it as a superb instance of divine and thoroughly-deserved retribution for a life crowded with sins...

...He has engaged Ed Wittstein to design the most impressive and serviceable set I have seen on or off Broadway in years, with its partitions and unexpected apertures, its flowing curtain and movable ladders, its miraculous conversions from the study of Faustus to a vault-and-gallery full of demons, to the "privy-chamber" of the Pope in "bright-resplendent Rome," to the court of the emperor Carolus the Fifth in Germany...

...Before you can say "Togetherness" or even "Freundschaft" both platoons are out there on no-man's-land passing a bottle of schnapps from mouth to mouth...

...And from the time of Baker's first production in New York (The Crucible at the Martinique) it has been clear that he knows how to cram a stage with action that never dissolves into confusion...

...Bertrand Russell said he loved it...

...Anybody who finds this a novelty deserves to sit through the rest of the show...

...And so the production, despite its abounding qualities, has a passive center, and some of the most magnificent soliloquies in the English language sound as stiff as college valedictories...

...As a consequence, this Tragical Historie of Doctor Faustus, always exciting to look at, is only sporadically worth listening to...

...The sound of Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht floats across the lines to them in a German baritone...

...The program for Oh What A Lovely War mentions no author, only "a treatment by Ted Allan...

...Second, it launches its main attack on Douglas Haig's megalomania by showing him, not inaccurately perhaps, as a humorless tactician who believes he must actuarially win, however great his losses in men, because God is sitting on his right hand...

...Almost from the moment when Faustus (pronounced Fawstus, please, not Fowstus) bids "Divinity, adieu," the plot races into one glorious escapade after another, beginning with the appearance of the chaste, golden-haired Good Angel and the seductive and brunette Evil Angel...