On Stage

...I was jolted to find myself filing these kids under categories, as the worst of their teachers must do...

...Productions by Lincoln Center's Repertory Company have generally floundered, too, and the top-heavy musical production numbers dumped into Beggar on Horseback, far from providing ballast, sink like a stone a play that was not very seaworthy in the first place...

...When we presented an expansion of the idea to Tyler and Lynn Fontanne, both agreed with us...

...Creators as disparate as Brecht and Dylan have made singing an intellectual, practical and, most important, fashionable form of commitment...

...If so, he has failed again, and more pitifully than usual...

...Tyler again turned to George Kaufman and me to supply a fresh vehicle for his youngest star, Helen Hayes...

...Anyone who believes that the American theater of the '20s merits reexamination, much less revival, should read the excerpts from co-author Connelly's autobiography, Voices Offstage, fearlessly reprinted in the Vivian Beaumont's program: "Lynn Fontanne's talents merited a play of her own...

...Showfolk now have as much faith in the musical's capacity for seriousness as they have in its box-office appeal...

...The villains are a hideous parvenu family from the old home town who have done two things I doubt any nou-veaux riches from the Middle West ever did, but this menage must do if we are to have a play: They have moved to New York City, and have decided their daughter can find no better mate with whom to share the family wealth than the young musician...

...Surprise...

...Hearing Lahr's rhymes crash about me ("mention . . . tension . . . wrench in") and tripping over his rhythms ("Life's never tragic/As long as we've got our magic"), I realized anew what havoc he, as Lincoln Center literary adviser, is able to wreak—first a complete season wasted on American plays, now a ruinously expensive production made all the more painful by his own illiterate contributions...

...It closed before I could work up the courage to see it...

...When the children begin to discuss school, he causes their bold drawings to fade into photos of classrooms and buildings that look like something out of The Inferno...

...Not much ingenuity is needed to make the Orpheum Theater on Second Avenue look like a slum, but I think designer Clarke Dunham deserves praise for creating so versatile a back-alley setting...

...but that was enough for a book that intended to show how expressive and poetic such writing can be...

...Art, or for that matter, Life, rarely intrudes...

...Winthrop Ames wanted to talk with us about adapting a German play by Paul Apfel . . . 'How would you like to create an American story using his method of dreamlike association?' " In short, Broadway was as much a factory as Detroit or Hollywood or, today, tv, and Kaufman and Connelly, who still make all the anthologies, were hacks...

...Holt and Friedman have not brought enough of this quality to their lyrics, as anyone in the audience could discover by reading the one work from Joseph's collection reprinted in the program ("The Hopeless Tree," by C. M., age 14), then listening to the lumpy, embarrassingly pretentious ballad they made of it ("The Tree...

...It begins with Douglas Grant, a galvanic black youngster barely three feet high, assuming center stage to praise the lunch period as the high point of the day (better than dope or sex...

...Even the most hidebound member of the Board of Education should be won over to the kids' side after viewing a composite film Livingston runs off (assembled from those fabulous visual aids certain teachers fall back upon), showing numerical fractions at play and boring historical figures in odd, ill-fitting clothes...

...We completed Dulcy in less than a month...

...Holt and Friedman flounder when they push out from the shallows of simple joy in Act I and venture into the deeper currents of militancy, drugs and death in Act II because their fragile little craft lacks the ballast only great music can provide...

...Kaufman and Connelly were at least decent second-rate talents...

...Most of the players are either miscast (Leonard Frey, an actor of considerable appeal, sounds very Brooklyn-bred for a Midwesterner) or weak...

...Hattie Winston is a veritable ball of fire...

...Carl Thoma is touching and powerful as a budding black militant...

...Now if only our producers would awaken to the fact that show music, rock or otherwise, is also limited, theater-going would be much less nightmarish...

...Despite such ingenuity and an indefatigable company in which even the less talented youngsters "relate" most delightfully to the others on stage, The Me Nobody Knows cannot go the distance either as a full evening of theater or a tribute to its young subjects...

...And when Jose Fernandez gives voice—most touchingly—to the letters a Spanish youth writes from a correctional institution, nothing but a few bold vertical stripes are cast on the slum's walls, allowing the setting to show through, as if this environment were prison enough...

...When our hero awakens, by the way, he decides to marry the poor little girl down the hall...

...I do hope showfolk learn the lesson taught by this little musical before they plunge into production next season with rock renditions of the Trojan War or the collapse of nato, or whatever else may be considered fitting...

...The best music in the world cannot serve as cosmetic for flaws that have come to be considered endemic to the Vivian Beaumont...

...Then, of course, there is the music...

...Beggar, their "dreamlike" play, has something of a serious theme: Art cannot be bought and mass-produced...

...Still, it is forgettable stuff, and never more so than when it must rise to a topic like the pressure of an indifferent society on the human spirit...

...The play proves it, too, but the victory is Pyrrhic...

...We are supposed to accept its 12 characters as individuals, yet none has more than a trait apiece: Paul Mace is utterly winning singing of girls, girls, girls...

...At the Vivian Beaumont, the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center is attempting to inject some life into its revival of George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly's 1924 hit, Beggar on Horseback, by turning its long central dream sequence into a Zieg-feld cum Berkeley spectacular, as lavish as it is depressing...

...For its first act, The Me Nobody Knows is a free-form, plotless affair of considerable charm and verve...

...I suppose Jules Irving sanctioned the mess in the hope of dazzling subscribers into renewing...

...Taken together, these productions chart the limits of the musical as if on a map...

...The hero is a young musician from the Middle West, starving in the accepted manner in a Greenwich Village garret while finishing a symphony...

...The musical that Beggar turns into, once our hero dozes off to dream about life with such in-laws, somehow manages to be worse than what went before...

...Stanley Silverman and John Lahr, who supply the needless songs, can only charitably be ranked third-rate...

...It is far less boring than I feared, thanks to Friedman's expanded arrangements for brass and, I suspect, the presence of some older pros in that pit Dunham covered with a grill...

...In the opening scene, as each child introduces himself in a brief, touchingly introspective monologue, Livingston transforms the walls into a cosmic panorama of starry skies...

...Why so unlikely a subject was ever set to music I could not begin to imagine—mere logic can go only so far in accounting for anything in the theater—but I think the fact itself is significant...

...and ends in a grand choreographic finale, with the cast stomping to one of Patricia Burch's simplest and best-staged musical numbers, "The Cockroach Crunch...

...It is justly grim, yet with plenty of open space for the cast to romp and wall space for the scores of projections Robert H. Livingston worked into his staging (reminiscent, I must add, of those ever-changing slides used so effectively by the Orpheum's previous tenant, the musical Your Own Thing...

...There is no better example of how Holt and Friedman have caught the toughness, vulgarity and indomitability of slum kids than "Flying Milk and Runaway Plates," a paean to the school lunch...

...Stephen M. Joseph, in his anthology of children's writing that supplied the inspiration, as well as the title, for this show, merely printed the initials and age of the young author after each contribution...

...Just last month, Wilson in the Promise Land was fleetingly with us, warbling earnestly about the League of Nations, the 14 Points and, for all I know, paralytic strokes...

...he usually does save his company's most lavish attempts for last...

...At the moment an Off-Broadway hit, The Me Nobody Knows, is singing about the psyches of a dozen children from the New York Public Schools, using the writings of pupils ages 7-18 as its spoken text and as the lyrics of four of its 21 songs...

...Schoolchildren actually do sing and dance in this manner and, God help them, to far worse rock than that by Will Holt and Gary William Friedman...

...The direction, this time by John Hirsch (a Hungarian-born resident of Canada and therefore an ideal choice to stage Americana), seems more a surrender to the temptations the vastly equipped Vivian Beaumont holds out to mere virtuosity than what Beggar actually needed...