On Stage

...the best features of this show will not be found on its "original cast recording...

...they fall into one another's arms exhausted from trading insults...

...Among the merry topics discussed are amputated feet, heart attacks and our hero's premature ejaculation (a ghost of an ex-wife reveals this failing...

...These shows are in for extended runs, but some of my comment should be considered an autopsy...

...it is never worked into the live action...

...Fortunately, the set Finlay James has designed is a fine one, a ruggedly masculine blend of rough masonry and polished wood...

...Occasionally, three irrelevant ghosts perform similar bits in Act I; their failure to reappear as often in Act II must indicate they bored Vonnegut, too...

...Keene Curtis, who otherwise does well as several of the Rothschilds' Gentile associates, swishes about so much as Metternich that I feared he had confused the character with Frederick the Great...

...If a play is any good, it should have said what it is going to say three-quarters of the way through...

...Mayer's death soon after this strenuous, yet feeble, number is no surprise...

...When the Indian major-domo of the mess protested to the young counsel that he could not allow the native lady victim, who just happened to show up outside at midnight, to confer with him "in here"--though, of course, he did--I almost shouted, "By god, old fellow, you'd better...

...when the shadowy mob has wreaked havoc on the darkened stage (Kidd wisely resists the temptation of razzle-dazzle choreography, here as elsewhere), Mayer reappears, surveys the wreckage and calls forth his sons--now played by five young men (Hecht, Timothy Jerome, David Garfield, Allan Gruet, Chris Sarandon...

...A second lieutenant, the willowy and wastrel son of the late regimental commander, is accused of drunkenly assaulting a lady, and another second lieutenant is assigned to defend him before a tribunal of his fellow officers...

...Otherwise, the only lament I have is that so much ingenuity, theatrical sense and faith in the potential of the stage is devoted to something I will forget all too soon...

...Half the pleasure at The Rothschilds comes from seeing how swiftly Yellen, designer John Bury and director Michael Kidd can move the show from 1772 to 1818 and across the whole of Europe while staying within the musical comedy limits...

...They are good actors, these lads, and like most of the cast, very musical in their delivery...

...All that ding-ding arguing...

...Jerry Bock's tunes are neither infectious enough for the lighter moments--and Sherman Yellen's excellent book provides several of these--nor powerful enough for the sterner ones...

...His setting is "the anteroom of the officers' mess of a regiment in the Indian Army" in the late 1800s...

...Healthiest of all three shows was The Rothschilds, an exceedingly skillful, clever and entertaining chunk of Broadway craftsmanship...

...I, however, willingly endured any vocal lapses at the Lunt-Fontanne because their acting had already charmed me and Yellen's writing had given their courtship a certain Shavian dash...

...The amplification was blessedly unobtrusive...

...In Act I, for example, peasants attack the Frankfurt ghetto, and Mayer orders his four little boys to seek shelter in the basement of the family shop...

...A neo-Ulysses, he finds her courted by two suitors...

...They take after Papa Linden, not Mama Leila Martin, an inferior singing-actress who pushes her voice past its limits and substitutes mannerism for manner...

...So far, so good, but Vonnegut's representative of this breed is about the least harmful of the species, an internationally famous big-game hunter and World War II hero...

...I dare say anyone simply listening to Paul Hecht and Jill Clayburgh belt out the obligatory love song will be a bit annoyed by their sometimes unsteady singing...

...Like most musicals these days, it is weakest where it should be strongest, its score...

...His rationalization appears even more specious when one considers the quality of what he says and of those "games" he plays after saying it...

...Taper off...

...When he settles down to preside at the trial, he is all the more convincing for being so quiet...

...When a similar assault on a wog woman is uncovered, the very nature of colonialism would seem to be on trial, along with the regimental honor...

...This atrocity had been concealed...

...There's a new firm in the firmament...

...It's a bloody one-set play...

...Such dialogue as "You are suggesting that I allow this trial to continue...

...I cut it out...

...The lady, as it turns out, was indeed mussed a bit by the young cad, but she was also sadistically attacked with a sword by someone else--jabbed up the anus, in point of fact, as wild pigs are in the hunt...

...The theme of Wanda June is the ridiculousness of the heroic masculine ideal at a time when overgrown boys play with oversized toys that can atomize the globe...

...Donald Pickering, in particular, is strenuously unconvincing when May makes him clink about in spurs, swagger stick at the ready...

...For a while Wanda June becomes a sort of four-sided triangle until one of the suitors, a peacenik md from down the hall, abandons his pacifism, like James Stewart in Destry Rides Again, to confront the bully husband...

...I doubt he would have tolerated such stuff in his novels, where his vision is broader and bleaker (the Army's behavior in its recent nerve-gas caper was like something out of Cat's Cradle) and his style more terse and winged...

...Broadway, that "fabulous invalid," has already had its transfusion of English playwriting with Barry England's Conduct Unbecoming, while Off Broadway has received a transplant in Happy Birthday, Wanda June, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s first produced attempt at filling a play with the quirks and peeves of his novels...

...Nothing ever really ends...

...He is clever (note that phrase, "officers' mess"), but relies for craftsmanship upon the rackety old melodramatics of the "well made play," which, of course, was not well made at all...

...Monologues are delivered from the footlights like vaudeville turns (our Hemingway type begins the play in this fashion, thus marring the shock of his return later...

...Plenty of things end, including plays, as Vonnegut well knows...

...his is the most becoming conduct on stage...

...He is so Hemingwayesque that "daughter" is the warmest term of affection he can offer his wife upon his abrupt return after being lost up the Amazon for eight years...

...Now The Rothschilds has opened to give the season that shot-in-the-arm only a big musical can deliver...

...He deflates the husband--and the play--by telling him he's a joke, and that is that...

...Some of the dialogue is antic, of course, but I kept recalling the superior games Brendan Behan played in The Hostage, where the romping was always to the point, about life in general and the Irish way of living it in particular...

...Here he tries to express the mighty hope that the family wealth can be used as leverage to remove the walls of the ghetto from around the Jews of Europe...

...Skillful as Bock is at setting Sheldon Harnick's bright lyrics ("May Bonaparte be blown apart...

...hardly masks the grinding of rather rusty dramatic gears...

...England strips the transmission at the finale in revealing the true assailant--a multiple personality case more akin to The Three Faces of Eve than Kim, and, as an out-and-out nut, hardly an acceptable symbol of anything...

...Vonnegut's promised end "games" are played throughout the evening...

...Gratuitous nastiness to his characters (as if the dumb bastards deserve no better) and excessive cuteness are the chief traits this play shares with the novels...

...Throughout, one senses the added unnaturalness of having the action confined to the anteroom...

...The best fun in Wanda June comes not from Vonnegut but from Pamela Saunders' graceful playing of a drunk ghost, and from Nicholas Coster's lively portrayal of a boring suitor...

...Despite its rather leisurely pace, Conduct advances by lurches in Act II when the machinery of coincidence allows the lady's slashed and bloodied dress to be conveniently discovered or impels a native mess servant to forget his lowly station and put forward an excellent suggestion...

...Perhaps anticipating the reviewers' almost unanimous diagnosis that Wanda June meandered off into nothing, he told the New York Times in an interview given before the opening: "There was a Shavian end to it...

...You play theatrical games after that...

...Vonnegut's Happy Birthday, Wanda June could have used some of May's overabundant adrenalin, particularly in its leading man, Kevin McCarthy...

...Less pleasing to the eye is Val May's generally noisy, bustling staging, which tends to undercut his actors...

...England's injecting a fashionable scorn for The Empire, the military and all that rot into an ever popular form, the courtroom melodrama...

...The play's fatal ailment, though, was Vonnegut's inability (seemingly incurable) to master theatrical form--or to consider it worth mastering...

...Hardest to accept is the young defense counsel's mastery of investigation and cross-examination, even though he had never been encumbered with legal training in civilian life...

...Even so personable and galvanic a performer as Hal Linden, unstoppable all night as Mayer Rothschild, patriarch of the clan, is crippled by a drab, grinding "soliloquy" called "In My Own Lifetime...

...The London success of Conduct is surely due to Mr...

...Playwright England sustains little of this promise...