On Stage

...Stephen Nathan plays Jesus with powerful simplicity...

...The success the authorities allow this production is their own unintentional tribute to a tormented comic who ended as a martyr and survives as an influence...

...Jeffrey Mylett, a sort of charming Jerry Lewis, is a first-rate musical-comedy talent...

...The parting in the Garden of Gethsemane is moving because the disciples cannot cut up, as before...

...Good works, like Kubrick's Dr...

...Joseph G. Aulisi not only brightens the evening with his costumes, he sometimes does a better job of characterization than the performers wearing them...

...I was partially won to it by the producers' refusal to christen it "a rock opera...

...It may never be, either...

...he tries hard, yet his vampirish leers and creakings hardly fit a character who says he is suffering from "humanitis...

...John-Michael Tebelak has conceived the Gospel as it would be seen through the eyes of today's Jesus freaks...

...He doesn't impersonate—he embodies—Bruce's traits...

...Three of the boys in the indefatigable cast are surely destined for bigger theaters than the Cherry Lane...

...Once those who make us laugh stop laughing, we want to know why...

...On Stage COMEDY AND THE DIVINE BY HARRIS GREEN LENNY BRUCE is vindicated by the untroubled success of Tom O'Horgan's latest skin show, Lenny, a phantasmagoric biography that suggests a musical with much of the music removed...

...There is an irresistible fascination to its central character, Bummidge, the ex-vaudevillian who gave up his tv show because he no longer found life a laughing matter ("Why can't I live without hope like everyone else...

...They are enough to restore my faith—in theater, I mean...

...His cause was the invaluable one of free speech...

...Comedians are worthy subjects for serious treatment, particularly in this age when so many historical events seem to be the products of sadistic practical jokers...

...Here is the master at his best, attacking a preposterous mass fallacy like the 2,000-year-old culpability of the Jews in the Crucifixion: "Yes, we did it...

...In any event, these routines give you some idea of how things go at the Brooks Atkinson...

...As the play begins, he has completed his own form of Freudian analysis—upon himself—and has sunk all his spare cash into a closed-circuit telecast to demonstrate his method to a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association...

...I have rarely seen so awesome a range of accents, such dazzling timing, such incandescent energy under supple control...

...Barry includes samples of both extremes in the play, though whether out of fairness or indiscrimination I cannot say...

...I do not mean its final offering, Play Strindberg, Friedrich Diir-renmatt's needless reductio ad ab-surdum adaptation of The Dance of Death that proved nothing about either Strindberg or Dance...

...The rock orchestration for organ and cymbals worked wonderfully for the Crucifixion, too...

...His raffish friends and relatives have been dragooned into helping him relive his past for the cameras...

...But surely the point could have been made less provocatively, with more art, not to mention wit...

...The production is one of those anything-goes affairs that makes a director's reputation overnight by providing good copy for neophiliac reviewers...

...I hope Bellow continues taking it off the shelf every so often...

...Jane House as the comedian's wife, Rusty (actually, she was called "Honey"), and Robert Weil, scurrying deftly through a multiplicity of roles, are quite good...

...Nor will O'Horgan, Barry and their producers be denied theaters for their subsequent, inevitable movie version because it will indulge in scatalogical taunts at religion, sick jokes about the President and obscene skits featuring pop culture characters...

...But usually the direction pulls up lame when it should scamper...

...You dragged me down into affluence...

...Gorman's performance is so fiercely right in its intensity that it must have burned itself into my consciousness, for I now feel he never once left the stage...

...There is a major theme entangled in the play's coils, however, along with several meaty parts and much delightfully bitter wit ("You exploited me...

...Stephen Schwartz's songs are pleasant enough, what my 26-year-old guest described as "Broadway rock...

...The art of being a night-club comic, while an art, isn't much of an art, yet selecting and controlling material was often beyond him...

...I did it...

...Joltingly funny as he could be, Bruce is more admirable as a martyr...

...Let me close out this season of nonplays and adaptations by considering more spiritual matters, namely Godspell, a worthy rock musical version of the Gospel according to St...

...Tom O'Horgan may prefer to work with a nonwriter because a nonplay is so much easier for his kind of director to stage...

...He has certainly omitted the vicious pranks and con games Bruce blithely confessed to...

...COMEDY OF another sort ended the current season of the little Forum Theater, at Lincoln Center...

...Maybe we should call it "gravel...

...Nudes, jazz, giant puppets of Li'l Orphan Annie and Jackie Kennedy, a primitive tribe of shuffling celebrants (inspired, I presume, by Kenneth Tynan's likening Bruce to a tribal shaman who exorcises the demons in us all)—O'Horgan creates the effect of an evening-long Lenny Bruce routine at its hippest and most self-indulgent...

...It's a thought...

...By himself, Schwartz could never raise the show to the level of the Passion's great moments...

...Bruce's autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, which I read before seeing Lenny because I never followed his career closely, frequently has utterly winged, devastating passages sharing the very same page with undisciplined, gratuitous stuff...

...The scene is not Giotto or Bach, but it is deeply felt...

...But no one, not even the excessively repulsive Joe Silver, can get the stage away from Cliff Gorman in the title role...

...fortunately Tebelak's staging, with its borrowings from Paul Sills and Peter Brook, does have elevating moments because of its madcap antics...

...Strangelove and Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, may not have been quite the same without him...

...Mann's production of Analysis at Circle-in-the-Square has its moments, thanks mostly to David Mar-gulies as a nasally droning ratcatcher (a new Bellow inspiration) and Martin Garner as a fat old jump-suited flunky...

...Matthew...

...A dearth of pretension and a wealth of good-natured energy are the chief traits of God-spell, once it gets past its ponderous opening...

...All these controversial ploys that Bruce pioneered are now as common as dying from an overdose of heroin, the last prophetic act he performed...

...I don't wish to see Gorman typecast again, now that he has escaped the flaming-queen roles that threatened to hound his career after his performance in The Boys in the Band, but I hope he will portray another comedian when he is older— in 25 years, say, when someone is sure to be reviving Saul Bellow's The Last Analysis in its latest version, as Theodore Mann has just done Off-Broadway...

...Having Christ and His disciples lark about like ingenuous hippie clowns is not really blasphemous or anachronistic, I think, if you realize how the Jerusalem Establishment must have viewed the originals...

...I doubt that his hip pop humor was quite so treasurable, es-thetically...

...It's also a madly oblique way of reminding us that censors and prudes hate pornography because they are antilife and pornography, in an off-center fashion, is for life...

...they try to, then wither in grief as Christ takes his leave...

...David Haskell has a major actor's dash and presence...

...We have lost too many valuable definitions, like those of "poet" and "revolution," to have "opera" debased by middlebrows who confuse pop's simple-minded vigor with artistic merit...

...Joseph Wiseman, fiendishly miscast as Bummidge, is the chief impediment...

...Watching him is like watching the sun: The image remains after you look away...

...I do not trust myself to write further about the matter, except to say my voice can be added to the clamor of protest and even hysterical laughter that must greet this decision...

...I found a note in my basement: 'We killed him—signed, Morty.' 'Why did you kill Christ, Jew?' 'We killed him because he didn't want to become a doctor, that's why.'" There is also an extended aria, to drum accompaniment, dealing with the phrase, "to come...

...I'm certain they wouldn't have been as fine, either, had he been the director or author...

...Barry relies so much on Bruce's own material and so little on any insight into the best and worst in the man's nature, I think it safe to say if Lenny Bruce hadn't existed, Julian Barry could never have created him...

...Bellow's revisions have made Analysis much tighter than the original version I saw in 1964, but I still don't think it's ready to open...

...My family...

...Instead of songs and production numbers, Julian Barry's script offers replays of the night-club routines that brought down upon Bruce the wrath of municipal authorities from coast to coast, yet no one is about to close Lenny...

...that business about the relatives pitching in at the last moment, without benefit of rehearsal, is a bit hard to take, even in a farce, although it is essential to this farce...

...Some of those piercing chords practically made me feel the stigmata...

...I refer to the decision of City Center, the Forum's new landlord, to turn this, the most comfortable and convenient of all the city's intimate auditoriums, into a movie theater, despite the fact that one already exists next door in the Library...

...I shall not quote this—it loses a lot without the drum—but, in essence, it tells us that anyone who finds this percussive hymn to ejaculation offensive is anti-God because He created the process...