On Stage

...I understand Simon originally planned to conclude with Evy giving into her oft-discussed sexual fervor, taking on the Puerto Rican delivery boy whom he had appear twice in Act I. This character is still about, ominous as ever, in the first act of the final version...

...Their show, as everyone must know by now, is an adaptation of Clifford Odets' folksy retelling of the story of Noah, The Flowering Peach...

...It should prepare us for her next announcement: She has decided to move in with this divorced parent, whom she barely knows and who is anything but the kind of adult a teenager would pick for a companion in any era, no less our own...

...Why, you may ask, should anyone care to make a musical about the end of the world...

...The character Polly, however, has to be seen to be disbelieved...

...I am willing to excuse her occasional grimacing as a family trait...

...John Patrick adapted it from another play of the '50s, his own hit...

...The Teahouse of the August Moon--which perceptive theatergoers back then must have felt was a musical without songs...

...Harry Goz, Walter Willison, Marilyn Cooper, Tricia O'Neil and Madeline Kahn (suitably vulgar as a pagan priestess, along for the ride) are well-supplied with talent...

...I could expect nothing less from those thick-skinned and thick-witted enough to attempt today an old-style musical about the American military at large in the Far East...

...Otherwise, Simon follows the usual Broadway recipe...

...Such scrutable Occidental cunning continually breaks through the rice-paper veneer of phony charm everyone labored to stretch across Lovely Ladies...

...Merry jokes about the speech impediments of her father and stepmother explain this decision: They were driving her crazy at home...

...On Stage GINGERBREAD CRUMBS MUSICAL FRAGMENTS BY HARRIS GREEN There are so many half-baked lumps of standard Broadway seriousness in The Gingerbread Lady, Neil Simon's first attempt at solemnity, that one has the impression he wrote (and rewrote) it while consulting the works of Miller, Williams and Inge as if these were cookbooks...

...Miss Ruymen, personally, is charming...

...A play that was probably stale in its first draft has now acquired a suitably crumbling dramatic form as well...

...Polly Baby is to daughter-hood what Mrs...

...The gis are eventually charmed out of their joyless ethic of hard work by the easy-going Orientals--but not before they convert them to producing their native artifacts in a mass-production manner worthy of Detroit, Michigan...

...Its master chefs are either retired or dead...

...He takes one divorced nymphomaniac alcoholic, picked at the precise moment of dramatic freshness--she is returning to her West Side Manhattan apartment from "a resthome for drunks"--and stirs her well for three acts...

...The only thing it leads to, though, is one fairly haunting stage picture, in Act III, when Robert Moore's direction, David Hays' set and Martin Aronstein's lighting manage to call up an alcoholic's upside-down existence of despair...

...And Kaye...

...Evy has come back to her apartment, pulled the drapes to shut out the sun and put on one of her old records: There she sits, lost in the past in the midst of the present, the dark in the middle of the morning--until one of Simon's characters makes another of those suspiciously well-timed appearances that keeps the play, such as it is, going...

...Admittedly, Two by Two has its choppy moments, with Noah's song to the corpse of his just-deceased wife ("Hey, Girlie...

...A stage-struck, middle-aged homosexual, doggedly plodding from audition to audition (with an occasional detour through Central Park to cruise The Ramble), Jimmy is the kind of show-biz type Simon can create with ease...

...Rodgers' score is never less than diverting, even when his lyricist, Martin Charnin, forces it to stoop a bit...

...But when daughter Polly, played by Ayn Ruymen, burst in upon us, I slumped in my seat...

...His heroine, Evy Meara, is not a famous singer whose dilemmas could be considered meaningful, but one of those little people whose triviality has kept American drama savorless for decades...

...When she used a prim term like "marijuana" instead of the more familiar "pot," I decided Simon had confected this paragon of sweetness as a favor to his loyal middle-class, middle-brow, middle-aged public, who probably feel like the excluded middle in today's youth-centered age...

...He has given them a Polly Baby whose reassuring goodness will banish all those young rebels from their minds...

...Lovely Ladies, Kind Gentlemen, is a musical containing far more to deplore than to enjoy...

...These he dutifully folds into the thin dramatic batter...

...As far as I could tell, not only is the flavor of The Gingerbread Lady the same, but the nourishment is equally meager...

...then lapse into hyper-senility once more, fit the bill...

...But perhaps the chief function of Two by Two has been to remind me how treasurable Kaye and Rodgers truly are...

...Ah, so...

...Her entrance line immediately sets her apart from us ordinary mortals: "I don't want to get your hopes up, but I have reason to believe I'm your daughter...

...then she makes her points in a strong, wasteless fashion that is a pleasure to watch...

...The general malaise began stealing over me from the first, when Kenneth Nelson appeared as Sakini, an Okinawan interpreter and narrator-guide for this parable of how West (American gis occupying Okinawa in 1946) meets East (those quaint little natives) for one of those fine old opportunistic morals...

...Mother Evy also starts to get to her, but by the final scene Polly has revealed herself to be such a tower of strength and patience that I suspect Simon, when he checked into our '40s dramatists to see what a serious play should be, looked into the novels of Olive Higgins Prouty as well...

...Besides, Joe Layton has even staged the appearances of The Almighty in a properly light manner (He communicates through projections--details from Old Masters, naturally--flashed on the backdrop...

...My only regret is that Remak Ramsey, who plays an Army psychiatrist through fiercely clenched teeth, and Lady Astor, a fantastically gifted little goat, could not have boarded Danny Kaye and Richard Rodgers' ark before the deluge...

...To impart his own flavor, he makes her a show-biz character, a bistro vocalist who overflows with the kind of gags he can always supply...

...I wasn't annoyed by the character Betsy von Furstenberg plays, either, since her performance has substance even if the role (a vain, middle-aged beauty) seems to exist in midair...

...but after all the rewriting, the poor lad never returns to perform the service for which he had been intended...

...The return to Broadway of Danny Kaye and Richard Rodgers in the same show, Two by Two, is therefore the kind of theatrical event that deserves mention, even belatedly...

...Our Evy's return to alcohol provides the sole dramatic progression of any sort...

...Prouty's immortal heroine Stella Dallas was to motherhood...

...Frankly, I feel it still is, now that I've heard what Stan Freeman and Franklin Underwood have put forward as ballads ("Simple Word") and choruses ("Find Your Own Cricket...

...Maureen Stapleton, as Evy, behaves in a fairly flustered manner, too, until Act III...

...I am more convinced than ever that it deserves attention now that another and somewhat similar musical, Lovely Ladies, Kind Gentlemen, has opened...

...The Broadway musical, once a veritable pastry tray of delectables, has also become increasingly dietetic of late...

...achieving a new high in queasy production...

...How often do we get the opportunity to relish a performer so radiant with charm, who knows precisely how to control it, to dispense it, as it were, in warming--not withering--rays...

...Surely this was the least he could do for them after they had faithfully supported his Broadway belief in comedy as an oddball, yet innocent, situation, festooned with gags and innuendo...

...Well, the story goes that Kaye wanted to return to Broadway in something challenging and different, and a musical that has him begin as a doddering 600-year-old, then become miraculously restored to comparative youth ("Ninety Again...

...Hollywood and tv wooed away its great stars along with its mass audience...

...To top it all, he serves Lady with the sort of bittersweet ending guaranteed to torture a fastidious palate: Evy bravely facing life, fortified with that miracle ingredient Love as embodied by her overbearing teen-age daughter Polly...

...I didn't object when the character entering was Jimmy, played by Michael Lombard with expansive force...

...I suggest that in a time when the musical is about to sink in a sea of rising costs, something with a cast of only eight performers must have seemed too ship-shape to resist...

...The show makes it to port, however, because all hands are highly accomplished and exceedingly pleasant to spend a few hours with...

...It remains to be seen whether they will support his first attempt at following Broadway's recipe for drama: pathetic people in depressing situations doing unfortunate things...

...Now the soaring expense of presenting such shows threatens to reduce the musical to a mini-affair, without dancers and a large orchestra, if not banish it altogether...