Seems Like Old Times

...Nostalgic Productions" may be the name of the firm, but Yoshe Kalb offers much more than mere nostalgia In comparison, the Jewish State Theater of Rumania, supposedly alive and well in Bucharest, and now touring the US, has only the past to offer in its presentations of The Dybbuk and The Pear I Necklace, the latter a musical revue Young, or even middle-aged, Yiddish performers are apparently hard to find in Rumania, and the oldsters m the two Rumanian shows seemed to be indulging equally their own remembrances and the happy memories ot their contemporaries in the audience I can recommend one new production that has nothing to do with nostalgia, though Lorca's Yerrna, as directed by Victor Garcia and acted by the Nuna Espert Company ot Madrid, also currently on a nationwide tour, would evoke recollections of Jerzy Grotowski and Peter Brook if more time had passed since the Grotowski-Brook system of free-handedly reinterpreting the classics first burst upon us Garcia has thrown out Lorca's realistic settings and stage directions, and substituted a great, gray trampoline Everything in the play takes place on or under this one prop, with exaggerated gestures employed to add action to the word Any number of piously realistic productions of Lorca have left the impression that the writer's reputation must rest upon wonders impossible to translate into English Yet a dramatist who was wont to set his scenes out of doors (by a running stream in one episode of Yerma) must have been deliberately rejecting realistic design and staging This helps to explain why Garcia's production conveys more life and more Lorca than any of the literal minded interpretations that have made the Spanish playwright's name synonymous with theatrical paralysis...

...On Stage SEEMS LIKE OLD TIMES BY HENRY POPKIN I have just seen a play sponsored by Jewish Nostalgic Productions, Inc , but that is not the only reason why nostalgia appears to be the dominant theme of the New York season thus far While the Yiddish-language theater is stirring ancient memories on the Lower East Side, Off-Broadway is awakening more sophisticated remembrances with programs drawn from two popular composers of yesterday, Kurt Weill and Noel Coward, and even the season's first Broadway comedy is stuffed full of references to Adlai Stevenson buttons and Your Show of Shows Last things first On Broadway, Bob Randall's 6 Rms Riv Vu is surely a calculated effort to capitalize on the current popular-culture nostalgia craze After carefully composing reams of dialogue about Wonder Woman, Your Hit Parade, the cha-cha-cha, and Zelda Fitzgerald, Randall had the troublesome problem of inventing a plot to contain it The one he supplied has its own aroma of slightly frayed reminiscence, it seems perfectly fitted to that quaint postwar period when Hollywood was gradually fighting its way out of the censor's clutches The bold young lovers, heedless of his wife and her husband, go to bed together, but instead of being struck by lightning, as in a 1930s film, they talk each other into a stupor and conclude that they will never do it again, as in a 1950s film Proper treatment for 6 Rms Riv Vu would be to put it into a time machine, ship it back 20 years, and get someone to make a Doris Day movie out of it The play's appeal, such as it is, rests on the boy and girl "meeting cute" (another old Hollywood custom) by being locked in an empty apartment together, and on their bland, easy charm Actually, the bland, easy charm is the private property of the actors, Jerry Orbach and Jane Alexander, under the bland, easy direction of Edwin Shenn Unfortunately, of Broadway's thousands of comedies about abrupt departures from marital fidelity, the few memorable ones have not shown us nice folk like you and me and Jerry and Jane, but eccentric little egotists like the Tom Ewell character in The Seven Year Itch Confronted with a few hours of biteless dialogue, whose point was how pleasant and essentially innocent everyone is, I passed the time by watching the assorted nostalgias whiz by the play's true subject anyway However, the memories are not only omnipresent, they are also somewhat fraudulent (The hero's being 33 should be enough to put us on our guard The nostalgia syndrome usually strikes a little later ) What Randall's man possesses is not the strictly limited lore of a stripling in his early 30s but the consolidated nostalgia of our age How can someone born in 1939 share his parents' experience of the Depression and recall competing in the sale of War Bonds unless he participates in racial memory...

...The trouble seems to be that the young lovers' ages had to be honed down to 33 so that they would be young enough for older playgoers to identify with, but then someone forgot to trim the nostalgia to match Berlin to Broadway with Kurt Weill A Musical Voyage is a complete production, meaning only that the songs have to compete with the gimmicks for our attention The music wins hands down, and, thankfully, none of the gimmicks is quite bad enough to interfere seriously with anyone's enjoyment of Weill's splendid melodies As the title implies, the metaphor of a sea voyage gives the show its excuse Apparent ly this idea was inspired, apart from some leftover props off of a poop deck, by two things-Weill's arrival in New York on an ocean liner, and his having composed a pair of songs about girls who wait for their ships to come in The first half of Berlin to Broadway corresponds to Weill's European career, and is replete with grim forebodings about the rise of Nazism This is fair enough in theory, albeit inaccurate, since Weill, after all, was not full of grim forebodings about the rise of Nazism The pur pose of the initial omens is simply to remind us, not to inform us of anything Still, I am haunted by the annoying suspicion that research for the Nazi addenda consisted of several viewings ot the recent film vei-sion ot Cabaret In the second halt the gimmicks are a greater problem, because they try to associate Weill with the New Deal and the struggle against Na zism at a time when he had frankly turned escapist There is no crime m composing escapist music, but the confecters of Berlin to Broadway evidently regard it as a shameful betrayal, so they have pumped the second act full of contemporary social references that are falsely related to Weill's music The composer's escapism finally receives its minimal recognition when we are told that Weill became an entertainer as his contribution to the War effort The songs, though, gloriously survive The "Bilbao Song,' "Pirate Jenny,' "September Song," "Lost in the Stars...

...and the rest achieve their destined effect despite anything that may be happening behind them or around them on the stage And if the boyish charm of one of the male singers and the fixed smile of the other become a little tiresome, the two girl singers, Margery Cohen and Judy Lander, not only behave m a manner suited to the occasion but get most things right In Oh Coward', the off-Broadway program of Noel Coward songs, the master of understatement is appropriately underproduced The songs are presented with a minunum of fuss "The Stately Homes of Eng land" and "Mad Dogs and Englishmen" explode that British dignity which exists only to be exploded, "Saturday Night at the Rose and Crown" and "What Ho Mrs Brisket" scrutinize that strange beast the cockney, "Zigeuner' and "I'll See You Again" cautiously approach emotion where Coward usually preferred restraint, and "Mad About the Boy" asserts emotion a little less cautiously, yet at least it rejects the boorish film tan's unrefined adoration of the boy (Who on earth told me, years ago, that the boy was Douglas Fairbanks, Jr ?) I wish there were not quite so many songs from 5a;/ Away 1 Unhappily, having seen this next-to-last of Coward's musicals flop on Broadway a few seasons back, I cannot get nostalgic about it But Oh Coward' deftly avoids other sins of commission, and one of its three performers, Roderick Cook, who devised and directed this entertainment, has exactly the right poker-faced Cowardly manner The show achieves its precise intention a stylized interpretation of a highly stylized talent The "musical" Yoshe Kalb is really a straight dramatization of I J Singer's vivid novel with a few songs and dances thrown in The eponymous hero is something of an enigma, an odd combination of passion and piety He is surrounded by a richly colorful cross section of East European Jewish hfe of a century ago, among whom are a power-hungry Chassid, an excessively noisy half-wit and a lustful temptress, played respectively by David Opa-toshu, Miriam Cressyn and Raquel Yossiffon (It is too bad that Miss Yossiffon was not around when Cecil B DeMille was hiring lustful temptresses by the gross for his Biblical epics ) It is surprising to find all this vigorous life on the American Yiddish stage that I thought to be dying Obviously, reports ot its demise have been greatly exaggerated...