On Stage

...Rene Auber-jonois goes most of the way toward creating a Malvolio of frenzy held in check by hauteur...

...What matters is the ability to speak verse with clarity, thrust, musicality, and ease...

...Yet even if this play had been laid in Africa and blackness built into its plot, merely having the proper skintone would not qualify an actor to do Shakespeare (that, after all, can be scooped out of a make-up jar...

...Other recent shows have been drab...

...When Sydney Walker (Sir Toby), George Pentecost (Feste) and Leonard Frey (Sir Andrew) revel in unison, they almost make you forget that each, taken individually, is miscast...

...The stage looks particularly evocative in Douglas W. Schmidt's carpeting of blue and sprinkling of stars...

...its very title verges on perfection...

...And Rabb does pace the grand unraveling of entanglement in the finale quite well...

...Jack Gelber did little for his fame as author of The Connection by writing an amorphous flow of topical vignettes, the nightmares about the public and private dilemmas of a Contemporary Everyman who, for some reason, has volunteered to participate in a "sleep-test...

...It's far more necessary to recreate the special mood and rhythms of the play with artful simplicity...

...We may trust her to serve as the playwright's spokesman against the disorder that was always his concern, whether it lay in lovers' hearts or monarchs' minds or the war-torn body of a state...

...Patricia Birch and Tom Moore have staged it in a manner that puts to rout any chance for sentimentality...

...Kert Lundell's oversized bed, backed up by a peacock's tail of neon tubing, is stunning...

...She could probably cure Malvolio of his self-love, too, but that task has been assigned to the other realist of the play, the old jester, Feste, who makes a very bitter business of it...

...Stephen McHattie, a white armed with a monotonous, cloddish brogue, battered both language and artistry just as badly in the role of Sebastien...

...When she had her first audience with Martha Henry's Olivia, a performance acceptably resolved and well bred, the Beaumont was suffused with an almost palpable sense of wonder, as if the audience were stunned by this reminder of Shakespeare's total mastery over language and incident, mood and character...

...Many of the vignettes are clever...

...Why satirize an era in which the brutish simplicities of rock 'n roll beat down whatever sophistication and craftsmanship remained in songwriting...

...Rabb seems to feel it's any American's constitutional right to appear at the Beaumont, regardless of his race, creed or diction...

...Wasn't it ridiculous enough...

...His sense of style, however, is notable for its absence, if we may judge by his using music that ranges from syncopated folk-rock to electronic gastritis, and costumes that seem to have been snatched from wardrobe trunks in Morocco, Cathay and Manchester...

...and I. in Maria's letter to Malvolio probably stand for the Latin names of the four elements, mare, orbis, aer and ignis...

...The production has other such moments and virtues...

...Unfortunately, the blacks in minor roles make their every utterance a jolt, and the two in key parts practically upend the play...

...Almost everything about the off-Broadway revival of The Shadow of a Gunman is miscalculated except the decision to do it now...

...Cynthia Belgrave's dreadful Maria spews forth a mystifying stream of shredded vowels and torn consonants while grinning in the insistent manner the amateurish always assume necessary for playing comedy...

...Shakespeare confines the distraught Malvolio in a dark room...

...I hope it moves to Broadway soon so the entire company can double its earnings...

...The interruptions and questions of the doctors give the play some structure...

...It's all very well to do your homework so you can indicate, as Rabb discreetly does, that the cryptic initials M.O.A...

...Lucille Fletcher's Night Watch attempts to keep the audience in suspense, wondering: "Is this wealthy, neurotic wife seeing actual corpses in the tenement opposite her posh East Side townhouse, or is her unfaithful husband going to great pains to drive her up the wall, between the Picasso and the Modigliani...

...On Stage ROUGH SLICK AND LUMPY BY HARRIS GREEN Ellis Rabb's lavish production of Twelfth Night for the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center, though far from a success, may well demand more attention than anything else done at the Vivian Beaumont in years...

...Fortunately, Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey did not share my critical lethargy...

...Indeed, Jacobs and Casey would be millionaires today had they composed "Beauty School Dropout," "Alone at a Drive-in Movie" and "It's Raining on Prom Night" way back in 1959...

...The Moorish dress was probably a roundabout way of justifying still more disastrous miscasting of blacks...

...The audience was often held by the timeliness of O'Casey's insight into the demons of blarney, pugnacity and illusion that drive the Irish...

...And how fetchingly convincing Miss Danner looks, garbed as a boy...

...A rock musical parodying the pop culture of the late '50s would appear to be as needless as any of Rabb's flowery touches and dying-fall pauses...

...The Pat Boone-ish Nice Boy (Tom Harris), for instance, never gets a chance for a solo because he's constantly scurrying about, practically running his white bucks off, helping out on such tasks as changing the scenery...

...Moses Gunn's bombastic Orsino not only flourishes a ludicrously phony English accent, but pauses so oddly and often that I got the impression he was indicating the indentation of the poetry...

...M Mirch and Moore may well be taking a passing swipe at Tom O'Horgan's unimaginative use of hand mikes in Jesus Christ Superstar by having their inordinately talented cast, headed by Carole Demas and Barry Bostwick, pluck its electronic aids from the very air at every opportunity...

...Jacques Levy fleshed out his reputation as the director of O! Calcutta...

...Yet for all the favor it has apparently found with reviewers and public, I must report that this Twelfth Night is not all that well done...

...They have recaptured all the raunchy, throbbing excesses of the Jerry Lee Lewis-Sandra Dee period in their off-Broadway hit, Grease, with great style and without once enshrouding it in the nauseous mists of nostalgia...

...Saddest of all was Sleep, at the American Place Theatre...

...by stripping some of the cast...

...Jacobs, Casey, Birch and Moore always select the right cliches, twisting them into refreshing comments on youth's foolishness...

...Thanks to her, the plotline involving Viola's disguise has such tensile strength that we willingly suspend our disbelief and settle back,content, to savor the delicious contrasts of the play...

...The first serious Shakespeare anyone has served this famine of a season, it reminds us how potentially nourishing the Repertory Theater remains...

...Lesser talents, I'm sure, would have called the archetypal school setting "Presley"????not "Rydell"?High and turned The Old Maid English Teacher (Dorothy Leon) into a helpless caricature instead of a tough old doll who makes the young oafs in her blackboard jungle snap to...

...I understand an all-Negro Twelfth Night had been originally threatened...

...She pronounces each speech trippingly and pointedly, carrying the main weight of the play balanced securely and gracefully upon her boyish frame all the while, despite the needless striding and frequent reclining Rabb has her and everyone else do...

...Rabb suspends him in a giant birdcage (because Feste sings of Robin as he approaches...

...After 15 soft minutes of dialog as padded as, "But I tell you I saw it...

...Shakespeare rounds off this rare comedy with Feste alone on the once teeming stage to sing of wind and rain...

...Miss Danner's sunny, undaunted Viola can surely teach Olivia how to mourn for a brother and correct Orsino's equally excessive passion...

...I began to wonder: '"Can a writer renowned only for a 30-minute radio script written 25 years ago stretch her thin gifts out to fill an evening...

...I was numbed by the badness of the cast, the sloppiness of their brogues and the timidity and monotony of Philip Minor's staging...

...Were they reclining to catch their breath from all that striding...

...Rabb has the whole company present during the song, lurching through a gavotte...

...But what a shallow stream of consciousness Gelber asks us to plunge into...

...I wouldn't put any cleverness beyond those responsible for a show as delightfully crafted and spiritedly performed as Grease...

...Perhaps it is a fatal loyalty to old associates that accounts for his casting in major roles such unspectacular performers as Walker and Pentecost, former members of the late, unlamented APA Repertory Company Rabb once headed...

...It is Blythe Danner, as Viola, who imparts most of the uniquely Shakespearian flavor to the evening...