No Camels, No Toreadors
BERMEL, ALBERT
On Stage NO CAMELS NO TOREADORS BY ALBERT BERMEL In many ways Broadway musicals haven't altered in the half-century since The Desert Song opened. Most of the lyrics in any show still sound like...
...Far from patronizing The Desert Song by camping it up, Butler has tried for a modern, deferential, sincere adaptation that does not match the characters' hungers...
...It goes forward as sluggishly as ever, despite the energetic goadings of Eli Wallach and his wife...
...They certainly meant increased efficiency...
...Another innovation was the dancing...
...I can never detect much more than a whiff of the lubricants for boulevard hits...
...The young leads continue to be a couple of humorless ciphers who hunt each other down as if in quest of a hot meal...
...We notice this when we compare the revival of The Desert Song with its glossy modern counterparts...
...For calamity the intrepid Red Shadow has been killed by the trepid Pierre, who has returned with a red burnoose as evidence...
...The hero, General St...
...While Margot sings directly to the audience, in the equivalent of a dramatic aside, and glumly yearns to have known more of the Shadow's caresses ("caresses" was an obligatory word in the '20s songwriting industry), Pierre resuscitates the Shadow for the last time by cramming himself into the red burnoose...
...The sun rarely figures as a source of such nourishment...
...Margot finishes her plaint ("This would be/A magic world for me/If he were mi-ine alo-one"), turns around, heartbroken, and finds her steady diet...
...The current production relies almost entirely on nostalgia...
...Anouilh is too intelligent to be slick, and too craftsmanlike to be inspired...
...The Waltz of the Toreadors has one fine scene, an old-fashioned tirade by Mme...
...Jean Anouilh's play, back in New York for the umpteenth time, consists of a domestic comedy with variations, but not enough of them...
...Anne Jackson...
...The evening I went some women in the audience hissed, some men applauded...
...Possibly because he is widely admired as a person, and because he has been associated with some first-rate directors, among them Louis Jouvet, Andre Barsacq, and Peter Brook, his work has come in for serious critical scrutiny from people who detect the influence of Girau-doux, Cocteau, Pirandello, or other masters...
...In his dramas you look for feelings and get regulated outbursts...
...And each derived from fiction by a literalist author, John O'Hara in the first instance, Lynn Riggs in the second...
...each pang frightens him toward the best bosom in sight, whether it belongs to a maid, a barmaid, or one of those accommodating seamstresses who, everyone thinks, became extinct in the 18th century...
...Jean Anouilh has been one of the prolific dramatists of the past three decades, and a force for good in the Parisian theater: A few years ago, for example, he unearthed Roger Vitrac's play Victor (1927) and gave it a new lease on life...
...Nonetheless, something did get lost, and I suspect that the vanished item is, very simply, theater...
...But one casual line does prove timelykermoyan's "Every woman is a slave and she must have a master...
...The reason may be the house, an intimidating new pile named for Percy Uris the builder, warming his vanity by displaying on its walls a miscellany of gigantic U-motifs...
...All live in foreign landscapes of the mind that are American, if not Americana, through and through, so that a stage Morocco has no more exotic verve than a pretentiously decorated front porch...
...he literally kicks his lines into the auditorium, and backheels one over the heads in the balcony...
...Margot does not dislike Pierre, yet he is no more than a snack...
...The new producers have not bothered to introduce subplots about oil disputes, pan-Arab conferences, hijacking, or nuclear testing...
...They exploit their raw material as purposefully as the meat-packing trade learned to do...
...Pe that Sarah Bernhardt would have rejoiced in...
...Most theater people have assumed that these novelties spelled improvements...
...Michael Kermoyan as a harem-owning sultan has a mighty voice and presence, and is a pleasure to watch even when he is merely listening to somebody else sing...
...Most of the lyrics in any show still sound like ads for "Love"A miracle elixir you can drink in by staring up at clouds, the stars, or the moon...
...an ever-present doctor friend who plagues him with sensible advice and could probably ruin him by submitting bills for house calls...
...Pe (Wallach), has philandered through his youth and middle age because, like a Tennessee Williams heroine, he feels gnawings of loneliness...
...What she could really use right now is a man of banquet proportions, namely the Red Shadow, fearsome leader of the Riffs (Moroccan outlaw-nationalists...
...The performance halted, the actors smiled...
...Standing onstage with her is Pierre, a late riser and flaccid gallant who once made the mistake of writing her a poem...
...Moreover, Butler required authoritative actors and did not cast them, except in three subsidiary roles where they outshine the principals...
...Clarke Dunham, who designed the sets, including one backdrop by Van Gogh there's one stock that has shot up since 1926 must have spent the late summer racing frantically between the Uris and its neighbor, the Joseph E. Levine Theater, preparing for two openings in a single week...
...And they stay on the move, pelting your ears with sound, keeping your eyeballs swiveling in opposite directions...
...The General is burdened with a fierce invalid for a wife...
...At the Uris Theater the revival seldom goes the limit and relishes itself...
...Jackson gives it all the heat and nuances of inflection it can support...
...According to David Ewen's American Musical Theater, Broadway strove for topicality in the '20s, too...
...In the last scene, for instance, Margot is singing a reprise of "One Alone...
...The latter teams up with the mistress, a soul mate in chastity and, in a last-scene plot twist that was foreseeable in scene one, turns out to be the General's son, courtesy of a forgotten seamstress...
...The old lines of chorus girls reaching their arms and legs politely to the right, then to the left, gave way to "choreography," every slab of which added its own weight, if not impetus, to the drama...
...As a spurned Arab mistress, a slightly displaced and declassee Amneris, Gloria Rossi is the production's discovery, tearing the evening's decorum wide open with a magnificent belly dance...
...There are a fascinating S-shaped loveseat, an old globe in a polished wood holder, a vermilion bedspread in velvet, and a divan that can be lifted like a stretcher with a body on it...
...and two gawky daughters competing for a youthful male secretary...
...At the Levine, the props and furniture (circa 1910) that Dunham has rescued, refinished, or reinvented for The Waltz of the Toreadors provide an excuse for insisting on front-row seats, which cost no more than any others...
...The second lead she is always a potato-brain...
...The writers of The Desert Song tried to cash in on the 1925-26 "revolt of the Riffs under the leadership of Abdel Drim...
...It was another, if accidental, moment of theater...
...Or it may be that Henry Butler, who directed, has veered timidly away from the impudent grandeur the show needs to make its impact...
...The Red Shadow, that vanquished superman who was trying to wrest Morocco from the French, is actually the Frenchman Pierre...
...A bit earlier he galloped her away on an Arabian charger to his hideout, and she regrets that she was too prissy to devour him when she had the chance...
...Both of these had American, not overseas, settings, though for many New Yorkers the folksy representation of the state of Oklahoma may well have been alien corn...
...The play contains no toreadors...
...You may as well pull out the stops when you are concocting a book and lyrics that will appeal, if at all, because they are tricky and unnatural, and exist in the first place to serve the gruesomely sweet melodies of Sigmund Romberg...
...The biggest change incorporating songs into the book seamlessly to advance the action is supposed to have begun with Pal Joey and Oklahoma...
...Even the plays that have enjoyed some success in English, such as Antigone and Becket, seem to have found favor with theatergoers who like to take their myths and medievalism coated with sentimentality and Laurence Olivier...
...Jerry Dodge as a craven American reporter not only dances with an Astaire-like body sway...
...Maybe this is finally why I find Anouilh unsatisfying: He does not have the knack of keeping something in reserve...
...Still, there have been some drastic changes since 1926 when the desert's first Red Shadow (Robert Halliday) invited the first Margot Bonvalet (Vivienne Segal) to consider the gastronomic tempations of "blue heaven and you and I/And sand kissing a starlit sky" in the "operetta" that was initially called of all things, My Fair Lady...
...you listen for wit and argument and hear fabricated stoicism...
...Recent shows don't ramble...
...she, a squeaking blondedrop the same old punning two-liners, trip over each other in the same tired routines, and look as sated as ever...
...an un-violated mistress of 35 with whom he has verbally waltzed for 17 years...
...Although modern commercial playwriting shuns the device as tricky and unnatural, the authors of The Desert Song (Otto Harbach, Frank Mandel and the young Oscar Hammerstein II), it seems to me, knew what they were about...
...Her husband reacts by choking her into silence but not until she has already run out of breath and completed her peroration...
...Taking advantage of an aside is an old ploy that goes back at least to Plautus...
...What Margot does not know is that she is playing Lois Lane to Pierre's Clark Kent...
Vol. 56 • October 1973 • No. 20
