GRAPE JUICE AND WINE
BERMEL, ALBERT
On Stage GRAPEJUICE AND WINE BY ALBERT BERMEL Ever since early 1957 when Candide, "a comic operetta based on Voltaire's satire," ended a brief run at the Martin Beck Theater, fans of Leonard...
...Would the new Candide be another Dude, a veritable Candudel Cannily avoiding a straight plunge into the big time, Prince tried out his revamped show under modest circumstances, the Chelsea Arts Center in Brooklyn-and came up with a certified winner...
...To which Julian smartly replies, "You don't know what you're saying...
...Thus the pride of this production, its environment, remains static and decorative...
...I want to make a home for you...
...Curtains keep rising to reveal Cunegonde on one of the 10 stages...
...Candide gallops the length and breadth of the building...
...The result is, in both senses, a sell-out...
...Stadlen works like a demon and sweats like a fountain...
...Mark Baker as Candide and Maureen Brennan as Cunegonde have nice smiles, steel-rimmed singing voices, and not much else...
...Barbara Cook and Richard Rounseville sang Cunegon-de's and Candide's numbers me-lodically and intelligibly...
...The gjrl is a man...
...His arguments illustrate our habit of attributing a flop to excesses, rather than to deficiencies...
...Pangloss and several lesser acting chores...
...The author of Find Your Way Home, John Hopkins, exploits this device to the limits-and beyond-for the sake of easy laughs...
...They help themselves to free peanuts in the lobby...
...During most of Act I and Act III the young man berates the middle-aged man for his dishonesty...
...When you hear words like these you know you're in for a play in which characters keep screaming at one another to tell the truth or face the truth, or, better, face up to the truth...
...The staging by Tyrone Guthrie lacked none of the rapidity and expansiveness that had characterized his previous work on Broadway, Tamburlaine and The Matchmaker, both of them money-spinners...
...Answer: He is requiting the young man's love...
...As he pleads near the beginning, with an eloquence typical of the play at its moments of crisis: "I want to live with you...
...so did the lyrics by Richard Wilbur, John LaTouche and Dorothy Parker...
...Now it seems, like most Broadway musicals, to be 200 years behind...
...There is a difference...
...Or "I used to cry all the time...
...the heroine too penetrable...
...As an artistic endeavor, it did not do justice to its source, that story of mutilations, murders, rapes, and assorted other horrors: Guthrie and his teammates could not reproduce Voltaire's chilly-scrivener tone...
...In short order he transferred it to Manhattan, gutting the gigantic Broadway Theater, to make way for the Lees' environment, now vastly enlarged...
...Many reviews praised Lewis J. Stadlen, who essays Voltaire, Dr...
...Later, Julian softens: "I want to live somewhere nice...
...Prince's directing resembles his producing in disguising sackcloth as silk, grape juice as wine...
...The genteel slumming has allowed Prince once again to modify-and so preserve?the hallowed formula for musicals...
...Following Belasco's example, he consistently keeps a jump ahead of the competition...
...One incident played at your elbow follows hard upon another that reaches you from a remote corner...
...A playwright friend of mine once wrote an authentic-seeming scene between two gay men by picturing one of them as a woman...
...Brennan wins applause not for her singing, but for having plucked jewelry out of the headpiece of an actress who sat in front of her fingering an imaginary harmonium-for no conceivable reason...
...After one song, "Glitter and Be Gay," Ms...
...Max Adrian was funny doubling as Pangloss and his opposite, Martin the Pessimist...
...For his objectivity and uninvolved reporting they substituted flipness and arched eyebrows...
...alan: No, I said I'd never see you again...
...the theme was too dispiriting...
...I remember enjoying the original show, which had stamina, verve and all the other glossy qualities a musical is supposed to display...
...About five years ago I heard one Candide-lovei, who had just transferred the music to a cassette, insist that the show would never come back: It was too classy for a large public...
...A soprano voice acquires a Doppler effect as it rushes past...
...When you see the acting close up, though, its details look unfinished, if not shoddy...
...For Broadway regulars this seems to be enough of an attraction...
...Possibly it was once 17 years ahead of its time...
...In Act II it's the wife's turn to do the same...
...The actors swarm around the house but you must sit trapped on your number...
...According to a letter Prince sent the New York Times, he first asked Ms...
...So is Alan's wife-at any rate, she is determined not to let him go after umpteen years of marriage and two teenaged children...
...The love, the tenderness...
...From a commercial viewpoint, it made the mistake of excluding those moments of sloshy reconciliation that give theater-partygoers their obligatory lump in the throat...
...Live -anywhere...
...Only this time around, there is a twist...
...That Broadway bromide, "Give the public what it wants," means, "Don't give the public more than it can take...
...In this instance, Prince began by junking Lillian Hellman's book and replaced it with one by Hugh Wheeler, the author of Big Fish, Little Fish and Look, We've Come Through...
...says the young man...
...Environmental theater has its appeals...
...Live here with you...
...For Superman, Cabaret, Follies, and A Little Night Music he styled embroidery that concealed the worn fabric...
...And so Candide flourishes...
...A hit is self-explanatory...
...find Your Way Home (Bilt-more Theater) goes further back, as far as the first story about the tart with a heart...
...and sit in exquisitely cramping togetherness with their knees in other people's backs or laps...
...When Hopkins gets subtle he perpetrates such exchanges as: "Julian: Didn't you say I'd never see you again...
...Although its program notes seemed unnecessarily defensive about Voltaire's novel ("a beloved and international best seller for 200 years"), Lillian Hellman's adaptation presented slivers of the tale with sharp edges...
...If this better-than-competent musical failed, I conclude it did so because of its deficiencies...
...At the Broadway an actor prefaces the evening with a statistical warning: Please keep your fingers, coats and peanut shells away from the 10 separate stages, runways, and drawbridges...
...The performance abounds in distractions and speed...
...the action-hopping about from Westphalia to Lisbon, to Paris, Buenos Aires, Venice, and home to Westphalia-was too bitty and remote...
...Julian, a man of 22, is desperately in love with Alan, a man of 48...
...The dialogue improves not at all when the wife and husband have a strictly hetero quarrel: "Where was [were?] the understanding and help I needed...
...enter the auditorium alongside wooden screens scribbled over with harmless graffiti...
...The Broadway, however, has numbered seats, all anchored to the floor...
...Honest" and "abrasive" and "scorching...
...Then, to demonstrate the play at its peak of abrasiveness, he asks politely, "Do you want to fuck...
...The narrator, "Dr...
...they consist of individual padded stools at $12 each for aristocrats, big spenders or critics, and benches and bleachers for the hoi polloi...
...On your favorite channel any afternoon you will find wittier directing, more lathery soap, and more challenging situations than in this impoverished descendant of Camille...
...As a producer who has forged an effective career for himself in directing, Prince has become the David Belasco of recent decades...
...Hellman to collaborate on the revival, evidently not thinking that to invite an artist of her caliber to refashion her own script is to proffer an insult, however well-meaning...
...Why does the middle-aged man stand there like a squeezed lemon, instead of grabbing his hat, booting them both in the teeth, and hastening off, like Candide, to Buenos Aires or some place...
...Am I supposed to squeal with delight...
...Yet his Voltaire drops lines-surprisingly pallid ones-in a standardized stage-old-man's quaver, while his Pangloss is a familiar, lipsmacking lecher with scholarly pretensions...
...Voltaire," interrupts the action repeatedly by materializing at some new entrance...
...Harold Prince has now picked up the challenge, scraping together fragments of the first Candide and adding some novelties...
...And, within a couple of minutes, as the two men clutch each other and kiss thirstily, he cries, "Love me, please, make love...
...The acting of Michael Moriarty (who won a Tony) as the young man, Lee Richardson as the older man, and Jane Alexander as the wife, combined with Edwin Sherin's staging, is appallingly sincere...
...Don't touch me...
...Wheeler thinned out the story and, among other changes, excised the character of Martin the Pessimist...
...I am susceptible to them, having especially savored the most impressive one of our time, Orlando Furioso, where you raced around an arena, pursued by wagons with episodes being enacted aboard them...
...On Stage GRAPEJUICE AND WINE BY ALBERT BERMEL Ever since early 1957 when Candide, "a comic operetta based on Voltaire's satire," ended a brief run at the Martin Beck Theater, fans of Leonard Bernstein's score have drooled over their deteriorated LP recordings and yearned for a resurrection...
...The first serious play about homosexuality," said the reviews...
...the hero too bland...
...Next, Prince commissioned an environment, rather than a mere set, from Eugene Lee and his wife Franne, who specialize in environments and have already created two for Peter Brook, one indoors (Paris) and one outdoors (Per-sepolis), another for Andre Gregory's Alice in Wonderland, and yet another for a Broadway extravaganza called Dude, which folded swiftly last year after dropping about a million dollars...
Vol. 57 • June 1974 • No. 12
