On Stage

...The Duke, however, has not left the city...

...The company's Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, for all its wit, gloss and vivacity, is empty-hearted because it will not face up sincerely to the plot...

...The Duke of Vienna pretends to go on a trip and leaves Angelo, his icily correct deputy, in charge...

...The Teutonic analogy is not a bad one, although drawing an historical analogy in the first place and then camping it up makes for futile guessing games about whom the Duke represents...

...Donald Ogden Stiers, Sam Tsoutsouvas, Kevin Kline, Patti LuPone, and most imposingly, Mary Lou Rosato have more inner fire and outer polish than most established profes-sionals...

...Angelo becomes a heel-clicking officer (a Bismarck...

...Up to now, the Center company's stagings have been uninspired...

...Unfortunately, Jamie believes himself to be cursed and possibly impotent-Several times he speaks of having "drawn a blank" in the past...

...It follows the shaky fortunes, 11 years after Journey, of Jamie, who is the older brother of the Tyrone family, an actor, a lush, and, since his parents' death, the owner of a small farm in Connecticut...

...Macheath the highwayman is not good enough for either of their daughters, Polly or Lucy...

...Stiers (Peachum), Tsoutsouvas (Lockit) and Kline (Macheath) revel in the double-dealing and take justifiable pride in handling their worn patrician props...

...My own pleasure was enhanced by a number of devastating cracks dropped by Flanders about the Standard Oil Company...

...Some people claim that today one cannot help snickering at Isabella's willingness to sacrifice her brother's life sooner than her chastity...

...As Josie's father, a shabby, shrewd, little Irish peasant, he triumphantly survives the action's 24-hour ordeal-It is fascinating to watch him merely light a pipe or smile or twitch his eyebrows-and creates a characterization that would have made O'Neill weep with pleasure...

...The play takes place in 1923 and might be subtitled A Touch of the Prophet...

...Macheath is a parody of what Polly calls "the great heroes of old," a fornicating compromise between Macbeth, a Restoration beau and a Spanish Capitano...

...LuPone (Lucy) lifted the spectators out of their seats when she switched from cool narration to howling aggression in one sentence: "Jealousy, rage, love, and fear are at once TEARING ME TO PIECES...

...and the results are incomprehensible, neither funny nor troubling...

...Most of the actors burlesque their roles...

...now he is appalled by Angelo's edict and behavior...

...While the actors were attached to Juilliard and giving public performances, John Houseman, who runs the School, seemed to have pulled off a miracle-In the people he selected at the original auditions and the fierce training he put them through...

...At present, then, the City Center Acting Company is a fine-toned instrument waiting for the right executant to show it off...

...According to the New York Times business pages, Exxon is raking in a 59 per cent profit rise out of the current misery...

...Designed (patronizingly) for children, the uncredited translation butchers Moliere's language and attempts to filch laughs from such lifeless English as, "How am I going to solve my problem...

...In any event, Isabella's ugly decision is one of the play's several theatrical ramifications, not its backbone...

...The work resounds with eloquent silences, lies and accidents of misinformation...

...A generous man, he had misgivings about his ability to deal with outbreaks of vice in the city...

...Maybe...

...Nonetheless, this is a compelling play, especially in the light of Long Day's Journey into Night...

...dressed in black velvet, an ironic effect, like his name, after we are told that his blood is said to be "snow broth...

...and behind all of this resides a truth about the impossibility of making a full confession, coming to terms with one's self-hatred...

...Maybe it is better, the Duke concludes, to have toleration instead of hypocritical repression in high places, and petty larceny and prostitution instead of fear at the lower end of the social scale...

...And they enjoy the benefit of not having been type-cast...

...It has stuck to, or been stuck with, the old repertory custom of choosing plays having distributed casts, rather than single or double leads, the theory being that audiences are thereby not blinded by gazing at stars...

...About half the text has been excised and the plot complications explained away in an incoherent introduction...

...In the final scenes, the Duke reassumes power but does not imprison Angelo...

...then he offers to free the brother if Isabella, a convent novitiate, will sleep with him...

...Gay viewed the 19th-century underworld of London as an inverse image of high society...

...Some Hapsburg perhaps...

...The actors bound tirelessly up and down, but too much of their energy is wasted changing levels...

...Whether out of consideration for her or out of fear, he is unable to utter the invitation, despite the fact that he keeps declaring his love for her...

...It will take a lot of money...

...Colleen Dewhurst as the daughter and Jason Robards as Jamie (a part he made his own in the Broadway and film versions of Journey) embody the pair accurately enough...

...Yet both actors appear constrained by the mechanics of the staging...

...The company's version of Scapin does not bother with the upstairs platform...

...Maybe this ambition, or something like it, will come to pass...

...so, a swineherd wooing two princesses, he makes love to both...

...Houseman talked at that time of sending out a new unit every year, wave on wave of shock-troupes, enough to overwhelm the most repertory-famished theater lover...

...she is only waiting for a proposal from him...

...Although actors may cleanse their souls by practicing cardinal virtues like togetherness and adaptability early in their careers, they need directors who trust them and will ask for more than they, as performers, expect to deliver if they are to grow into separate artists, and not simply become a tighter ensemble...

...Pierre Lefevre, the director, must have expended a lot of effort and obstinacy in castrating a farce that, like The Beggar's Opera, should be a glorious entertainment...

...Meanwhile, the company, after dashing all over the U.S...

...now they should relinquish the reins...

...The three offerings I saw (out of five-I missed Chekhov's The Three Sisters and James Saunders' Next Time I'll Sing to You, the one contemporary work on the bill) lead to the unsurprising observation that repertory theater is only slightly better than its directors...

...It all showed in the accomplishment with which they swung from a daunting classic like Thomas Mid-dleton's aristocratic Women Beware Women to the squalid beauty of Maxim Gorki's The Lower Depths...

...Far from being an imposed ending, this act of reconciliation is the culmination of a serious idea?the overriding need for compassion in government-pursued and embellished throughout the five acts, as well as in other Shakespeare plays...

...Individually and chorally they have to sing the alluring old ballad tunes that John Gay borrowed for his lyrics, to dance, mime, and do vaudeville turns...

...it remains on one level, tedium...

...And Rosato as Mrs...

...The Beggar's Opera, under the direction of Gene Lesser, makes large demands on the cast...

...But for me the performance hits its high points when the women do their solo bits...

...Yet I have seen the play work magnificently enough times to know that a determined actress can wipe out doubts and smiles...

...Houseman and his faculty (which includes all the present directors) have done a superb preparatory job...

...the arch-crooks Peachum and Lockit cherish their dignity as jealously as their upper-crust counterparts...

...But Houseman, who directed this production, evidently felt defeated from the start, and decided that if he couldn't beat Shakespeare's "datedness" he might as well join it...

...As a touch of redeeming virtuosity, Stiers plays Geronte, a swindled miser, in a vulture's mask and with a leg action that mimics the finicky walk of a bird...

...Dewhurst even comes uncannily close to O'Neill's larger conception of Josie Hogan as an earth mother, a mythical all-women-in-one...

...Jose Quintero's revival of A Moon for the Misbegotten (Moros-co) suffers from the literal reading of O'Neill that I complained about in my last column ("The Iceman Melteth," NL, January 21), deriving from the playwright's single, down-to-earth setting and psychological veracity in portraying people who feel themselves degraded...

...Houseman has pushed the time of the action forward to the late 19th century...

...to harden its skills and identity, has landed briefly at New York's Billy Rose Theater...

...As the new ruler, Angelo inaugurates a Stalinistic campaign against immorality by sentencing Isabella's brother to death for getting a girl with child...

...Peachum, a hefty beldame, rocks astoundingly on her heels between a tragic Anna Mag-nani and a farcical Margaret Rutherford...

...This production, like the others, is served by a basic setting that features a center doorway and another doorway on a raised platform, a treacherous-looking area reached by two unnecessarily steep flights of steps...

...The way the performance went, my money is on Danny Kaye...

...On Stage UNFINISHED MIRACLE BY ALBERT BERMEL The City Center Acting Company, an ensemble made up of the first class of graduates ('72) from the Juilliard School of Drama, has a hope chest of unhidden assets, including exuberance, versatility and five or six personalities who can each fill a stage singlehanded...

...Yet even within this constriction some of the actors display outstanding talents...

...He slinks around in a monk's habit, watching the effects of Angelo's accession and frustrating them as best he can in his new guise...

...Not so Ed Flanders...

...He is attracted to the daughter of his tenant-farmer...

...Now and then Ms...