On Stage
SIMON, JOHN
On Stage BICENTENNIAL BYWAYS BY JOHN SIMON T HE Bicentennial mania for rediscovering neglected gems of American drama is creating a plethora of Brigadoons. I don't mean the Lerner-Loewe musical,...
...James Til-ton's producer's-office set is appropriately Art Deco, and there is one very droll bit contributed by Joe Grifasi as a desperate songwriter...
...As the pure and only ever so slightly tarnished heroine...
...probably unintentionally, which makes it all the worse...
...The only intolerable performance comes from Charles Kimbrough, who turns the Confederate counterespionage agent into a creature of utter loathesomeness...
...I don't mean the Lerner-Loewe musical, but the enchanted town in it, which emerges from the mists of time for one day every century...
...The two genres have yielded some of the most patronizing pseudo-humor and gargantuanly tasteless production numbers, respectively...
...who hails from New Jersey, plays the passionate Southern belle with a superb accent that goes way beyond the Mason-Dixon line...
...The plot is predictable...
...certain kinds of humor are funnier when they snuggle up to you via the nearness of the large or little screen than when they are relegated to the far side of the footlights...
...and the number of times the wit is on target could at best do credit to a blind marksman...
...I wonder, incidentally, when the other team member speaks of "this titivating drivel" instead of "titillating," whether the fault is the actor's or the hard-working authors...
...Captain Thorne is a Yankee spy in the Confederate Army who is about to send a telegram to the Union troops besieging Richmond that will tell them where they can break through the city's defenses...
...As for nostalgia, Freudenberger has come up with the appealing idea of bridging the lengthy waits for scene shifts on the primitive Playhouse stage by having a cast member come out front to sing some period ballad or campfire song in a soulful solo, or having a whole group sing in close harmony as a number of soldiers exchange weapons for instruments and join their voices with skill and warmth...
...the characters, with the possible exception of the heroine, are unbelievable...
...That's the worst of hack writing...
...Not all the actors are equally good at playing this sort of thing...
...A number of very elaborate visual effects can be transferred only poorly to the stage, some not at all...
...Perhaps I can break the deadlock by declaring that what I like still less is husband-and-wife playwriting teams such as Henry and Phoebe Ephron, Ruth and Augustus Goetz, Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, and Sam and Bella Spewack...
...Lenny Baker is good as one of the writers, but Charles Kimbrough makes the other one no different from his Confederate counterspy...
...To tell much more than this of the plot of a melodrama would be an act of calculated cruelty: first to those who might catch the show, because plot is mostly what they will get...
...Best among the men is John Lithgow, whose Captain Thorne is cocky, gallant, and more than a little whacky...
...T HE second bill, Boy Meets Girl, is a 1935 collaboration of the husband-and-wife team of Bella and Samuel Spewack, who enjoyed considerable success as playwrights in the '20s and '30s, and as screen-writers in the '30s and '40s...
...it is utterly tantalizing to try to tell whether it is a very high voice sounding strangely low, or a very low one doing some crazy high-wire act...
...the young audience greeted every new number with an ovation worthy of a major rock group in Madison Square Garden...
...Still, both the Playhouse stage and the Phoenix budget put limited means at a designer's disposal...
...To see either of these plays once in a lifetime, well produced, can, however, be moderately enjoyable...
...He revels in horrid grimaces and a vocalism that sounds as if every syllable were trumpeted through a deliberately obstructed nose: Demosthenes put pebbles in his mouth...
...brings that troupe of entertainers...
...Meryl Streep...
...Boy Meets Girl can now retire until the Tricentennial...
...Secret Service is the work of William Gillette, the actor-manager who also wrote plays...
...I would say that Monty is cleverer than the Spewacks or William Gillette, though less sharp than a razor blade...
...Don Scardino, Roy Poole, and Charles Kimbrough...
...Miss Streep is fast becoming one of our most valuable actresses...
...The question is merely whether it was worth disturbing their peace at all...
...Don Scardino, as an untalented extra who turns out to be the son of a British Lord, has an English accent even less convincing than his performance...
...I am not sure which I like less, Broadway satires on Hollywood or Hollywood musicals about Broadway...
...It all depends on how much of a stomach you have for twice- or thrice-told tales...
...They are probably best remembered for the book they contributed to Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate, and second best for this comedy about the frantic shenanigans in Movieland...
...The scenery and costumes are adequate, although James Tilton, who designed both the sets and the lighting, must thus be credited with two undistinguished performances...
...a pistol shot in the hand or the love of a good woman, to name but two...
...from television and films to the stage...
...Arthur Miller, who dons the Confederate gray for these occasions and plays a lively banjo, harmonica and autoharp, is the music director of the Phoenix, and not to be confused with a gentleman of the same name who earlier supplied the company with a play called A Memory of Two Mondays: these musical memories of the Old South are much sweeter on the ear...
...I wonder what Kimbrough stuffs up his nostrils...
...with one illegitimate baby, but that one a movie star...
...nothing has been added, but something, alas, has been lost in the move...
...Daniel Freudenberger has staged the play at the intersection, as it were, of three approaches: straight melodrama, camp and nostalgia...
...But there is also enough camp here to make the telegraph-office scene, for example, into a huge, ludicrous interruptus: At least a dozen times Thome's nimble fingers send out bits of the message, only to be stopped by one means or another...
...The others do passably by smaller parts, but John Lithgow's direotion is more frenetic than inventive, and Clifford Capone's costumes could have been more amusing...
...Sherlock Holmes, the eponymous hero of his other hit, and Captain Thome in Secret Service (1895), were the two juiciest, and he acted in them almost until his death in 1930...
...several, like Frederick Coffin...
...Whatever this may tell us about dramatic collaboration and conjugal drama, this much is certain: Boy Meets Girl fails both as expose of Hollywood's inanities and as a screwball comedy about the socio-sexual mores between Burbank and Grauman's Chinese...
...Freudenberger's direction is to be applauded all the more for overcoming such handicaps...
...Yet something mildly pleasing does happen on stage at the Playhouse, a converted movie theater that the Phoenix's present selections appear bent on reconverting, because Secret Service is so well presented...
...They perform a goodly selection from their TV and film skits...
...The dozen tapped-out fragments might be sufficient for a brief biography of Jefferson Davis, but not enough, it appears, to tell the Blues where to attack...
...then to those who won't catch it, because the plot summary of a silly play is the last thing they need...
...or whether he will not, causing Edith Varney, the fairest flower of the Southland, to fall into his arms...
...Equally poor is Frederick Coffin as a cowboy star, whose cloddishness ought to have been mitigated with some appeal...
...Miss Hurt has the looks of an impish china doll and the voice to put a crack in one...
...She also has perfect timing and the kind of cunning expressions and intonations that convey the most damnable things in the sweetest, most innocent way...
...it's hard work...
...Surely plays like Secret Service and Boy Meets Girl, to whose gathered dust the Phoenix theater has now applied the Bicentennial brush, will soon return to a century on the shelf...
...Actors and authors (luckily for them, and less so for us) do not get bored with their own work very easily, but it must have taken the combined pride of authorship and actorhood for Gillette not to have fallen asleep during his enactments of Holmes or Thorne...
...are not all that good at playing anything, in fact...
...chiefly, it would seem, to supply himself with juicy roles...
...it is almost like orchestrating the possibilities of Southern speech into a charming little vocal concert...
...a generally juvenile and often delinquent Beyond the Fringe...
...complains one of the team of successful Hollywood hack writers who are among the main characters (unmarried to each other, since they are both men), and the play's humor is downright sweaty from hard work...
...Almost equally good is Marybeth Hurt's portrayal of Caroline Mitford, the tomboyish ingenue...
...Indeed, I am inclined to believe that the superiority of Betty Comden and Adolph Green lay largely in their not being married to each other...
...Marybeth Hurt is, this time round, a bit precious...
...The story is still treated just seriously enough for us to take, say, a Monopoly player's dose of interest in whether Thome will send that telegram, causing the capital of the Confederacy to fall into Union hands...
...But there are a few first-rate performances...
...Monty Python Live...
...Here she ingeniously treads the line between melodramatic pathos and romantic farce, and manages to dangle a foot teasingly in either direction without ever making a false step...
...On his trail is Benton Arrelsford, of the Confederate War Ministry, and it seems as if all of Richmond were engaged, wittingly or unwittingly, either in abetting or in thwarting the transmission of that telegram...
Vol. 59 • May 1976 • No. 10
