On Stage

...he may in addition be too much of a dancer and not enough of an actor...

...in musical history, though, that makes a big difference...

...The obvious favorites, I must confess, sound like musical-comedy songs to me, but damned good ones—yet the less obvious items, such as the duets "What You Want Wid Bess...

...Thereupon Hirst himself comes in, again immaculately garbed, and it now seems that he too is a poet, that he and Spooner have known each other since Oxford days, that Spooner's wife became Hirst's mistress while Spooner made out with an Arabella Hinscott, whom Hirst was very fond of...

...The Houston Grand Opera musicians play well under DeMain, and the physical production—inexpensive but evocative sets by Robert Randolph, vivid but not exaggerated costumes by Nancy Potts, and no-nonsense lighting by Gilbert Hems-ley Jr.—works handily...

...After abundant mutual hostility, Spooner eagerly offers his secretarial service to Hirst...

...Still, if something like Going Up, a harmless, pleasantly silly World-War-I show, also in current revival, can actually be considered a musical comedy, Porgy must surely be something better, presumably opera...

...I have no idea what the world's greatest living playwright, himself in decline, made of Pinter's latest, but if imitation is indeed the sincerest form of flattery, he must at the very least have been mightily flattered...

...For Pinter's plays ultimately hinge on self-contradiction, on things being both black and white, square and round, true and untrue, yes and no...

...in Act II the other way round...

...Opera or musical or good red herring, Porgy and Bess is a national musical and theatrical asset, and the 30 or so years we had to wait between major revivals of it are far, far too many...

...Sooner or later everything gets contradicted, with the contradiction as good or bad as the initial assertion—except when, as often happens, the whole caboodle is deliberately kept incomprehensible...

...Let us be content to state, then, that the current revival is judiciously uncut, and that there is not a weak number, not a superfluous note in its hefty three-hour duration...

...equally threateningly, they close and are locked...

...In Pinter, everything is mechanistic, usually stripped of linguistic interest even, maniacally geared to menace and, above all, dishonest...

...But nothing is really threatened save our sanity, if we put up with this for long...

...True, Pinter is trying for one...

...With one or two minor exceptions, the casting is expert...

...and "I Loves You, Porgy," or the trio "Oh, Bess, Oh Where's My Bess...

...Jack O'Brien's staging is unspectacular but adequate...

...We shall get nowhere this way...

...Spooner sums up: "You are in no man's land...

...Now Briggs, a seeming butler, and young Foster, an ostensible male secretary, appear and talk confusingly and vaguely threateningly at Spooner, who tries to cloak his unease in dignified near-silence...

...the two younger men do their best to prevent his acceptance...

...In Act I Hirst seems to dominate Spooner...

...Hirst hardly listens, only asks for refills...

...Kenneth Tynan, who was in the audience, explained to me that all four characters are named after famous British cricketers...

...On the other hand, when John DeMain, who conducts the new production here as he did in Houston, where it originated, declares the Gershwin work is fully as much opera as Puccini, we may wonder...

...Which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but which remains forever, icy and silent...

...Doors open with predictably threatening shafts of light invading the scene...

...Spooner, an impoverished poet, is pathetically grateful for the free booze, talks subserviently and too much, and keeps refilling his host's and his own glass...

...Foster spouts more veiledly ominous gibberish, turns out the light, and locks Spooner into the room for the night...

...Clamma Dale, the Bess I saw, sings impeccably, acts touchingly a woman who is both good and bad and above all weak, and is a lovely creature to boot...

...If the subject is winter, for instance, it'll be winter forever," as Foster puts it...

...Hirst acquiesces, "I'll drink to that...

...But Beckett, in both his plays and fictions, tends to present some sort of humble, but somehow gallant opposition to nihilism that consists of doing small things, hoping against hope, or, if nothing else, continuing to talk...

...A folk opera it apparently isn't, because despite its jazz idiom, all the tunes are Gershwin's own...

...The three others then pounce on Hirst...

...That this clever phony should have attained the prominence he enjoys in the contemporary theater is sad yet typical of our world, where serious writers turn away from the stage but supposedly major talents must nevertheless be unearthed and enshrined, even if they make no sense, even if they kill us with a boredom few people dare admit to...

...No Man's Land, you might argue, is his apocalyptic vision of the world ending with a whimper, as it has been ending in so many of Beckett's plays ever since Endgame...

...The only thing Puccini has got on them is a jump of several decades...

...No Man's Land concerns the elderly Hirst, a rich semirecluse, who picks up the equally elderly Spooner on Hempstead Heath and brings him back to his expensive yet austere living room usually curtained against the light...

...Thus in Act I Spooner and Hirst don't know each other...

...its always workmanlike and sometimes quite cunning lyrics by Heyward and Ira Gershwin...

...Pinter has become more and more openly Beckett-struck or -addicted, and I am told he now submits his every new script to the master for approval...

...In any event, the work is supremely stageworthy, what with its colorful, dramatic, simple libretto by DuBose Heyward...

...in Act II they do know each other, though toward the end they again don't...

...Curtain...

...The Beckett parallel is no parallel at all...

...Frankly, it seems to me rather unimportant by which title we savor the show, as long as we give it its due as a fine, moving creation...

...If Foster and Briggs treat Spooner badly at the end of Act I, at the beginning of Act II he'll be brought a luxurious breakfast...

...and its wonderfully jazzy albeit also timeless music...

...In the imported National-Theater-of-Great-Britain production, a marvelous cast headed by John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson, and expertly directed by Peter Hall in John Bury's splendidly designed and lighted decor, could do nothing more than elicit a few laughs...

...However, could this not be a case simply of Gershwin's being the best musical-comedy composer of all...

...No matter how denuded of trappings and biographies his characters are, their pasts contain a few perfectly comprehensible incidents to which they can cling, on which they can embroider, and from which they can launch their existential and metaphysical speculations...

...And so on, by the numbers...

...Personally, I think the subject is not winter but Pinter?that is to say hogwash, and it will be hogwash forever, or as long as Pinter keeps turning out plays...

...Donnie Ray Albert is a full-voiced, manly Porgy, perhaps a little less sensitive than what we are accustomed to, but straightforward and appealing...

...Harold Pinter is back with what was—unsurprisingly—a big London hit, and duly elicited high praise from a number of our critics: No Man's Land...

...Hirst collapses again, and is led away by Briggs...

...We may wonder even more when we remember that Joseph Kerman, in his famous but rather pretentious book on opera, refused even to discuss Puccini as being unworthy of inclusion under that rubric...

...And when we further recall Beachcomber's celebrated boutade, "Wagner is the Puccini of music," we must realize how subjective and relative all this nomenclature is...

...are distinctively more operatic and, I think, rather more beautiful...

...Dozens of people and situations, known or partly known to both men, are evoked and turned into pawns in a power contest...

...They convince Hirst that winter is indeed the subject he changed "for the last time," and that from now on it will always be winter, always night...

...In other parts—at least in the number-one aggregation (some roles are triple-or double-cast)-—the singing and acting are first-rate...

...At last, Hirst returns in an elegant robe, and blabbers away about a dream of drowning, his photograph album that holds his opulent past, and sundry non sequiturs...

...This bit of hermeneutics was of no help whatever...

...Then he starts keeling over, and finally crawls out...

...They claim what he said means "that the subject is changed once and for all and for the last time forever...

...Next morning, Spooner is defiant as he consumes a handsome breakfast with champagne and listens to Briggs tell a preposterous story about how he met Foster and brought him into the Hirst household...

...For the last time...

...But the best laugh is Pinter's, all the way to the bank...

...In Act I Spooner does a lot of talking and Hirst is mostly silent...

...in Act II the reverse...

...There is some sort of byplay between him and his apparent employes (they may also be a homosexual menage a trois), with Spooner trying to pitch in but being kept at arm's length...

...There is much drinking and blather about Spooner's qualifications until Hirst pro poses that they "change the subject...

...Thus, Larry Marshall is too young, attractive and somehow innocuous for the clever but mean and sinister pusher, Sportin' Life...

...Gershwin's notions of orchestration were decidedly not the most highly evolved and sophisticated, yet even compared to such major musicals as Pal Joey, Guys and Dolls and West Side Story, Porgy and Bess remains sui generis and superior...