On Stage

...Offenbach for the French, etc...

...In fact, The Royal Family sounds like a month's supply of movie or theater gossip columns, written and pasted together by people just a little brighter than the usual purveyors of that product...

...The show concerns two mismated honeymooning couples about to catch the boat for Poughkeepsie, or some such romantic spot, except that only the bride from one and bridegroom from the other make it, later to be caught up with by the other two at Honeymoon Inn, where, after many unfunny peripeties—no, after a few stretched-out unfunny peripeties—the right men end up with the right women...

...Let me see where's my bag...

...Under Ellis Rabb's suitably hectic but otherwise undistinguished direction, this production—yet another Bicentennial offering from the Kennedy Center and the Xerox Corporation—is generally routine, except for two very likable performances by Marie Louise Wilson and the veteran Eva Le Gallienne, a lovely piece of work by Rosemary Harris, and a rotten job by Sam Levene in a part that ought to be just right for him...

...Clearly, if some classic play by Shakespeare or Moliere or Pirandello is offered, that should not be called a revival...

...For tripe and pretentiousness combined, you can go to a contemporary musical...

...such plays are always alive, often much more so than the production that is inflicted on them...

...You bet there's some due on them, $4.75...

...One might think, conversely, that The Royal Family, the 1927 comedy by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber, deserves to be seen again...

...Ah well, roses, like musicals, were cheaper then...

...These shows tend to succeed only if they are lavishly presented, and?here comes the curious part—if they are cleverly tampered with...

...and the idolizing of the star ("I can give you the names of actors and actresses from 300 years ago...

...But worse than the wit is the underlying mentality—the patronizing of education ("You wouldn't believe a college professor in Ioway could know so much...

...Well, not only by Greene...

...Otherwise, however, this unsuccessful mating of East and West remains a typical Shogun wedding...

...but some of it, alas, is only the unquenchable human appetite for tripe...

...yet even within this category, I think, a subdivision is called for...

...This, as you may recall, is supposed to be an affectionate take-off on the Barrymores, a theatrical royal family, for whom acting, on and off stage, is dearer than anything else—especially the unfortunate men and women who get involved with them or marry them—and who are called the Cavendishes in the play...

...Much of the credit for this, no doubt, must go to Haruki Fujimoto, the Kabuki consultant, who, as Commodore Perry, does a rousing lion dance, too...

...That The Royal Family was breaking up audiences in 1927 may or may not be deplorable...

...Kaufman, after all, was the prime farceur of our theater in the '20s and '30s, and though he was never able to write a play by himself (a bad sign, that), of all his collaborators, Edna Ferber "made him dig deeper into what he called 'the rich, red meat of playwrighting [sic].'" (I hope the misspelling is Howard Teichmann's, whose book I'm quoting, rather than Kaufman's...

...The result, though it sometimes succeeds, means we are actually seeing neither the genuine old article, with perhaps a little historic value, nor something new with any real worth—for worthy playwrights have better things to do than to go around refurbishing old chestnuts...

...Name me two 17th-century stockbrokers...

...One of the two current, apparently successful, revivals is Very Good Eddie, a 1913 musical with music by Jerome Kern, book by Guy Bolton, and lyrics by Schuyler Greene...

...It also patronizes Japan...

...Pacific Overtures, with a book by John Weidman and Hugh Wheeler, and music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, possibly Broadway's glossiest name...

...But if some lesser work from the relatively recent past is dug up, and has life breathed into it by clever staging—say, Room Service or The Contrast or a farce by Labiche—that certainly is a revival...

...who may have aspired to become the Hudson Valley Feydeau...

...We must now address ourselves to a couple of offerings that strike me very much as revivals...

...Now, this sort of thing would be quite acceptable for a middling cocktail party of short duration (say, one act), but it is not the stuff of three-act comedies...

...But as one sits at The Royal Family today, there is very little red meat or anything else rich about it, only poor cardboard figures running through the travesty of a plot mechanism that chugs along on the adulterated fuel of third-rate wit...

...but most of them smelled just as much...

...what you would not have expected is the critical raves the show got there, and again on Broadway...

...I am not thinking, of course, of such more bitter or tough-minded—in short, serious—plays as Six Characters in Search of an Author or Colombe, but of the kind of work of which Molnar, alas, is the apogee (The Guardsman, The Play's the Thing), and The Royal Family the sadly typical average...

...on the other, the denial of opportunity to a contemporary work to be put on stage...

...The idea here is to tell the story of Commodore Perry's "opening up" of Japan and its consequences the way a modern Japanese author, combining Kabuki and some notion of Broadway, might have done it...

...But the tampering is apparently necessary because the old shows had fewer songs, production numbers, etc., going for them than current practice demands...

...Valentine's Day comes around...

...We have, accordingly, seen a spate of recent nostalgia-inducing revivals, usually musicals, like No, No, Nanette, Irene, Good News and The Desert Song, to name only the most obvious...

...The sets and costumes, by the usually tasteless Fred Voelpel and generally elegant David Toser, respectively, were about what you'd expect from a production that originated on the cheap at the Goodspeed Opera House...

...but if one of his late masterpieces is mounted, that, for want of another word, is purely a production...

...It was all based on what must have been a pitiful play by Phillip Bartholomae...

...that it is still doing that to audiences and reviewers is a graver matter...

...Whereas Sondheim can usually be depended on at least for good lyrics, and sometimes even for interesting melodies, here his attempt to sound simultaneously authentically Japanese (or at least as authentically as a two weeks' trip to Japan and the reading of some haikus will permit) and razzmatazzily Broadway results in predictable disaster...

...It contains one-liners like, "Compared to my dressing-room, Grand Central Terminal is a rustic retreat," and "Marriage isn't a career—it's an incident," or, to progress to a bit of dialogue: "For the past 20 years, you've made at least a million dollars...

...A distinction has to be made between a little-known or forgotten play that nevertheless has genuine merit, and one that has nothing to recommend it besides its nostalgia value...

...Only two of Sondheim's musical numbers come off: "Chrysanthemum Tea,' in which his practical mother tries to spur the ineffectual Shogun to action, and "Please Hello,' in which foreign ambassadors descend on Japan in appropriate musical pastiches, e.g., Gilbert and Sullivan for the British...

...I wish I could do that much for the play...

...Although even what is meant to be satire now strikes me as star-struck apple-polishing, Ethel Barrymore had considered suing the playwrights, and, ever after, "only nodded to Kaufman...

...To be sure, the borderline is often tenuous...

...But even if the event comes off as a true-blue piece of nostalgia, what have we got...

...What little plot, characterization or point of view there might have been in this farrago is sacrificed to the creation of effects, and to the over-arching exoticism...

...On the one hand, the sickly gushing over something that has nothing other than sentimental value, because it makes us tearful or slaphappy and reminds us of our lost youth...

...The result is a horrible mishmash, a living—or partly living—demonstration of what happens when you defy Kipling's dictum and try to make the second most famous twain (after Mark) meet...

...and the old gags, dialogue and situations desperately need sprucing up...

...That they are mostly musicals is easily explicable: old lines do not evoke memories as potently as old melodies do...

...There are several other "comic" characters, including a ubiquitous comedian who is first all the crew of the ship, then all the staff of the inn, and is given to such witticisms as "The hotel is very fussy, and we won't stand for any moral turpentine...

...The latter is by far the most common reason for reviving a work on Broadway these days, even if other justifications are always claimed for it by various parties...

...How much of it have you got now...

...Some of it is, obviously, nostalgia again, some of it is the worship of theatrical glitter even at its most luster-less...

...This leads to the odd business of cannibalizing other shows by the same composer to beef up the one in need of additional songs, as well as to adding all kinds of new jokes and gimmicks...

...I am not claiming this proves that as many as half a dozen other shows were rifled, but clearly there has been some desperate hanky-panky —desperate because none of the songs is very good: Kern had not yet hit his stride, and the lyricists were no great help to him...

...when a wretched play by O'Neill like All God's Chillun Got Wings is done, that is, presumably, a revival...

...The sets by Boris Aronson actually manage to be both impressive and tasteful, and there are good things to be said for Florence Klotz's costumes, Patricia Birch's choreography, and Tharon Musser's lighting...

...it turns out that of the 18 songs only 6.5 have lyrics by him, whereas 11.5 are by six other lyricists including P. G. Wodehouse...

...I can't say much, for instance, for a song called "Bungalow in Quogue," which begins: "Let's build a little bungalow in Quogue,/In Yaphank, in Hicksville or Patchogue," all of which promptly rhymes with "the dog" (or, the dogue, as the case may be), and is strictly from Hicksville, even if Wodehouse himself wrote it...

...I have long since concluded that Levene is one of Broadway's most overrated mediocrities, with repertoire consisting of two gestures, one look, and one intonation...

...Besides one-liners, there is also repartee: "There's actually some dew on the roses...

...None of the performances is appreciably better than the others, but that of James Harder, as the omnipresent comic, is appreciably worse —though the material was no help to the poor man...

...It is one of those valentines the commercial theater is fond of sending to itself rather more often than St...

...Frankly, I would much rather spend an evening with an intelligent stockbroker than with most actors or actresses—including those whose names will be remembered in 2276 (if the world, or, at any rate, culture lasts that long)—not to mention an evening with the authors of The Royal Family...

...The Oriental, virtually all-male cast (complete with less than convincing onagatas, or female impersonators, except for Freddy Mao, who also does some nice Kabuki-style dancing) is generally acceptable, and Harold Prince's direction tries to keep things as Japanese as possible...