On Stage

...The electrifying smiles have become sheepish, the voice is a hoarse whisper, the dancing is mostly arm-waving and finger-wiggling...

...As she puts things on the blackboard, her handwriting becomes progressively distorted with pathological rage...

...What talent there is in the show is mostly concentrated in Vivian Reed...

...Much can be said, too, for the agile footwork and pleasant personality of Barry Preston, the show's one white male, and for the subtle song styling and attractive manliness of Chip Garnett...

...To be sure, as Shaw long ago reminded us, plays can be pleasant or unpleasant as well as comic or tragic, and one of the possible uses of the stage is to irritate us into awareness...

...Moreover, great old numbers can be enjoyable only if unburdened by wilfully distorting arrangements, inferior performances, and an interlarding with lackluster new songs and banal old jokes, not to mention vestiges of a superannuated plot...

...This tale of the rise of a ruthless but colorful and flavorsome Irish robber baron, who is generally superior to his patrician competitors and enemies, and who, after repeatedly besting them, finds moral redemption in his downfall, demands a strong, magnetic leading man...

...A revue needs three things: originality, wit and a point of view...

...Miss Wastba either teaches her students absurdities from an imbecile syllabus or lectures them on the great vowel shift to their absolute stupefaction, and is always patronizing or insulting...

...Josephine Premice, not so long ago a charmingly saucy singing and dancing actress, has grown prematurely hammy and campy, grimaces smeared across her face, every word dripping with crude innuendo...

...Broadway, meanwhile, has come up with a black revue, Bubbling Brown Sugar, that whets one's appetite...

...actors were found who speak the called-for languages flawlessly, while being equally proficient in the universal language of acting...

...Edward Berkeley has directed cleanly and efficiently, and the production design is simple and telling...

...I would say Miss Wastba is God, who was an offstage character in Horovitz's one-acter Morning, and who is seen here as a disturbed, spiteful, megalomaniacal sower of discord even while demanding unity through the choral repetition of incomprehensible verbiage...

...Though Long is artful, life is short, and decrepitude forces him into mere vocal and kinetic indications of his role...

...God is no less worthless than his (her) creatures, although he (she), as wastebasket, is a container for a better sort of rubbish, whereas they, made in his (her) image, get to hold only filthy detritus, for all their pretensions to being a higher type of receptacle...

...The play, justly accused of being xenophobic, goes farther: It is misanthropic and misotheistic, sparing neither God nor man...

...His plays, essentially melodramas or boulevard romances, nonetheless captured a social climate and psychological details unheeded by most of his contemporaries...

...at no time is he shaken out of this condescension by becoming implicated in human or divine guilt...

...Only Miss Wastba, though, is actually named after that object, albeit in apocopated form...

...But this original concept by Rosetta LeNoire has been fatally aggrandized during its one-year pre-Broadway tour: Its book, by Loften Mitchell, is bloated vapidity itself, and neither the good old songs badly reorchestrated by Danny Holgate, nor the feeble new ones by Mitchell, Holgate and two associates, can do much to save this sprawling, pointless mess...

...He bore up heroically, continuing to collaborate on plays, and advising and encouraging the large circle of artists that gathered at his bedside...

...Even the casting is a problem...

...They receive little help from the ugly, cramping scenery by Clarke Dunham, and the nondescript costumes by Bernard Johnson...

...How nice it would be if the lost art of the revue were retrieved and redeveloped by the black theater...

...Most commendably...

...Nevertheless, there are authentic laughs here, and the writing is as richly visual as it is verbal-or anti-verbal...

...I am beginning to think that the few people who still try to put together a revue do not understand the meaning of the word, confusing it with one of the meanings of review...

...it does not mean a repeated viewing of a lot of stuff that has been viewed before...

...The rest of the cast is a mixed bag...

...The Chelsea production manages, as always, to look delicious on a circumscribed budget...

...Horovitz is giving us an updated version of the Tower of Babel story, with some extra added attractions...

...Particularly painful are the references to and intermittent impersonations of the headliners of yesteryear by performers lacking in both skill and magnetism...

...The third team member, Joseph Attles, a boring beanpole of a performer, is as ineffectual as ever...

...this contraption lacks all of them...

...Avon Long was a dazzling musical-comedy performer-for instance, as Sportin' Life in the first Broadway revival of Porgy and Bess...

...Yet each character points to the onstage wastebasket in seeking to establish identity...

...Pong (for once Horovitz's linguistics must have forsaken him??surely pong can't be the Chinese for trash can...

...Diane Keaton is perfectly cast in the role of Debbie Wastba: Her range is minimal- severe neurosis or psychosis under a veneer of genteel smugness-but within it, as in this case, she is unbeatable...

...it has decent sets by Lawrence King, elegant costumes by Carrie F Robbins, and adequate staging by Edward Gilbert...

...She is an exciting performer, good at everything, who subdues the audience with her calm self-assurance even before going into her powerful singing or intense yet controlled dancing...

...An appreciable influence on O'Neill, Sheldon's work to this day provides some modest, humane insight...

...This plot has a mature trio of black vaudeville stars take two young couples, one black and one white, on a trip around Harlem-but more through time than through space-thereby evoking famous past night spots and celebrated old-time performers...

...My own discomfiture stems from the suspicion that the typical theatergoer emerges with a feeling of unearned superiority to foreigners and teachers...

...It is not exactly kind to the audience either, stretching as it does an old vaudeville routine (however metaphysically refurbished) to 90 minutes' duration...

...Still, the play overcomes everything and makes you care for its characters, something that does not happen often in today's more ingenious and sophisticated commercial plays...

...The others are equally good, although my favorite is young Lori Tann Chinn as a very old and frail yet sweetly testy Chinese woman called Mrs...

...As the proud socialite who scornfully marries him to save her family from bankruptcy, and ends up loving him, Louise Shaffer does look her part, but cannot act it...

...The new play concerns the first session of a primary English class for foreigners, where an Italian, a Frenchman, a German, an old Chinese woman, and a young Japanese one, none of whom speaks the least English, come for sorely needed linguistic help...

...she asserts that her name is of Mesopotamian origin, which brings us back to Babel...

...Then there is the curious conceit of naming every person in the play, including the Polish-spouting janitor, whatever the word for trash can is in his respective language...

...Thus there is a novice English teacher...

...Despite feeble or frantic stabs at communication, no such thing as tongue to tongue resuscitation is possible and all attempts at understanding expire in grotesque death throes...

...Who is this Miss Wastba...

...And what are we to make of the trash-can-into-wastebasket symbolism...

...Miss Debbie Wastba, a total incompetent, hysteric, tyrant, and monolingual xenophobe, who insists on mistaking the Polish janitor for a rapist lurking in the women's toilet...

...In the end, the three vaudevillians reliving their artistic, financial and amorous tribulations only hustle us from show-biz platitude to platitude...

...Sheldon had a tragic life: For some years he was the handsome and successful darling of show business and society, then, for decades, he was blind and bed-ridden with arthritis...

...Across the bridge in Brooklyn, the Chelsea Theater has revived The Boss, a 1911 play by Edward Sheldon, a minor but appealing American dramatist undeserving of the oblivion that threatens him...

...Billy Wilson's conventional choreography is energetic and captivating...

...She manages to confound, humiliate and, finally, infuriate her students, until one by one they abandon her to her private demons...

...Added to the nostalgia, though hardly miscible with it, are paltry forays into social significance, such as jokes based on changing interracial relations or bits of melodrama about white gangsters horning in on the black numbers racket...

...Andrew Jarkowski, whatever his incidental virtues, does not even look the part...

...in Horovitz's play it is other tongues...

...There are also invisible, UN-style translators to provide instant English translation of the dialogue, which is entirely in the languages appropriate to the various characters...

...To make matters worse, no one speaks anyone else's language...

...The only question about this off-Broadway production is what kind of awareness could it goad us into...

...For revue means a gathering of verbal and musical talents, so that they can pass in parade before an audience...

...This consists of taking people and situations at the borderline of the possible and tilting them as far as they can lean toward absurdist abstraction without losing their tiny toehold on reality...

...Hell, in Sartre's No Exit, was other people...