The Past Recaptured

...There are unassuming little dance numbers by Peter Gennaro, but the real dancing comes from your spirits as they flutter along with this endearing musical puffball...

...in others the entire score...

...One of them is not really a musical or, strictly speaking, a revue...

...It makes O'Neill's less than convincing lingo sound all the odder...

...This time the vehicle is Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie, and it is as creaky as a tin lizzie...

...Though he becomes moderately efficient as a soldier, he ends up dying a death as silly as his life...

...he last of the trio, Annie, is a delight...

...Reid Shelton is a delicious Daddy Warbucks, neither too real nor too unreal, and good in a way that is not goody-goody...

...Regrettably, he insists on exhibiting his cleverness at the same time by working into his "continuity" all kinds of jokes about current headlines that he brings continually up to date...

...Pavlo's language begins to have the same literalness that O'Neill's had, and fails to achieve transcendence in its occasional leaps, exactly as O'Neill's failed...

...Tenderness and sweetness are no more his stuff than they are Edward Al-bee's, Terrence McNally's or Joe Orton's...

...Funny as some of them are (the rest are pretty fatuous) they are dragged in with only a shred of relevance, and sometimes none—a delight to the groundlings but an offense to anyone with a sense of artistic decorum...

...T .JL...

...David F. Segal's lighting supplies the present production with additional dramatic wallop...

...The selection is apt—mixing the well-known with the lesser known —yet more appropriate to England, where much of Sondheim had not received a hearing...

...Though the locale is Trenton, New Jersey, rather than California, and the upper middle-class characters of the film have become lower-to-middle middle-class in the show, the plot still concerns two friendly couples who decide to swing by means of a mini-orgy that is to consist of simultaneous wife-swapping in the same bed...

...Wheeler has done well enough by the interactions of the various soldiers, and he has the good fortune of having the original Sergeant Tower, Joe Fields...

...On the whole, Stewart's lyrics are considerably neater than his book, but Cy Coleman's tunes tend to let them down...

...Ever since the premiere in 1921, the chief objection to the play has been to its happy ending...

...I suspect that there is no such person, and that this is merely a strategy for deflecting our attention from how indecently the book of this musical resembles the movie Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice...

...But the wide-eyed quality of the strip remains, although not quite so literally as in Harold Gray's drawings, where eyes are mere circles...

...Lenny Baker is a comic who works hard and to some good effect, but who is a bit too aggressively gauche and homely...

...Again as in Bob etc., there is one spuriously swinging male and one dopey one...

...Secondly, the characters in Anna Christie seldom if ever do anything we couldn't guess they will, if we were involved enough to bother guessing...

...The show is expertly directed by Gene Saks, has delightful sets by the aforementioned David Mitchell, along with good costumes by Ron Talsky...

...An equally disappointing revival is the Theater Company of Boston's production of The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel...

...But unlike the four fine musicians, the four main performers are weak...

...Tisa Chang is perhaps more authentic than Victoria Racimo was in the original, but hardly as heartbreaking...

...In the fairly impossible role of Ardell, Albert Hall was infinitely tougher than Gustave Johnson, who is altogether too uncertain of what he is doing...

...It is Side by Side by Sondheim, consisting of 30 songs plus one medley from various Sondheim shows...

...Ned Sherrin keeps touting Sondheim as an expert on marriage, noting that many of the songs are wittily and balefully antimarriage...

...Sondheim is much better as a lyricist—in fact, he is the best we have—than as a composer, his tunes being generally either too recherche or too ordinary...

...First, of course, the language, which is a mighty obstacle in all but O'Neill's last few works...

...O'Neill was accused of selling out to Broadway...

...He is best at either a kind of poetic craziness (Dog Day Afternoon) or maniacal viciousness (The Local Stagmatic), and has to portray a character that falls into neither category...

...With a very few exceptions, we still clearly remember these songs from the shows they appeared in, where we could hear and see them to better advantage thanks to the presence of a context, not to mention a full orchestra...

...The other little girls at the orphanage are splendidly scruffy or sassy brats: seven-year-old Danielle Brisebois may be a bit cute, but if you are that small, that talented and that adorable, you are entitled...

...The many minor roles suffer especially in the current production...

...Sandy, played by a canine foundling aptly named Sandy, is a joy: hammy, but not too doggedly so...

...BY JOHN SIMON T JL^iv Ullmann's long-awaited Broadway debut has proved just as equivocal an affair as her long-awaited 1975 off-Broadway debut in A Doll's House at Lincoln Center...

...The problem, however, is not so much the ending as everything about the play...

...It is an old-fashioned musical, based on the comic strip Little Orphan Annie...

...Rebecca Darke, whom I remember affectionately from Who'll Save the Plowboy?, is surprisingly stilted and inept as Pavlo's mother, a role Sloan Shelton excelled in...

...All the minor roles are well taken, and the direction by Martin Charnin is efficient and ungimmicky...

...When he adds, "You don't have to be nice to the people you meet on the way up—if you're not coming down again," he's not snide, merely philosophical...

...And Jose Quintero's direction lacks the ingenuity to make us less aware of the play's weaknesses...

...In other words, we have here my most loathed genre: the clean dirty joke, the spiritual pabulum of mental eunuchs...

...I am fairly sure that much of the fervor in behalf of the play stemmed from its coming when it' did and from whom it did—a Vietnam veteran writing with the war still on...

...In some cases he wrote only the lyrics...

...Otherwise, the wit is mostly on the level of the other fellow's wife, about to feed the first fellow banana pie before (presumably) going to bed with him, saying: "Wally, I'm going to give you a big piece: I want to make sure you'll have plenty of banana...

...The pianists are good, and Florence Klotz's costumes effective...

...Sherrin does offer some useful information about the songs, the shows they came from, and Sondheim himself...

...The best one, "We'd Like to Thank You," sung by the inhabitants of a Hooverville, is perilously Weillian, but at least Strouse knows from whom to steal...

...but he does convey perfectly all that is good and bad about those tough noncoms that were the backbone and fists of the Armed Services...

...in the original version these characters were an offstage voice?to better effect...

...fter a prolonged lack of good, or for that matter bad, musicals, suddenly three opened within one week to become critical and audience successes...

...Like the eyes, the characters have been neatly filled in...

...The triple amputee, Bri^bey, is played by Richard Lynch, a young and pretty boy who cannot act...

...What he is supreme at is richly rhyming bitchiness, of which there are many fine examples—rather too many...

...Coleman, who has been known to do better, has the same problem here Sondheim has with his tunes: Some sound too much like all kinds of other people's tunes, and some try so desperately to be different as to sound like nothing at all...

...Lee Wallace, a much older and plainer man, made the part reverberate with irrepressible bitterness...

...But was this show's trip really necessary...

...it is full of old slang that has not aged gracefully, and is not used in a way that turns dross into poetry?as happens in the superior last plays...

...But even then she does not glow as she does on screen, and her Norwegian accent is too thick for a girl who left Scandinavia aged six...

...and James Naughton is just plain dull...

...There are also two pianists and one Ned Sherrin, who provides "continuity" and is very nearly de trop...

...Wheeler's worst idea may have been to bring the Sorrentinos, mother and daughter, on stage in the selfsame person...

...This interests me particularly because I had, as the book jacket of the published play reminded me, compared Rabe favorably with O'Neill...

...Thirdly, the malign power of the sea is never really communicated, especially since it seems to have a cleansing effect on Anna...

...He is, I'm afraid, all too Trenton...

...His ballads, in any case, tend to be considerably be low his other songs, because sentiment is not Sondheim's forte...

...Ilene Graff and Joanna Gleason are moderately amusing but not very attractive...

...Al Pacino, who plays Hummel, is an actor of genuine talent and extraordinary energy, but he has two handicaps in Pavlo...

...The production was conceived in England by the actor David Ker-nan, who is in it with two singing actresses, Julia McKenzie and Mil-licent Martin...

...The two women are excellent: Miss Martin as a delicious actress who can sing passably, Miss McKenzie as an accomplished singer who is no slouch as an actress...

...Fields has become, if anything, less comprehensible in his instructions and commands, the verbal slings and arrows he pelts his men with...

...Sondheim, a bachelor, does not strike me as an expert on the conjugal state, only as its expert baiter...

...This is the story of a somewhat unbright, somewhat dishonest, yet basically well-meaning bumbler, who fumbles his middle-class civilian life back home, and fumbles equally in the Army in Vietnam...

...His lyrics are on the simple side, as they should be here, and Charles Strouse's tunes range from the delectably corny to the serviceable...

...And, in both movie and show, the participants chicken out after sundry not very funny high jinks...

...Then when relief comes, it comes in the form of a romanticism that is excogitated, unconvincing and sometimes boring...

...But, let's face it, it is getting to be harder and harder to come up with melodies that are both original and melodious...

...In addition, we may have seen a little too much of Pacino in recent years...

...The original production, designed by the admirable David Mitchell and staged with hard swiftness by Jeff Bleckner was, I believe, better than Wheeler's, which resorts to a little more heavy symbolism, slows things down a bit excessively and has both a much less satisfactory set by Robert Mitchell and a very much less satisfying cast...

...They are worked into the show in various guises—anything from furniture movers to Santa Clauses, sometimes as real people, sometimes as imaginary presences, and it is always fun to anticipate in what new avatar they will be sprung on us, even though the invention flags and their later transformations are less droll than the earlier ones...

...Love My Wife, written by Michael Stewart, claims to be based on a play by Luis Rego...

...Later, he came to dislike the play altogether and requested that it not be included in selections from his work...

...The politics of the original?Hearst Republican—have been considerably Democratized...

...More clean dirty humor, you see, and not even top-banana stuff...

...Nevertheless...

...David Wheeler's staging of David Rabe's first success, produced in 1971 but in the writing since 1968, today seems almost as dated as Anna Christie...

...Unfortunately, great as Miss Ull-mann is in Swedish movies, here her performance can best be described as worthy...

...She manages to be thoroughly contemptible but also funny and innocuous, like the wicked witch of the fairy tales, whom no kid wi'h spunk really fears...

...Time has now come full circle, and I must again compare him to O'Neill, to the disadvantage of both...

...In the first two acts, she plays someone rather more sophisticated than a peasant-girl-turned-hooker: There is an invulnerable sophistication about her, an ability to rise above her predicament and view it with an ironic detachment?like a Bennington or Sarah Lawrence graduate who has become a call girl and is indulging in self-dramatizing disgust with herself...

...Ker-nan is far too mannered, and some of his renditions are four-fifths preciosity and only one barely audible fifth singing...

...If Thomas Meehan's book is, as I suspect, funnier and more sophisticated than the strip, it is a sophistication adroitly concealed behind a merriment that stays well this side of sentimentality...

...And they are all there...

...He does a couple of vaguely transvestite numbers, too, that I could easily dispense with...

...The costumes by Theoni V. Aldredge are sparkling, and—again!—David Mitchell's scenery is brilliant...

...His defense, initially, was that the kiss and promise of wedding bells for the tough but narrow-minded sailor, Mat Burke, and the hardened but large-spirited prostitute, Anna Christie, was only a happy stage, a comma, in something that would inevitably run on toward a gloomier end...

...The theme of the whore with the golden heart is perhaps the hoariest cliche still floating around, and in O'Neill's play it floats around with equal lack of conviction on land and sea...

...Pavlo does, however, have his little decencies, and, finally, he is a human being...

...There are further difficulties for me...

...seeing him live and die so shabbily is moving, not the least because Rabe wisely refrains from any sentimentality...

...With more money than he usually gets, and with two treadmills to help along, Mitchell has conjured up a New York City that can move past you as it would in a movie...

...When he remarks, after observing that he made his first million by the time he was 23 and in 10 years turned it into a 100, "And in those days that was a lot of money," he waxes properly thoughtful, not cutesy...

...If she is great, the play has a ghost of a chance...

...The chief interest of the play, then, since the two main male roles lack depth, centers on the actress who impersonates Anna...

...A Jl...

...and managing to capture some of it for us in a way that other Vietnam plays, written by people who hadn't been there, did not...

...Ultimately —and not unrelatedly—there is something painfully aroh, devious, indeed campy about this show, both in the words themselves and in their presentation, that leaves us hungry, like too much sauce and not enough meat...

...again, of the two women, the less likely one proves more sanguine about the enterprise...

...There are, to be sure, a good many jokes about Trenton that are entirely new to / Love My Wife, as, for example in this sample lyric (also by Michael Stewart): "If we cut loose and have a ball/With orgies relatively small,/ Because it's Trenton, after all,/And not Gomorrah . . ." etc...

...It is only when redemption begins to set in, when she can be both sincere and determined, injured in her love yet proud, that Miss Ullmann comes into her own...

...Annie is played by the gifted and rightly not too pretty Andrea McArdle as she is written—not to wring your heart, only to raise your hopes...

...As Miss Hannigan, the child-hating orphanage directress, Dorothy Loudon is inspired...

...What makes / Love My Wife innovative is one very ingenious idea: having the orchestra consist of four versatile chaps who appear in a number of minor roles both acting and singing a little and making a lot of music...