A Sheep in Fox's Clothing
SIMON, JOHN
On Stage A SHEEP IN FOX'S CLOTHING BY JOHN SIMON what is there about Ben Jonson's Volpone that compels people to rewrite it? Why has so fine a play so steadily prqyoked a rage to improve it,...
...about all I can remember is that it was called Foxy and set in the Klondike...
...Truckle, propped up comedi-cally by Scott and her stage husband, played riotously by Bob Dishy...
...Eve Merriam...
...Now, I ask you, how damningly antifeminist is this...
...This time round, the locale is San Francisco in the late 1800s, and the work, with its aging courtesan and happy ending, is based as much on Zweig and Romains as on Jonson...
...Then they all called me handsome...
...they all held me up every payday...
...And Mrs...
...The effect is both wittily alienating and, as I have suggested, in a larger sense conciliatory...
...To be sure, Gelbart has the Jonsonian framework of plot and character to hang his play on...
...He has wisely refrained from excesses of directorial cleverness and mostly given his accomplished clowns their heads as they rollick away...
...Why has so fine a play so steadily prqyoked a rage to improve it, whether in the German, by Stefan Zweig, or in the French, by Jules Romains...
...What a homely face Scott has, yet how brilliantly his acting makes use of it only to make us forget it...
...There is easeful, highly inventive direction and choreography by young Tommy Tune, and the old tunes, dating from 1894 to 1905, are pleasing albeit undistinguished...
...A closing bit that has one of the women shake out her long, feminine tresses is pretentious symbolism, but for the rest, the show scatters delights all the way, whether or not it achieves its political purpose...
...so that, as he might put it, his gags are at least well hung...
...and mentalities—really were...
...and Albert Wolsky's costumes, though unlikely to win prizes for inventiveness, will suffice...
...less clever with words, I should imagine...
...It consists of one basic, fairly bright idea—having women dress up as members and staff of a turn-of-the-century men's club, and sing the authentic songs, tell the actual jokes of the period, along with minimal new dialogue...
...Taste aside, the question is, how far can a play go on one-liners...
...some are almost refined, like this description of Sly's alleged state by his man Able: "His pulse is beating from memory...
...Yes, if every other form of persuasion fails...
...If Abner Truckle were to prostitute his wife to him, "At the height of ecstasy, he might find himself coming and going at the same time...
...Alas, like many bright ideas this one has its dimmer side...
...Few of them, though, are quite as low as "They don't call me the Hanging Judge just because I'm well built...
...What would he miss if he was dead...
...whereas this latter-day replica, with glowing reviews and audiences laughing themselves to pieces over Gelbart's wit, basks in parasitic success...
...divert-er...
...it's written on both sides of his face...
...deviser...
...What would be ideal, though, is "Five women, pink, black and yellow—one for each limb...
...Even more remarkable are the three typical but carefully differentiated clubbies of Joanne Beretta, Carole Monferdini and Gloria Hodes, each of whom achieves spectacular masculinity while retaining her fundamental feminine grace...
...Gelbart, who also adapted M*A*S*H into a television series, is above all a gag-writer, and a gaggle of gags is what Sly Fox really is...
...And so it goes, relentlessly on and on...
...Jack Gilford as a doddering miser, and John Heffernan as a crawling one, contribute handsome creations properly verging on the macabre, and James Gallery does what he can with the mildly idiotic part of a sex-crazed police chief...
...As Simon Able, Hector Elizondo is good in a part that cries out for greatness...
...Her breasts could be bigger—but then, that's always true...
...The eponymous old fox is here called Foxwell J. Sly...
...Their lyrics, meant to seem ridiculous, may actually defeat that purpose by sounding too sweetly nostalgic...
...The cast, with one exception (Julie J. Hafner, who is only fair), is excellent: Marlene Dell as a Philip Morrisish bellhop, Terri White as a tap-dancing black waiter, and Memnie Innerarity as an eccentric club pianist give superb transcriptions from life, just a whit heightened for comic effect...
...Bv putting all this into the mouths of women impersonating men, some of the hurt is removed from the subject, distancing is achieved...
...George C. Scott is a wonderful choice for the protagonist, with his uncanny ability to be simultaneously funny and sinister...
...With his huge round eyes colliding from sheer greed in his thin face, the effect is that of two saucers caught forever in the moment of falling off a narrow ledge...
...He has a field day playing not only the sinisterly funny Sly, but also the funnily sinister judge...
...The other characters have been given similarly Restoration-comedy monickers with American overtones, but the plot outline has been rigorously maintained—out of practicality, surely, not respectfulness...
...Those romantic ballads or patter songs, and even the old jokes, were not quite so anti-woman as Eve Merriam in her ardent feminism seems to think...
...Yet there is a saving grace...
...M 9 ut Miss Merriam's idea is still effective enough: These creatures in top hats and tails, dashingly swinging their canes, who sit, talk and sing on two facing platforms connected by a long, narrow runway where they sometimes dance and more often swagger, who exchange "man-talk" that is at once sentimental and condescending, tough and self-pitying vis-a-vis women ("Oh, if only we could fall into a woman's arms without falling into her hands...
...at the same time, the absurdity of these patriarchal attitudes is made more laughably grotesque...
...Gretchen Wyler is only passable as the whore with a heart set on gold ("God with an 1," as Sly defines it), and John Ramsey does little for the thankless role of Captain Crouch, who tries vainly to bring Sly to justice...
...Haven't women said much the same sort of thing about their menfolk since time began...
...Unfortunately, his very pretty wife, Trish Van Devere, is beginning to lose her looks without gaining anything in acting ability...
...I wonder what he would have thought of Jonson's play...
...Clearly he relishes the quick costume changes that permit him to slip from groans into glowerings, from the moribund into the sanguinary...
...There mav, after all, not be that much difference between the sexes...
...The ploy, hardly new (it is at least as old as As You Like It), is nonetheless exquisitely executed: not only a joke within a joke, but a further joke within that as well, because this playlet about a marital triangle is played by actual members of such a triangle...
...At last a man whose sincerity is apparent...
...Still, the very unity is a virtue that can turn into a vice —monotony—and on the mere subject of erections, for instance, the number of gags is, shall we say, hair-raising...
...Yes—hand some over...
...For example, a much-married husband declares: "Every one of my wives has supported me...
...George Jenkins has devised sets that exude San Francisco's pre-earthquake picturesqueness...
...The line, "Never think too little of people—there's always a little bit less to come," might be applied as well to Sly Fox itself: When you think the cheapest or corniest gag has been encountered, a cheaper and cornier one turns up...
...A much slighter yet in many ways happier event is The Club, dubbed "a musical diversion" by its author (compiler...
...The notion is to show how male chauvinist the old songs and jokes...
...Truckle...
...his servant, the former Mosca, Simon Able...
...what we should and must advert to is, finally, our basic humanity, which subsumes and transcends the sex of an individual...
...Herewith a few samples...
...The production is suitably staged by Arthur Penn, who really ought to forget about making impossible movies and stick to his first—and requited—love for the theater...
...But what, I wonder, would Ben Jonson have said of this cozy diminishment of his complex satirical comedy...
...Without this, there is a total loss of romance...
...The divertissement, always entertaining, becomes hilarious when the actresses pretend to be not just men, but men playing women in the annual club show...
...Like his Volpone, he might have exclaimed, "This is called mortifying of a fox...
...Can we be certain, however, that the necessary magic of pop songs does not in-eluctably depend on simplifying, romanticizing, if you will, dehumanizing their subjects...
...She barely squeaks through in the undemanding role of the pious and innocent Mrs...
...Some years ago Volpone appeared as a Broadway musical starring Bert Lahr...
...Now it has become a play again, Sly Fox, by Larry Gelbart, a coauthor of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum...
...As I was leaving, I heard a man say, "This will bear another seeing—it is so clever with words...
...As for Truckle, "You could drill into [him] for a year, and never strike decent...
...these men are really, if you look closely, women...
...As for the songs, though they don't go so far as to treat the girls they are addressed to as sex objects, they do make them into little Noras in doll houses...
...But how much more bitingly disturbing...
...The gags may have a limited range even for gags, but they do cluster around a theme or themes, and most of them are funny...
...Or, more to the point, how far is a play entitled to try to go on one-liners...
...And how deliciously they sing, dance and camp...
...I cannot help feeling sad, however, to think that Volpone would never get such an opulent Broadway production...
...About the supposedly dying Foxwell: "All he does is nap...
...Similarly the stronger stuff: "Do any of you chaps believe in clubs for women...
Vol. 60 • January 1977 • No. 2
