Fooling Around

...Although his beard and good works are held against him in roughly equal measure, the unseen Yank gets his wish, chiefly because the Home Secretary wanders into the room looking for a drinking companion, and happens to be in a good, signing mood...

...Considering the number of times Matthew has lately been exploited by the stage and screen, he would need only to be alive to outgross Neil Simon...

...Today, with myriad minor but potentially major miseries spotting the globe so that it seems to be wearing a leopard-skin coat, the bittersweet philosophy and happy-sad ending of Fiddler—(he very theme of tradition subsuming and outliving change—are the best we can hope for: a kind of pessimistic optimism or optimistic pessimism, endurance perceived as victory...

...F M Berman has directed here as in London, and the production is as good as can be asked for given the problems of our actors with British speech...

...Not much can be said about— and still less for—Your Arms Too Short to Box with God, a gospel musical based on Saint Matthew, with a book by Vinnette Carroll (who also directed), and music and lyrics by Alex Bradford, supplemented by Micki Grant...

...She has, in fact, played house with the commonality of men, including a few uncommon women, and become, as Stoppard implies, wiser and better than anyone...

...Miss Hart is spirited, lovely, and graceful: Her lingerie is decidedly deciduous, but her pertinence, like her pertness, is evergreen...

...Dirty Linen displays the unencumbered Stoppard of The Real Inspector Hound and the first act of Travesties, rather than the weightier and duller one of the existential implications in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and lumpers, and the political ponderosities of the second act of Travesties...

...Still, there are good enough contributions from everybody, notably from Remak Ramsey as the stuffiest and most cantankerous of MP's, Merwin Goldsmith as a fat Whitenshaw with a thin smile, Humphry Davis as the America-worshiping younger Home Office man, and especially Cecilia Hart as a Miss Gotobed with whom it would be a sin not to...

...and the eloquence is on the order of "I cannot dismiss a nagging feeling that something is wrong in Jerusalem...

...Yet I enjoyed Zero Mostel's Tevye, despite its out-rageousness...

...The answer, in part, is relativity...

...Before this, however, the old official is allowed some senile recollections of himself and Lloyd George during World War I (mostly a parody of the boulevard comedy Mv Father Knew Lloyd George...

...The visual aspects of the production by Gabriella Falk are unexceptionable, and Berman's direction keeps everything properly slithering or sputtering, even if, as mentioned, the diction is an occasional casualty of the fast and furious traffic...

...and everything else was substantially—and deliberately—unchanged...

...Thereupon, the young official is permitted a long monologue that is a takeoff on a poster-art or B-movie travelogue through a semifictitious U.S.A., as seen from a fantasy train that goes from New York to the North, South, West, and beyond...

...The current production, being such a faithful replica of the original one, needs evaluating only in its two major differences...

...How great, therefore, was my surprise when I found myself relishing and even being moved by the current revival...

...Something else bothered me: the passivity of these shtetl Jews, the way they allowed themselves to be kicked around, hanging in only by hanging on to their alleged direct pipeline to God...

...And it is not simply that tempora mutantur, but also that nos mutamur in illis...

...Yes, if I'm given enough time"), but her sexuality has conquered the lone holdout on the committee, and her sagacity has resolved and secured the dismissal of the issue at hand...

...It soon emerges that Maddie is the source of all the fuss: She has gone to bed, it seems, with all save one member of the committee, and with innumerable members of the House of Commons, House of Lords, and both the liberal and illiberal houses of the press...

...the supporting cast was partly better yet also partly worse than before...

...With the crop of Broadway musicals for several years now as unmusical as, say, The Wiz, Shenandoah and A Chorus Line (to pick two of the worst and one of the best, but all three hits), Fiddler suddenly seems to be fiddling on top of the world, not just a roof...

...This is particularly the case when the wit is on the level of "and then he turned water into booze," or "So you're His main man, are you...

...Most impressive is the choreography of Tal-ley Beatty, especially as danced by Stanley Perryman (Jesus) and Hector Jaime Mercado (Judas...

...Otherwise there is something worse than wrong in Jerusalem—something rotten with overuse...

...Well, come on down from the cross, and we'll try your way...

...Tom Stoppard wrote Dirty Linen for the Ambiance, his friend Ed Berman's luncheon theater...

...As such, it had to be frothy, easily digestible and short...

...Here Stoppard has actually created two larger-than-f arce-size characters: Maddie Gotobed, whose simple and unpremeditated copulations, coupled with shrewd observations on human nature, make her a splendid comic archetype...

...Unfortunately, after Pasolini, lesus Christ Superstar, Godspell, and God knows how many others, the story is beginning to pall...

...The rather cliche words and music are well-sung by an enthusiastic cast, among whom the best, or at any rate loudest, is Delores Hall...

...While the committee retires for deliberation, an old and a young official come in to use the same shabby room right under Big Ben (whose ringing provides occasional deafening interludes) to decide on said American's request for citizenship...

...Zero Mostcl was even more zeroically unbridled than ever, not merely chewing up the scenery but also spewing out his own additional dialogue...

...making Tevye's dialogues with Jehovah still more monologous...

...it might conceivably have laughed some of that nonsense out of existence...

...The second is rather a loss: Where Maria Kami-lova was charming as well as fierce as the original Golde, Thelma Lee is too much of a battle-ax, a mere straight woman to her husband...

...Another element in its current favor is our epoch: The times have become even less hopeful than they were in the mid-'60s, when we could blame all troubles on one or two major national and international problems that, once resolved, would leave the world as happy as the ending of a Broadway show...

...Stoppard stuck into the middle of his parliamentary farce, instead of an intermission, another playlet: a sketch about two Home Office officials considering an application for naturalization from an American whose description reveals him to be Ed Berman himself...

...How regrettable that this Bicentennial tribute reaches us at the end of the celebrations rather than at their beginning...

...This farce-within-a-farce is called New-Foimd-Land, and comes from the green land of Stoppard's best verbal wit, even if it is stretched a bit thin...

...But his inflections, timing, eyes of a frog in tragic love, and walk of a dignifiedly inebriated camel are as enchanting as ever...

...Because Berman, an American who became an Englishman, requested a work with a U.S...

...Dirty Linen deals with a parliamentary committee investigating press allegations of carnal misconduct in the House of Commons...

...Nonetheless, there it is: As we grow older, we all become shtetl-Jewish...

...This may be wrong: Tevye's lovingly carping, chattily censorious, wistful-wry dialogues that are really monologues with God may be not so much stoicism as self-delusion, and are certainly defusers of that rage that might get one to move mountains instead of being content to bear them on one's back...

...motif for the Bicentennial...

...As the play ends, her secretarial skills are as bad as ever ("You do speed-writing, I suppose...

...The exigencies of farce, in particular, demand that it be spoken trippingly on the tongue— the kind of tripping that is not the forte of American performers, who are better with almost anything else than with the tongue...

...It was as if they were awaiting the coming of Hannah Arendt to kick them around some more for their spineless sub-missiveness...

...and Malcolm Whiten-shaw, the committee chairman, a lowly Lancastrian with brazen aspirations to a peerage, the peerless paradigm of inept opportunism that will eventually make it on sheer dumb persistence...

...The play, or plays, may not be the very funniest Stoppard there is, but must be among the most unpretentious, which easily makes up for some of the less sparkling moments...

...Jerome Robbins' choreography was consistently alert, witty and dramatic...

...A gloriously sexy but otherwise remarkably unqualified typist-stenographer, Maddie Gotobed, is assigned to the committee, on the kind of pull that might perhaps be better described as suction...

...and the sets and costumes by Boris Aronson and Patricia Zipprodt, respectively, managed to suffuse poverty with poetry, or, as they say, Chagall a son gout...

...As I grow older, the appeal of passivity, the lure of grumbling, griping, wisecracking acquiescence in unalterable injustice, come to look more tempting, indeed wise...

...I found it cutesy and mawkish by turns, with music and lyrics that were sometimes passable and often best passed over, a book that was a bit too schematic, and rather uneven acting...

...The first is, to repeat, the fact that Mostel does not just ham—unkosher enough in itself—he acts as if he were God...