On Stage

...Jules Fisher has lighted Santo Loquasto's dazzling assemblage of junk objects with Satanic glitter...

...and for such popular movie musicals as Singin' in the Rain, The Band Wagon, It's Always Fair Weather, etc...

...Their now raspy voices are ugly to listen to, and they manage to ruin some of their very best songs...

...By way of representative lines, take: "I can always tell which friends will betray me moments before I put my trust in them," and "For me, getting out of bed in the morning is an act of false confidence...

...This is actually the second time that they are doing such an "And then I wrote . . ." show on Broadway, and though they are good as writers, they should?by now, at any rate—leave performing to others...

...Mel Shapiro's staging has received much critical blame, yet I frankly don't know what a director could have done either for or against this farrago...

...That leaves the language...

...Chalfont, Dooley and others concerned, please note...

...The problem may be that Comden and Green were never satirists in the true sense, only topical humorists...

...Bobby shows up with what he claims is an equally valuable nickel and manages to infuriate the frustrated Teach, who proceeds to wreck part of the junk shop and batter Bobby so severely that blood pours from his ear...

...There is no pathos, no warmth, no real pain, no more than surface comedy to any of it...

...Presidency—the time is 1999—because he has the cure for cancer...

...At that, the Feiffer drawings are more amusing than some of the present performers, although Michael Tucci has an incipient comic quality he has not yet learned how to use to full advantage...

...And here, unlike in his previous pieces, Mamet does not imbue the language with anything beyond strikingly stupid and occasionally laughable crude-ness...

...The playwright feels no sympathy for his characters, and so we can't feel any, either...

...It does have a clever sight gag here, a funny line there, but it would take more than that to make a play, and a lot more to redeem this one...

...Satire cuts deep enough to be perennially scathing and true...

...We are given a junkshop whose owner, Donny, a petty criminal type, has befriended a young loafer (possibly an addict as well), Bobby...

...not old enough to evoke nostalgia (itself a dubious commodity), and not young enough to be au cou-rant—indeed, their more recent material is almost embarrassingly out of touch...

...Moreover, despite everything being done to make Party feel like a spontaneous entertainment in our living room (a discreet piano accompanist, two stools, and one costume change are all the frills we get) a Broadway house does not convert easily into a home, and?particularly without jokes that are funny enough—spontaneity is the hardest thing to fake...

...topical humor does not survive changes in manners and fashion very well...

...or me, the big disappointment of the season is David Mamet's American Buffalo...

...Well, American Buffalo is barely full-length, having difficulty squeezing out two short acts, but even what is there is close to empty...

...They began as a night-club act, The Revuers, whioh included the late Judy Holliday, and went on to writing the book and/or lyrics for such successful Broadway shows as On the Town, Wonderful Town, Bells Are Ringing, and Applause, among others...

...Their comic patter ranges between tame and lame, and their ages themselves are unfortunate...

...A fourth chap (unseen in the play), who is a more accomplished crook, is drawn into the plot, but fails to deliver because of an assault on him...

...He also has trouble with his wife, who is thinking of going back to being a concert pianist (Mozart and other composers used to materialize for her inside the piano) or of eloping with her lover, a family friend and adventurer with an inside track on the U.S...

...It is by no means tabu for the older generation to poke fun at the younger one...

...The acting is uneven: Joel Grey and Madeline Kahn are as funny as their husband and wife roles will allow, and Sigourney Weaver and James Jansen are good in lesser roles...

...Donny, it seems, has mistakenly sold a valuable American Buffalo nickel to a collector for a pittance...

...Since his very first play, Little Murders, which had a comic-horrible vision that it was able to sustain through most of its two acts, Jules Feiffer has been floundering as a playwright...

...UIu Grosbard has directed competently, and the three actors—Robert Du-vall, Kenneth Macmillan and John Savage—could not be more sordidly believable...

...But a good ear is a minimal rather than maximal requirement for a playwright...

...Guare may give us real plays someday, if he finds something to write about and the self-discipline he sorely lacks...

...but this, despite the critical hosannas their Party has received, is not enough to make a Broadway evening...

...The play is rumored to be about Guare and a well-known theatrical couple with whom he got peculiarly involved, yet not even gossip value can make it very interesting...

...Nothing can be said for Paul Dooley and Kathleen Chalfont, who are as unpersuasive as they are unprepossessing...

...Our filmmaker hero eventually does get to the faraway planet, has intercourse with the same green plant and produces a proliferating brood that must be killed off for ecological reasons...

...When he returns to earth, he is reborn as his own baby son, though to everyone else he looks just like his former adult self...

...Most of it sounds like Freud translated into vaudeville and is, frankly, boring...

...But Chris Sarandon as the gadabout who becomes fish food is stiff, and Anne Jackson, as the mother-father, tends to forget her lines and is too cutesy when she remembers them...

...Comden and Green can sing a little, act a little, and horse around more than a little...

...His real father is his mother, who by means of complicated sex changes managed both to beget and conceive him...

...The relationship may or may not have homosexual overtones...

...Later he loses the lower part of his body and legs to piranhas that, by severe upheavals of land and sea, have been forced northward...

...It is written down on a piece of paper that he unfortunately loses...

...The youth refuses to be hospitalized, and there is some sort of final reconciliation between him and Donny, who appears to have been supporting him all along...

...Neither the characters nor the story provide anything compelling...

...A third man, nicknamed Teach, who is an ever-so-slightly more experienced criminal—as well as a now boastful, now whiny psychopath—proposes to execute a burglary with Donny's help...

...however, it must be done with more acute observation than these obsolescent wits can muster...

...Essentially, it is kvetching, and often less than funny even in its original cartoon form...

...If it isn't Freudian vaudeville, it's the old New York Jewish joke book being trotted out all over again, and doesn't go down all that well even with the drinks being served along with it...

...But many details remain unclear...

...In The Working Actor, Katanka Matson quotes the director Tom Millott: "The first thing you should do if you want to go into this business is to spend an hour in front of your mirror . . . [and] decide if you think you would pay $10.00 to see you...

...These extremely foul-mouthed, ineffectually in-fighting, hypocritical and obtuse crooks are intended as symbols of American big business, as a damning caricature of capitalism itself...

...Instead, the filmmaker is having trouble with his father, the reluctant star of the movie, who turns out not to be his father...

...A woman dancer, two actresses and two actors enact a batch of tiny vignettes, monologues or duologues, redolent of urban neuroses...

...A Party with Betty Comden and Adolph Green is a trip through cabaret, theater and movie material that this team of Broadway and Hollywood musical-comedy writers has come up with over a good many years...

...You may recall my praise in this column for Mamet's earlier one-acters, Sexual Perversity in Chicago and Duck Variations, which made me eager to see what the young (now 29) playwright could do with a full-length work, especially when it is accorded the Broadway razzmatazz...

...Mamet has an admittedly sensitive ear, finely attuned to the idiotic vagaries, the picturesque vulgarities of his characters...

...Or is that asking too much from one of our younger playwrights...

...Now Caymichael Patten has adapted and directed some of his cartoons for the cabaret stage under the title Hold Me...

...John Wulp's scenery is adequate, and there is nothing wrong with the costumes and lighting...

...It takes place in the future, when an astronaut is about to inseminate interstel-larly his runaway wife, now hiding out as a maid to a filmmaker's family in an igloo on a Norwegian ice floe...

...The worst thing is that I don't even worry about the obscurity because I don't care about the characters...

...Though I could perhaps—I am not really sure—tell you more of the plot, let me spare both of us...

...But a play that leaves me as unaffected as this one does is, to me, hardly worth a plugged nickel...

...Dalienne Majors, the dancer, does at least look like a Feiffer cartoon figure, and Geraldine Brooks, even if a bit goody-goody and show-biz neon-lightish, has some basic talent...

...Rather than just recover the coin, the idea is to make off with the man's entire collection...

...The filmmaker is shooting a movie about Marco Polo, but would rather be on that outer-space planet where the astronaut is having an affair with a concupiscent green plant...

...But for us to become involved, something has to attract or, at the very least, fascinate us...