On Stage

...Also at bam we were granted what is bound to be the most thrilling event of the spring season, the all too brief guest appearance of Berlin's Schillertheater with their famous production of Waiting for Godot, staged by Beckett himself...

...Pamela Payton-Wright, the Juliet, is one of our most gifted younger actresses', that she too is delivering her lines as if she had a train to catch at the end of every one of them proves conclusively Ted Mann's gift for turning gold into dross...

...True, the very shape of the stage at the Circle is an absurdity...

...the orchestra is reduced to a five-piece band...

...The first offering was a revival of the 1906 Broadway hit, The New York Idea...

...I also decided to part company with the play...

...To change similes, it was all like a crazy relay race in which the stick was passed so quickly that you had no sense of who was carrying it or how well...

...But there were things I had never seen before...

...Naturalism is almost always avoided, the joys being stylized buffoons' joys, the sorrows contorted clownish sorrows...

...First, the old hacks—like Jan Miner (Nurse), Lester Rawlins (Capulet) and Jack Gwillim (Friar Laurence)—who have a lot of experience but very meager talent, and consequently give polished bad performances...

...For example, that the similarities between Vladimir and Estragon are really greater than the differences...

...At this, Blythe Dan-ner and Denholm Elliott are consistently successful, with Rene Auber-jonois and Rosemary Harris also scoring often enough...

...This is unsuited to at least nine out of any 10 productions, and here obliged the designer, Ming Cho Lee...

...Thus the Mercutio of David Rounds, an actor who can do present-day oddballs, malcontents and perverts, but whose range does not extend beyond that...

...Though the dialogue falls short of genuine wit, it does provide lines that the right actors can make sound funnier than they are...

...Thirdly, some in-between performers, fairly experienced and fairly uninspired, who with more or less polish are doing the wrong things...

...that the gap between the rich Pozzo and his slave Lucky is not all that great—Pozzo himself being somewhat shabby and insecure, and Lucky far less ludicrous or crazy than in most American productions...

...Secondly, a bunch of green youths, who appear unacquainted with what a stage is, and give no performances...

...Visually, this was very much the original Paris production, with the same stylized, rudimentary tree and stylized, rudimentary rock as the only bits of scenery...

...When the great final parting scene of the married lovers was being run through an electric vegetable shredder...

...Most remarkable of all performers was the lanky Stefan Wigger, who made Vladimir into a wind-up doll of Chaplinesque dimensions...

...Inasmuch as the theater was built to Mann's specifications—to recreate uptown the wretched old downtown Circle, whose awkward shape Mann should have been only too glad to be rid of—the fault, once again, is the director's...

...The rather cute tale is embedded in the doings at the perfume shop: little comic dramas of intrigue and jealousy, and farcical goings-on involving the customers.A trifle silly this may be, but it is amusing and endearing, and I was curious to see how the work would translate to the concert stage, where it has been transposed by John Bowab...

...But the wonder of it is that it works—with the performers in evening attire sitting on tall stools when not acting, with the musicians fully visible on stage, and with nary a prop in sight...

...to build houses and a balcony into the cramped top of the T, and leave its long stem more or less empty?a street or square in Verona...

...So the only thing to do is toss the stuff as fast as possible at the next person before it burns your fingers...

...the customers have been conflated into a mere trio...

...The dances, sets and costumes are gone...

...Still, I got the impression that though these actors could have done better if slowed down, they were unsafe at any speed...

...Horst Bollmann's Estragon was a nasty, fat little imp, yet even the comic disparity in the men's sizes merely emphasized their state of mismatched but indissoluble interdependence...

...Never before have I heard speech after poetic speech rushed through with such unseemly haste, as if slowing down to the point where some thoughts or emotions might truly register could have the direst consequences...

...Thus we have a T-shaped stage whose leg is, as it were, stuck into the open end of a U-shaped seating area...

...his mere silent presence contributes to his characterization, exuding intelligence, amusement and joviality...

...it also suggests The Philadelphia Story, with a heroine sidestepping marriage to a stuffy fellow at the last moment, to end up instead with her racy ex-husband...

...The elegantly spastic gestures and weirdly diagonal walk—the body protruding like a periscope from too shallow waters—were both slightly repellent and very touching...

...Paul Rudd, a young man good at playing today's young men, especially if they are timid or awkward, is dreadful as Romeo...

...Still, we must wait for the next attraction, Chekhov's Three Sisters, to assess the company's true worth...

...He even looks rather like a turnip...

...At the Brooklyn Academy of Music a new repertory company has been founded under the artistic direction of Frank Dunlop, the able British director who guided the Young Vic to prominence with such productions as Scapino, a well-deserved hit on both sides of the Atlantic...

...It is a long, narrow rectangle surrounded by spectators on three sides, and having a smaller rectangular acting area, at right angles to the main one, on the fourth side...

...Dunlop's direction is stylish without being fussy, and the visual elements, though inexpensive, manage to suggest opulence...

...Laurence Guittard may not be quite so good as the dapper villain as the late Jack Cassidy was on Broadway, but Rita Moreno, as a daffy cashier, and George Rose, as the benevolent but disturbed shop owner, could not be better—whether, like her, delect-ably overplaying, or, like him, underplaying with great poise.The surprise of the evening is Barry Bostwick as the hero...

...It is the story of two employes in a small Budapest perfume shop who rather resent each other in the flesh, but who conduct a pseudonymous epistolary love affair with each other without knowing who their pen pals are...

...For his bam Theater Company, Dunlop has assembled a goodly array of canny American actors, reinforced by a couple of savvy Britishers...

...Three kinds of actors, all detrimental, are in evidence...

...an old Hungarian play by Miklos L4szl6 that was twice made into a Hollywood movie (once with music), and became in 1963 a Broadway musical with book by Joe Masteroff, music and lyrics by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick...

...That it works so well on the Town Hall stage is partly a tribute to the sturdi-ness of the material—a sweet sentimentality leavened with worldly-wise humor—and partly a tribute to the delightful performances under Bowab's buoyant direction...

...The result is that most of the brawling, public action takes place close to the audience, whereas the intimate family and love scenes are relegated to the farthest part of the theater, topographically and visually reversing the emotional priorities...

...A slow-witted bumpkin who overcom-pensates by running off at the mouth, this Romeo has about as much poetry, passion and romance about him as a parboiled turnip...

...Well, one idea: Shakespeare's dialogue is a hot potato right off the stove that the actors have to handle without pothold-ers...

...The one unhappy exception is Madeline Kahn, who plays the heroine not as a pretty, bright, spunky, outwardly resolute yet soft-centered young woman, but as a campy kook reaching for cheap laughs and conniving crudely with the more outre homosexuals in the audience—the sort of thing that offends people of taste whatever their sexuality...

...An infinitely nicer sort of revival is She Loves Me...

...Stanley Kauffmann, I noted, had not lasted even that long...

...The well-known vaudeville elements of the play were ever-present, but performed with manic distortions that made them almost more disturbing than funny...

...Any architecture there would seriously interfere with the sighdines...

...This young actor, who has steadily grown in stature, now adds to his considerable boyish charm a warm, glowing maturity, the two aspects inextricably and delectably concurrent...

...Though performed in German, it caught more of the work's spirit than any production I have seen in English or French, Beckett's mother and father tongues...

...Theodore Mann, the artistic director who often directs his own productions rather inartis-tically, has picked one of the safest possible bets, Romeo and Juliet, and mounted it without the trace of an idea or feeling...

...The others are fine...

...Lang-don Mitchell's play is no great shakes—it is situated somewhere below (well below) the confluence of Noel Coward and Philip Barry?but it affords an interesting insight into what solid commercial American theater was like at the beginning of this century...

...Bostwick does not just play his part through its active moments...

...No galley slave could have been goaded by the lash into manipulating his oar with the desperate zeal with which these unfortunate actors were whipped through their lines, yielding not a grain of credibility much less of en-poyment, excitement, suffering, or rapture...

...The situation resembles Private Lives, with a well-matched pair of stubborn lovers finding it hard to make do either with or without each other...