Insubstantial Pageants
VALENTINE, DEAN
On Stage INSUBSTANTIAL PAGEANTS BY DEAN VALENTINE Theater, like all arts in the 20th century, has been guided by the principle that ornamentation is the supreme no-no, that what architect Peter...
...I do remember a lot of feathers, twirling parasols, high platform shoes, people on stilts, African masks and totems, gold lame robes, bright purple robes, orange robes, blue robes, no robes at all, flowing silk and gauze, and streaming banners...
...Created to exploit our nostalgia, they are shamelessly proud of their moldy plots, boring music and generally incompetent, sometimes desiccated, stars...
...His hands are like wild birds, taking flight in bravura gestures at the slightest provocation, and his eyebrow muscles probably need a cold compress after every performance...
...But who cares...
...He must also get some backers...
...Two, in fact, even fail as pageants: Their set and costume designers would be more at home decorating Barbara Cartland's house than the Broadway stage...
...Perhaps director, choreographer, and costume designer Geoffrey Holder realized that Tim-bukone (Kismet) was mostly a turkey and could be salvaged only by innun-dating it in stage cornucopia...
...She has one trick in her depleted bag: She can insinuate obscenity with the most innocent of lines...
...Imogene Coca establishes her stage presence by baring her teeth and walking about as if someone had tried to push her through a mail box slot...
...Audiences who during the last 60 years have seen Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra done bare are perhaps getting a truer view of the Bard than 19th-century audiences, who were distracted by plump nymphs on immense barges traversing the stage...
...Would that it were she, and not some "personality," an old ghost, returning to haunt those who still remember her as one of the finest comediennes ever to hit town...
...Purity of line, of course, does have its beauty and its function...
...And suddenly, there's Imogene plastered on the front of the locomotive—between two 'Repent' stickers...
...Still, Shakespeare himself spared no effort to provide "caviary to the general...
...Even The November People, deservedly closed down after two or three performances, was less painful to watch than this exercise in necrophilia...
...Another is Lily Garland, nee Mildred Plotka (Madeline Kahn), a Hollywood star who was once Oscar's lover...
...But splendid contrivances cannot, after all, compensate for the absence of an original idea, and a competent book, lyrics and score...
...That goes off and the next thing we see and hear are [sic] the whistle of the train, the steam and the headlight coming right at us...
...But it is not good enough to enliven Cy Coleman's drab, pseudo-operatic score...
...And then that goes up into the air and we're back in the stateroom with John Cullum being discovered and thought to be the nut they are all looking for—of course, he's not...
...Microphones, incidentally, still annoy me...
...Certainly not writers and lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green...
...Saddest of all is watching Carol Channing lifelessly strut her stuff —pretending it is the Channing of old now come back where she belongs...
...They are as dust compared to Kevin Kline, however, who steals the evening as the slick-haired Bruce Gran-it—a cross between Errol Flynn and Clark Gable trying to stay in Lily's good graces, and in her bed...
...To prevent his ruin, Oscar must sign the popular Lily for a show...
...her show-stopping "Repent, Repent," though, is delivered with considerable lascivious relish...
...The bad news is that in most other respects they are dcadbeals...
...Enter Letitia Primrose (Imo-gene Coca), a millionaress and religious "nut...
...We move cinematically from scene to scene...
...It doesn't...
...The story, lifted from (the program says "based on") plays by Ben Hecht, Charles Mac-Arthur and Bruce Millholland, unfolds in the early '30s on a train ride from Chicago to New York...
...Done twice, it is mildly inoffensive, Done thrice, it disgusts...
...Dean Dittman, George Coe and Tom Batten are more effective in their supporting roles as Jaffee's second bananas and a train conductor, respectively...
...Wagner has conveniently described one sequence in a New York Times article: "[The actors are| in the drawing room...
...On Stage INSUBSTANTIAL PAGEANTS BY DEAN VALENTINE Theater, like all arts in the 20th century, has been guided by the principle that ornamentation is the supreme no-no, that what architect Peter Blake snickeringly calls "unadorned Puritan plainness" is the thing to shoot for...
...Thus the good news is that three current Broadway musicals challenge the dictum "less is more...
...While Gilbert Price fares somewhat better, thanks largely to raw vocal power, he also cannot escape the tempest Holder has called forth...
...The set (by Oliver Smith) and the costumes (by Freddy Wittop), far from making this a glamorous production, are unspeakably tawdry...
...Jerry Herman's lyrics, heard too often in the past decade, have acquired the consistency of Muzak...
...Not much of an actress, she can outsing anyone on stage, but with the cast waltzing around in the background, twirling staffs, etc., it is impossible to concentrate on her, even when the microphone system does not crunch her middle register notes and spit them back as static...
...Neither can Eartha Kitt, although in her case that is a blessing...
...the moment you leave the theater it leaves your memory...
...One can, at any rate, comfortably appreciate just so many naked brick walls and little wooden platforms without beginning to long for the glittery and the extraordinary, for something less doggedly ascetic and intellectual—in short, for spectacle...
...One of the passengers is Oscar Jaffee (John Cullum), a bankrupt theater producer and director trying to escape his creditors after his latest flop...
...it is not hard to see why Lily keeps him around...
...They were counting on the audience's apparently insatiable hunger to believe that there were good old days—not on character or innovation—to carry the day...
...The female members of the chorus line range from tall and plump to short and thin, with no stopover at well-built, and the male members retain locked smiles regardless of what they're doing...
...Timbuktu...
...And then, for one moment, Imogene sticks her head out of the window and slaps her 'Repent' sticker on the outside and disappears...
...Done once, this is mildly amusing...
...Die next thing you see is those little toy trains traveling in the distance, small lights going across...
...Kitt's meow is done hundreds of times, and 1 don't know an adjective severe enough for that...
...Hello, Dolly...
...Yet in a way it seems almost beside the point to speak of the acting when the real stars of the evening are meant to be Robin Wagner's sets...
...The sequence—it lasts about a minute—is unquestionably thrilling...
...To shorten a long story, Lily and Oscar live happily ever after...
...I can't remember the plot, which has something to do with orphans, beggars, wazirs, pirates and kings in 14th-century Mali...
...Kline's athletic agility and actor's genius endow what was written as a sponging-louse part with sneakiness, good nature and sexiness...
...It never does...
...Ditto for Madeline Kahn, who is rumored to have had operatic training...
...On the Twentieth Century...
...were modern stagecraft, lighting, and costuming available to him, he would doubtless have employed them...
...In addition, Holder drowns out whatever he has going for him: his dancer's stunning bodies, some of Kismet's best songs ("Strangers in Paradise" and "Night of my Nights"), his own sense of proportion, and the talented Melba Moore...
...And then, as Wagner would say, the front of the locomotive turns around and we see the back of the caboose, and there's Imogene again, waving to audience...
...Probably at director Harold Prince's instructions to play it big, Cullum does a Snidely Whiplash routine...
...For the orchestra and singers, hitting a note properly is the rare exception...
...Yet for this to help, the cornucopia would have to be pleasing, instead of looking like the aftermath of a Fire Island party...
...Tedious acting aggravates a tedious conception...
...Visually stunning, replete with Art Deco chrome designs and mute but luscious colors, they perform remarkable feats...
...There's a closeup of the whole inside of the locomotive...
...Limited but the best of the worst...
...There's a blackout, creating the impression that the train is going through a tunnel...
...His singing is better, especially in "I Rise Again" and "Lilly, Oscar...
...One goes to the theater to hear real people, not real people at one crackling remove...
...Broadway's low for the year...
Vol. 61 • March 1978 • No. 7
