On Stage
VALENTINE, DEAN
On Stage THOSEWERE THE DAYS by dean valentine T he musical version of / Remember Mama, based on John van Druten's dramatization of Kathryn Forbes' Mama's Bank Account, has been among the most...
...After the stage machinery again went out of whack after intermission, about half of those who paid the exorbitant ticket prices glumly walked out...
...On the positive side, there is the catchy "Ev'ry Day Comes Something Beautiful," and "Easy Come, Easy Go...
...Paul has become well-heeled, the owner of a film production company who is constantly checking his watch to make sure he doesn't miss his plane to the coast...
...It is an awful, messy piece of work, badly thought out and poorly brought off...
...He imparts to Paul a childish shyness and an old man's cynicism...
...Shortly thereafter, they decide to divorce...
...They may not be as passionate as they once were, nor communicate as well, but from every indication they continue to love each other...
...The crucial problem is that the play confuses truthfulness with cardboard ethnics wallowing in sentimentality...
...Then there is Uncle Chris...
...They are a poor, struggling bunch—Papa is a carpenter in the shipyards until he loses his job—but they are held together by their wonder-working Mama...
...Her husband, who can't find work in America, gets an offer from his homeland and decides to take it...
...This time they stay together, indeed, get married and move into a small house in Boston...
...Offered a gallery show in New York, she goes there and returns almost immediately...
...Nothing seemed to help, however...
...Costing $ 1,250,000, starring Liv Ullmann, with music by Richard Rodgers, the show had high hopes before opening in Philadelphia, but was promptly panned by nearly every critic in the City of Brotherly Love...
...Viscerally sympathetic to all suffering things, I would very much like to report that / Remember Mama deserves better than it has gotten...
...In his Weltanschaaung, the energy, beauty, youth and idealism of the '60s and early '70s were displaced within 10 years by middle-aged materialism and self-centeredness...
...Nearly half the original songs were thrown out and fresh ones introduced...
...Unfortunately, she is so wonderful that she is very boring...
...Paul and Susan meet for the last time in 1979...
...Deprived of the focus that should have been Mama, the audience's attention is forced to alight on the secondary cast and the songs...
...On the other hand, Mama is given to rhapsodizing about the stars, and is a stubborn women's libber before her time...
...The second night was even worse: The revolving stage broke down just before curtain time, leading to a 45-minute delay, during which the audience was mildly entertained by Cohen's jokes...
...It swallows the large talents of Rogers and Ullmann as easily as the whale gobbled Jonah...
...I wonder when someone is going to come up with a better word for what lovers have...
...Mama is, in short, Earth Mama —motherhood perfected...
...Strong, loving, a firm believer in the American Dream, she is also uneducated (read: cute...
...They are exceptionally happy...
...Susan, for her part, is developing her skills as a photographer...
...She explains to her brood that the first house in history came to be constructed because "there were only four people in the world and they were getting wet, so somebody built a house...
...He has, he tells his back-slapping brother Ben, everything he wants: Susan, a job that pays enough to live on, a peaceful life missing only children...
...Roxanne Hart manages, despite the script, to make Susan grow sympathetically from a lively young thing into a mature woman...
...Whereas he used to dress in jeans and work shirts, he now wears three piece white suits and tinted horned rimmed glasses...
...Regrettably, this is not so...
...Susan is just as chic, and their apartment is out of a New Yorker ad—shag rug, chrome lamps, white overstuffed sofas...
...Kevin Kline, who showed off his talent for comedy in On the Twentieth Century, here displays a strong bent for straight drama...
...The father, a good man, seems to exist merely to provide Mama with enough grief to show off her peasant-like in-domitability...
...Some of the cast got their walking papers, a new choreographer took over, and the [New York] opening, originally set for May 3, was twice postponed...
...The production of Loose Ends is more powerful than the play itself...
...According to The New York Times: "The original director and lyricist, Martin Charnin, who had developed the idea for the show, was replaced by Cy Feuer, whose musical credits go back to the 1950s and such shows as Silk Stockings...
...some people have built lasting marriages on less...
...The songs are choked with the same stock sentiments and predictability that clog the book...
...and an "I love him but I hate him because he left me but I really love him anyway" song that Mama addresses to her departed husband...
...Weller intends, of course, to recount the story of the decade through his two lovers...
...For instance, he twice forbids one of Mama's sisters to marry an undertaker, once because the little bald fellow is Swedish, the second time because he is a Methodist, mortal sins in Chris' book...
...The story, which takes place in 1890s San Francisco, concerns a family of Norwegian immigrants who speak for-eignese ("Choost listen Papa...
...They sleep together for one night in an old New Hampshire cabin, and then she leaves to meet her boyfriend, a vegetarian...
...Still, there's a shallowness to his approach that ultimately subverts the drama...
...It is a very tedious and elongated bit of business whose one purpose apparently is to allow Chris to blow thick cigar smoke in the undertaker's face, thereby supplying the comic relief for the night...
...Nicely played by George S. Irving, Uncle Chris is one of those larger than life ethnics (see Uncle Tonoose of Make Room For Daddy), who womanizes, blows all his money, and as the patriarch of his extended family in America, rules with an iron hand...
...he would rather be miserable with her in New York than without her in Boston...
...He insists that his family accompany him back...
...I go now to the store...
...When he learns of it three months later, he goes on a rampage—everything he's done, he informs her, he's done for the child he's expected...
...She attempts to convince him to start an a new life in the Big Apple...
...Playwright Michael Weller has a fine ear for today's jargon, and his shots at the Bloomingdale's generation are well-aimed...
...Certainly it is always a treat to watch Liv UUmann, yet there is no room for her to develop a living person for us...
...Here too, though, the musical disappoints...
...The precise opposite of such nostalgia is Loose Ends, which tries to document, as it were, a typical modern relationship...
...But on the whole you are as sure to forget the music and the lyrics as you are everything else in / Remember Mama...
...Loose Ends is the story of Paul, an idealistic Peace Corps worker, and Susan, who meet on a beach in Bali in 1970...
...Almost to a man (the effervescent Clive Barnes was the exception), New York's first-night critics deplored the production...
...she loves Paul so much she can't stand being away from him...
...The next time we see them, they are nearly drowning in the Me Decade...
...The play closes with him looking at slides, the poor remnant of their nine years together...
...This is the height of their passion and the end of Act I. MlJ y the beginning of the second act, the '70s have set in...
...Initially reluctant, he finally gives in—after all, she is all he has...
...On Stage THOSEWERE THE DAYS by dean valentine T he musical version of / Remember Mama, based on John van Druten's dramatization of Kathryn Forbes' Mama's Bank Account, has been among the most disaster-ridden enterprises in theater history...
...Yet, even granting the validity of what Weller says, his argument is preferred at the expense of his characters, who suffer or are glad at Weller's whim, so that he can make his point...
...But Mama refuses—this is her home, her children's home, and if he wants to leave he can damn well leave alone...
...Nor is it necessarily true: If there is today pressure on the young to get a good job and make mountains of money, there was in those supposedly halcyon yesteryears an equal pressure to conform in matters of dress (blue jeans and work shirts are just as much a uniform as three-piece suits) and thought (try finding a friend if you thought South Vietnam was worth saving...
...Thereupon the producers, Alexander Cohen and his wife Hildy Parks, began a major overhaul...
...Paul and Susan have been separated for three months because she wanted to pursue her career in New York, a place he doesn't much care for...
...his anger breaks with terrifying force and velocity...
...Pregnant, obsessed by her career and afraid of breaking the news to Paul that she doesn't want the baby, Susan gets an abortion...
...This is not exactly news...
...A new lyricist, Raymond Jessel, was brought in from California...
...The children, notwithstanding their distinguishing characteristics (one girl thumps the piano maddeningly, another is a dreamy aspiring writer, a third is fond of a cat named Uncle Elizabeth, and the boy is scrounging for $19 to enter high school), are virtually indistinguishable...
...Both are semiattached to others...
...Two representative examples: A song predicated on Mama's discovery that her daughter is a grown up?When did you happen?/ Where was I was looking...
...In reciting a list of writers her daughter is always reading, she includes the name of "James Fenimore Kipling...
...For three years they don't see each other, until Paul runs into Susan on a bus...
...Not among Richard Rogers' best work, these tunes nevertheless have a spark of life...
...He lives on the coast where he is a teacher, she is still a photographer in New York...
...Steven Vinovich (Ben) takes another stab at acting, but Jay O. Sanders and Celia Weston have some of the evening's brightest moments as Paul's hippie friends...
...Alan Schneider directs impeccably, as usual...
...They fall in love, sort of, but are separated by circumstances...
...The result has some merit...
...Meanwhile, the structure of the show was totally revamped, a narrative line inserted, and the overall concept of the musical was shifted, in Mr...
...they no longer communicate...
...the material goods are worthless without that...
...Cohen's words, 'from shtik to spine' (by shtik he meant a vaudeville approach, by spine a truthful one...
...Moreover, in his heat to get his message across, the author neglects essential information, such as why Paul and Susan get divorced...
...It would appear that they have everything—but in reality, Weller tells us, they have less than before...
...Almost anyone could have taken the role and played it as well, since all it requires is cartoon posturing, not acting...
Vol. 62 • June 1979 • No. 13
