A BAD TRIP

...Still, there are Hashes in his account, moments that convince us that he really is the right man for the job, particularly during the dancing...

...The choreography by Donald Saddler, never distinguished, has bright spots, one being a rousing ensemble number in the first act...

...this forces Stewart and Bramble to draw the Colonel in broad cartoon strokes and virtually insures that the audience won't much care about his dawning recognition that he loves Jacobowsky...

...In light of what Broadway has recently been offering (Ain't Misbehavin' is an exception, but its music was written by Fats Waller 40 years ago), this strikes me as a fine ambition...

...Unfortunately, such sweet moments are all too rare and cannot, in the end, wash out the bad aftertaste of Grey's shortcomings...

...First of all, it has Joel Grey as its central attraction, and he comes equipped with what every musical comedy performer should have: As he proved in Cabaret, he not only can sing, dance and act, but he possesses a vaudevillian's sense of timing (his father was comedian Mickey Katz...

...Ming Cho Lee's sets successfully invoke a battered, crumbling France...

...The most depressing case is Joel Grey...

...The gaudy costumes, by Theoni V. Aldredge, are, like the show, misconceived...

...Other flaws are attributable to the director, Gerald Freedman, and to writers Michael Stuart and Mark Bramble...

...The supporting cast does as well as can be expected under the circumstances...

...Danny Kaye, to my mind one of the greatest American comedians, displayed it in abundance in the movie, and thereby deepened the pathos of his situation...

...For all who die, for all who suffer, for all who fight against unsurmountable obstacles, for all woman-warriors...

...By use of Brechtian techniques of separating the viewer from the viewed, by a sharp eye and solid stage sense, the Bread and Puppet players created a fairy tale with a message-a fairy tale whose visual poetry stays in the mind long after the message leaves it...

...Behrman rewrote it for American audiences, and it was made into an excellent movie starring Danny Kaye and Kurt Jurgens...

...Time hasn't dulled its shine, though...

...Three people appeared dressed in scruffy angel costumes, sat down in front of a battered set of musical instruments, and produced cacaphonous music...

...Knowing nothing of this troupe, I was hoping to see two hours of puppetry, as the press release seemed to promise...

...We can see as we watch, what it is Jacobowsky wants to live for, what keeps him going...

...What one expects, in other words, is not what one gets...

...During the first few minutes of the Bread and Puppet Theater's Joan of Arc, which has just concluded a three-week run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, I felt let down...

...Part of the problem is that despite all he has to offer, it turns out that he does not have the ability to project the one quality that seems critical when a whole nation is bent on your annihilation, and you are trying to escape in a dilapidated car driven by a slightly anti-Semitic, pompous, Polish Colonel-namely, a sense of irony...

...If this production is any indication, he would have had no trouble getting his name into the dance annals, for with the motion of his body he beautifully conveys the dignity, the heroism he cannot convey with his acting...

...But this center does not hold here...

...Rapidly establishing himself as one of the least talented actors around, Vinovich, as the Colonel's protege, manages to make a fool of himself by staggering about like a drunken oaf and by speaking as if he has marbles in his mouth...

...Having by now gotten over my initial disappointment that there would be no marionettes, I found myself rather enchanted...

...Jacobowsky stumbles into a wedding that is missing a rabbi...

...It is difficult to say why matters have turned out this way, but among the more tangible facts is that few of the talents here are at their best...

...So much emotion buried in the plot, so little of it unearthed by the songs...

...Killed by a bunch of suburbanite businessmen on a commuter train (modern society, in case you couldn't guess), the animal-played by two men, one for the rear, another for the head-is at the end resurrected by an angel on stilts...

...One need not share the political pieties or the apocalyptic tone of the explanation to appreciate the imagination, the humor and the friendliness-the reaching out to the audience -that characterize Peter Schumann's company...

...Finally, the show has the services of JOEL GREY Jerry Herman, who wrote the lyrics and the score...

...For another, the songs overhelm the story...

...As for the lyrics, they are almost invariably trite, grandiose and filled with the kind of poetic inversions that set the teeth gnashing ("To the ends of the earth I may roam/But I'll still belong here...

...The second half, by far the better, recounts the tale of Joan's white horse-symbol of truth, innocence, goodness, etc...

...the battle of Orleans...

...Lacking a driving force, The Grand Tour becomes a wild goose chase...

...they give the impression of grog-gily making their way to the kitchen for the morning's first cup of coffee after having awakened from a peaceful night's sleep...

...If we can make an angel who conquers the impossible, then you can make an angel who conquers the impossible too...

...Nor can the music...

...As S. L. Jacobowsky, the archetypal Jew-a perpetual wanderer, optimistic in bad times, pessimistic in good times, witty, humane, and slightly cunning??Grey is merely a shadow of what he should be...

...The question the play gently posed??how is one to survive with the barbarians at the gate?-seems to me as worthwile, if not as pressing, today as in 1939...

...The core of the story is the developing friendship between Jacobowsky and the Colonel as they make their way across wartime France...

...A few of the intonations are right, but most are wrong...

...And yet if The Grand Tour has almost everything, it is, like many rich people, very stingy with its wealth...

...he is conscripted, and he begins a dance, each step initially slow and emphatic, then faster and faster until he is furiously whirring about the stage in a blur of joy...

...Just as it seems that we will witness real interplay between the two men, somebody starts singing (frequently a song that has only a tangential relation to the action), and thereby obviates the inner logic of the drama...

...Only two of the 12 tunes in The Grand Tour are humma-ble, "Do It For Poland" and "Marianne," and the latter alone has genuine distinction...

...the stresses fall incorrectly, making him sound like someone trying to sound like a Jew...

...and, most moving of all, Joan's death, with her spirit freeing itself from its body's agony and fleeing to heaven...

...Moreover, Grey has not worked hard enough at getting down the Jewish accent, not as hard as he worked at his German accent for his stunning rendition of the MC in Cabaret...

...The other part of the problem is what Grey gives us instead...

...Because our civilization is a dead-end road, because it's dark, because we suffer-and in order to break the logic of this story, and in order to light a light, and in order to raise a flag...

...Besides the one already described, these include a scene of God talking to the kitchen...

...For one thing, the spotlight shines too long and too often on Grey...

...One instance is worth special mention...

...He reduces Jacobowsky to a schlemiel who is too ingratiating and self-consciously charming to charm us...

...Ambition, however, it remains...

...The rest slip from the memory as fast as last night's dream...

...For Whom Joan of Arc...

...What there is of Steve Vino-vich, by contrast, is too much...

...What I did see was-well, it was strange...

...So does the answer-kindness, kindness and more kindness, to borrow E. M. Forster's phrase...

...If anyone could play an elfin Jewish refugee trying to escape the Nazis, one would think Grey could...

...The program note on Jerry Herman identifies him as a fellow who "believes in writing songs that can hopefully [sic] make you hum on the way out of the theater...

...Franz Werfel created the original play on which this musical version is based, S.N...

...the crowning of the Dauphin...

...Although Florence Lacey as Marianne, the beloved of both the Colonel and Jacobowsky, never gets half a chance to act, what there is of her is pleasant enough...

...In the opening half of the show, Bread and Puppet tells the story of the Maid of Orleans through a series of brief vignettes...

...The curtains parted to reveal a assembly of hooded humans with brooms, sweeping cardboard figures, each about 9" high, off the stage...

...Ron Holgate, as Colonel Ta-deusz Boleslav Stjerbinsky, deserves special admiration for his attempt to give life to a part that precludes the gift...

...Granted, the story has been with us for some time...

...Presently one angel announced: "The people are swept out of their own country...

...In addition to its jack-of-all-talents star, the show has a good, solid plot, of late a scarce commodity on Broadway...

...Let me pass on to you Bread and Puppet's own description of what all this is about: " Why Joan of Arc...

...I recently saw him on television, and in a conversation he was having with someone or other, he mentioned that when hewasa child he wanted to be a ballet dancer...

...With his mincing walk, his thin voice and his waifs eyes, he suggests not so much the Perpetual Wanderer as the Homosexual Esthete, making his way from one end of the Village to the other at 4:00 in the morning...

...The man whose songs made hits of Hello Dolly', and Maine, Herman is a specialist at alternating lyric, wistful ballads with sock'em numbers-and one could hardly ask more from a musical...