On Stage
VALENTINE, DEAN
On Stage MUSICALS NOW AND THEN BY DEAN VALENTINE aravd is a sellout. By which I mean not that it is well attended (although it is, thanks to the television ads; not even Crazy Eddie, King of...
...Here is how Amado describes it in the novel: "Vadinho, Dona Flor's first husband, died one Sunday of Carnival, in the morning, when, dressed up like a Bahian woman, he was dancing the samba, with the greatest enthusiasm, in the Dois de Julho Square, not far from his house...
...The other man, understandably upset, comes around with a huge knife to take his revenge and recoup his honor...
...she is all intellect...
...Vadinho steps in to try to break up the fight and save his friend—and promptly gets killed...
...She appears, if I remember correctly, in every scene...
...Still, infelicitous moments are the exceptions here...
...Based on Jorge Amado's Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, the musical is about the dilemma of a woman in love with two men, one of them dead...
...not even Crazy Eddie, King of Stereos, buys as much late-night New York air time), but that it aims for the common, midcult, denominator...
...The cockamamie story goes like this: Henry, a hypochondriac, is visiting Arizona for his health...
...Being a very vital man, however, death does not faze him and he returns to this world just as eager to savor the luscious Flor as before he left it...
...Vadinho, rogue, gambler, whoremonger, general nogoodnik, was Dona Flor's husband until his sudden death...
...Where's the dramatic tension if the choice is between one fine upstanding man and another...
...She brings to mind F. Scott Fitzgerald's description of Joan Crawford: "the girl you see in smart nightclubs, gowned to the apex of sophistication, toying iced glasses with a remote, faintly bitter expression, dancing deliciously, laughing a great deal, with wide hurt eyes...
...Both her face and, more important, her singing, are lovely, but she is not a sufficiently developed performer, and has a long way to go before she can hold an audience on her own for over two hours...
...So much of a bump and grind that she seems near exploding...
...Michael Ingram is an amiable Teo, conveying all of the doctor's decency and compassion...
...I have no way of knowing whether "Bigamy means if you're married to one woman you're through" was funny in 1928, but it definitely produces a thud today...
...His innards, it is later discovered, had been decayed from his dissipation...
...And happiness is the rule...
...A friend of his cuckolds another man's wife...
...Her every gesture has too obviously been studied, analyzed, worked, reworked...
...The Indian, holding a red rose and singing "My Love is Like a Red Red Rose," becomes so enraptured with his own passion that Sally almost has to wrench the flower from his grip...
...There he runs into a girl named Sally, who is betrothed to the town sheriff by her father's command, even though she loves another: an American Indian who is an alumnus of Dartmouth...
...Sitting on the running board of their car, they sing "Until You Get Somebody Else," one of Gus Kahn's finest and least acknowledged tunes, and do a little soft shoe...
...she wriggles her bottom and purrs to denote sexiness, etc...
...The model of the genre was Man of La-Mancha, whose score, appropriately, was provided by Mitch Leigh, the producer and tunesmith for Saravd...
...None of it makes any sense, of course, but then again, there is no reason to complain when one is so consistently, crazily entertained...
...Amado tells this tale with great gusto and earthy humor...
...An example of how sensibility has been sacrificed to sentimentality for mass consumption purposes comes early on, with Vadinho's death...
...In Saravd Vadinho takes his leave in an altogether different manner...
...At first her delivery is slow and sultry, but as she gets more into the song she heats up—until by the end she is doing a bump and grind...
...Young things with a talent for living...
...Everybody winds up at the Bar M Ranch, where after another hour or so of shenanigans, the plot comes to a happily predictable end...
...Catherine Cox's rendition of "You...
...Betty Walker, despite, or perhaps because of her playing Dona Paiva (Flor's nasty and brutish mother) in a British accent, provides the only comic relief of the evening...
...She is not, though...
...The people who put this show together also erred in centering it around Tovah Feldshuh (Flor...
...In setting it to music, the producers of Saravd have robbed it of these qualities and flattened it to typical Broadway fare: There are heart rending love songs, bouncy company numbers, fights, local color and all the rest...
...As a result, the essential life, has been ripped out of Flor...
...Every twitch of her hips has an almost convulsive effect on the meek Henry...
...is one of the most enchanting of the '70s too...
...With her bob haircut, pipe-stem legs and thin lips, Cox is the perfect flapper...
...To escape a loveless marriage, Sally convinces the unwitting Henry to elope with her...
...In other words, we ineluctably begin to fashion ourselves above the material, watching it as scientists watch amoeba under a microscope...
...They drive out into the desert with the sheriff, his posse, and Henry's nurse in hot and heavy pursuit...
...I suppose that the motive of the Good-speed Opera House company is to show just how looney and, perhaps, innocent these old musicals were...
...But the ultimate effect is to distance us from the action—to make us feel like intruders upon a simpler, quainter era...
...Alan Abrams, Randy Graff and Carol Jean Lewis are all talented performers stuck in parts too small for them...
...Age, it seems, has for the most part heightened its charms, and while Charles Repole is no Eddie Kantor, he will serve...
...He is first and foremost a scoundrel—that's what makes him attractive...
...When the nurse (Carol Swarbrick) finally catches up with Henry, she breaks into "Love Me or Leave Me...
...The rest of the cast is splendid...
...Some high points: ?Henry and Sally in the desert, pleased as punch with themselves...
...Feldshuh's main problem is that she tries too hard...
...If she loosened up—and paid less attention to representing emotion and more to emoting—she would become a formidable actress...
...A little less fidelity, in this case, would have made for a lot more pleasure...
...For just as white bread—at least in its commercial variety—meets all the formal requirements of bread without imparting any real taste, so some musicals meet all the requirements of the form yet leave one feeling emotionally and intellectually rather desolate...
...What we get is a lot of overacting: Feldshuh's eyes continually look up imploringly at the sky to denote sadness or despair...
...I kept thinking of My Fair Lady, where the tunes and the tone perfectly expressed Shaw's quirky vision...
...The net effect of this change is to ennoble Vadinho...
...The direction and choreography by Rick Atwell are inexperienced but unobtrusive...
...o ne of the most enchanting of the '20s musicals, Whoopee...
...Unfortunately, he is not supposed to be noble...
...What he has in mind does not exactly displease Flor—she is, in fact, starved for Vadinho's touch-but there is a big problem: She is remarried to Dr...
...A relative unknown by the name of P. J. Benjamin is an impressive Vadinho —boyish, slightly wicked, sex obsessed—and is by far the best dancer on stage...
...Certainly she has the talent, as she demonstrated in The Three Sisters last year at the Brooklyn Academy of Music...
...The sets by the ubiquitous Santo Loquasto are not up to his previous work, being kind of scruffy and cheap looking...
...Teodoro, now a respectable pharmacist, a genuinely nice man and an adoring husband—everything Vadinho was not...
...The play livens up by half whenever he appears, which is not often enough...
...Nonetheless, there is nothing here that approximates the charm, the unique character of the book...
...By losing track of that point, N. Richard Nash, who wrote the book, diminishes the strength of the central theme—the conflict of spirit and flesh as it is fought in the voluptuous body of Dona Flora...
...He did not belong to the group—he had just joined it, in the company of four of his friends, all masquerading as bahianas, and they had come from a bar on Cabeca, where the whiskey flowed like wa-ter...
...If I have any complaint about Whoopee!, it is that too many of the original "groaners" were kept in...
...A friend of mine has a name for this destructive process: "Whitebreading...
...This would, of course, be no drawback if she were capable of carrying it off...
...someone might suggest, though, that in the future she not upstage herself by turning her back to the audience...
Vol. 62 • March 1979 • No. 6
