On Stage
SAUVAGE, LEO
On Stage SIFTING THE SEASON BY LEO SAUVAGE Thmettmes early in thel980-81 season, it was only upon arriving at a darkened theater for the second night performance magazine critics attend that I...
...Jonas Jurasas directed it (initially for the Trinity Square Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island) with verve and style inspired by his study of Meyerhold...
...This misplaced "suspense" weakened the impact of the lesson to be learned from Fugard—how apartheid poisons everything, including the friendship of two men who happen to have different color skins...
...It reportedly lost nearly $2 million...
...Moreover, no better can-can could have been danced on a Parisian stage...
...Its few soft-pom moments were too ridiculous to rouse the pig that, according to a French popular saying, sleeps in every man...
...Al-bee's play was lethaliy boring...
...Still, Copper-field had much charm of its own: Barrie Ingham played Uriah Heep as a clown with style and a masterful sense of body language, and I thought his scenes with George Irving's Mister Micawber were really funny...
...Sarah Caldwell's Macbeth offered little to boast about...
...Lena Home's The Lady and Her Music probably ran a close second...
...ButifNikolaiErdmanwasno great hero, his play is nevertheless full of wit...
...But many more millions were netted, I am told, since the greatest amount of money is made or lost by musicals and many of them did well financially...
...Lanford Wilson's Fifth of July was not bad either, but I did not find any added attraction in what the author no doubt considers his most innovative idea, making his central couple homosexual...
...The young "dr—Tier" he opposes to the prosaic outside world is no dreamer, even in the most superficially poetic sense of the word...
...The Soviet playwright's work, it must be said, lacks the political significance commonly credited to it...
...I love Zizi Jeanmarie as I love Paris, yet when I listened to her performing those numbers I could not help comparing her to Lilo in the original Can-Can—and finding the memories more thrilling, more enthralling, more contagious...
...Like his rings, his trick cord, his appearing scarves and disappearing egg, the floating light bulb that opens and closes the play comes from the shelvesof ashop...
...curtain...
...To make sure my acquaintance with Edith Piaf herself did not prompt me to condemn too hastily, and because I was told important changes had been made in the production, I went back to see it again...
...It is also unfortunate that Athol Fugard's powerful A Lesson From Aloes was flawed by the sterile ambiguity of leaving us guessing whether an anti-apartheid Afrikaner had betrayed his black friend...
...Itisasymbolof dependence rather than imaginative freedom...
...Other melodious moneymakers that also managed to be good theater were 42nd Street and The Pirates of Penzance...
...It was easy to forget about the threadbare, pedestrian text...
...That spared me the several unnecessary trips and left the impression that quite a few million dollars were lost on Broadway over the last eight or nine months...
...Piaf played on Broadway for nearly five months, closing June 28...
...Regrettably, New York's position was not strengthened by anything staged at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater...
...It was not a hit, surely, but the length of the run does suggest that there is a public easy to titillate, if not eager to be titillated, by the crassest means...
...For me, this short-lived Suicide was the only legitimate production I saw on Broadway that came close to being in a class with the marvelous Sophisticated Ladies...
...A more reprehensible failure was TheSurvivor, purportedly based on the recollections of a young boy who lived through the miseries of the Warsaw Ghetto under the Nazis, survived its desperate uprising, and then endured two more years in Hitler's extermination camps...
...They picked up an old, funny folktale about a village where everybody is bom an idiot, called itFools, and systematically proceeded to render it as witless as possible...
...The fraud Edward Albee dubbed Lo-lita, using the names of characters from Vladimir Nabokov's novel bearing the same title, had a much shorter run...
...Nikolai Erdman's The Suicide had a rather brief run at the start of the season...
...The new production of Cole Porter's Can-Can, with Zizi Jeanmarie as "la mome Pistache" dancing to the choreography of her husband, Ronald Petit, had to quit after five performances...
...Although artistic achievement has in the past often had little relationship to fiscal success, this time out it can be said that the cash register tended to ring for the right reasons...
...The only reason to be disturbed by its demise is the appalling possibility that it might have been hastened by the protests of Susan Brownmiller's Women Against Pornography—a Left-wing feminist counterpart of Jerry FalwelTs Right-wing anti-feminist Moral Majority...
...Two money losing musicals that I felt deserved to last longer than some of the genre's survivors were Copperfield and Can-Can...
...I must report that although the order of the scenes was rearranged, it was still the same tasteless, uninhib-itedly insulting commercial trash, and at second sight Jane Lapotaire was hamming it more intolerably...
...If ever there were two lyrics that need to be belted, they are "I Love Paris" and "C'est Magnifique...
...The Stalinist bureaucrats who shut it down were too stupid to recognize that it actually served their purpose...
...Neither was without its shortcomings, and I continue to believe that an audience belongs in front of the actors, not around them...
...There is not the least hint that Paul ever tried to invent something on his own...
...Too bad...
...and Zizi Jeanmarie, in all her movements and expressions was a delicious "mome Pistache...
...If I sound tentative, it is not because the show wasn't what one understands by "musical comedy" (neither was Sophisticated Ladies, for that matter...
...Charles Dickens needed several hundred pages to tell the same tale...
...Although Vsevolod Meyerhold's original production was banned just before the Moscow opening night in 1932, the play mainly satirized characters that the Soviet government recommended as objects of attack...
...1 was more impressed by The Circle in the Square Theater's versions of Henrik Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman and August Strindberg's The Father...
...They seem to have been written in a moment of enthusiasm, and what matters in bringing them off is utter conviction, the will to electrify and not merely to please...
...It didn't last long, which proves that relatively few Broadway theatergoers are the fools the makers of Fools seemed to believe they are...
...One scene in particular struck meas embodying not only the worst of commercial Broadway, but of commercial Hollywood as well: A group of fighters from the Ghetto have to spend a night in a cemetery, where they could be caught and shot at any moment by an SS patrol...
...The legitimate theater of'80-'81 consisted of several interesting works whose flaws prevented them from being very good, and a number of plays that were simply very bad...
...A dud attributed to Neil Simon and Mike Nichols must have taken some effort to fashion...
...In these pages I have already expressed some?not all—of my feelings about the ugly, distasteful and unscruplous job done on a famous French singer in a travesty by Pam Gems, erroneously entitled Piaf...
...The rNTERESTiNG legitimate productions of the season included an honorable revival of Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes, and Joanna M. Glass' acceptable, underohelrning, To Grandmother's House We Go...
...On Stage SIFTING THE SEASON BY LEO SAUVAGE Thmettmes early in thel980-81 season, it was only upon arriving at a darkened theater for the second night performance magazine critics attend that I discovered the cancellation of a production...
...This aspiring magician, Paul Pollack, is a marginal but still very recognizable inhabitant of the outside world that is mocked as a "consumer society...
...Finally learning from the experience, yet embarrassed to phone and ask pointblank if there would be a second performance, I took to feigning ignorance of the 8 :00 p.m...
...For Sophisticated Ladies, wonderfully assembled around the music of Duke Ellington by Michael Smuin, Henry Le-Tang and Donald McKayle, was almost perfect...
...Indeed, it is among the musicals that I would place the most enchanting evening of the season...
...And the single tolerable scene in Woody Allen's The Floating Light Bulb—showing an artistic manager taking a halfhearted interest in a housewife who is full of resentment at having given up a dancing career—was tangential to the play's theme...
...Everything he "practices" his magic with is mass-produced and ready-made, complete with instructions booklets, and obtainable from stores listed in the Yellow Pages...
...The important point, however, is that a city without dramatic contributions like these—despite its 42nd Street and Sophisticated Ladies and Elizabeth Taylor in The Little Foxes—could not be lauded as the capital of the theater...
...If we are to admit there was one...
...Defying dramatic logic, they are sitting up, clapping their hands and loudly singing a stimulating song, as if they were partisans safe in the mountains or Israeli soldiers gathered around a peaceful campfire...
...The story sounded even sillier than it did when the show was first presented in 1953, but the girls looked fine, and they convincingly imitated Mont-martre grisettes of the period...
...Can-Can's real difficulty was that the most important songs?I Love Paris" and "C'est Magnifique"—aie not tunes to be finessed and stylized...
...They knew how to wear Franca Squarci-apino's elegant costumes and move gracefully through David Mitchell's lovely settings...
...In contrast, Woman of the Year was a box office hit that lavished so much attention on its star, Lauren Ba-call, no room was left for anything memorable...
...Allen was apparently unaware of the faulty filament in his Bulb...
...True, the love intrigue in Copperfield was so badly resolved that the show missed the boat—and the book...
...My seat was directly under a speaker and I had to spend most of the evening covering my ears...
...The Broadway hero tragically loses his wife, embarks on a long sea journey, then returns and marries his first love, Agnes, in less than 10 minutes...
...For all that the events and the characters underpinning this play were part of a crushing real-life, real-death horror, it managed to be utterly artificial—more showbiz than drama...
...Woody Allen's The Floating Light Bulb came to rest without telling us anything...
...Because Arthur Miller's The American Clock did have something to say, it is a pity that this essay on the Great Depression emerged from its various revisions as such a weak play...
Vol. 64 • July 1981 • No. 14
