On Stage

...It mailers little that the actors do their best, or that director John Madden can be criticized only for having seen anything worth directing in Feiffer's mess If, as is widely assumed, the parents portrayed are modeled on the playwright's, one can feel compassion for him without applauding his having brought them to the stage He does try to put more personality into Jake and Louise They know they must avoid Jake's insufferable parents as much as possible, and except for a few not too frequent Sundays, they manage to do so They also say they love each other and should be able to get along He is bitter, however, and she is a nag Their most acrimonious fights are over the education of their eight-year-old daughter, Edie (Jennifer Dundas) Though Jake does not appear to be a particularly active or efficient father, he thinks his wife neglects Edie The reproach is clearly unjustified, since Edie seems to be the only normal human in the whole awful family To our surprise, there must have been something done right up to then in her upbringing, even if we fear it will be undone by the time Edie grows up At the conclusion of this misleading-ly titled play, Jake suddenly announces to everybody that he is goingto leave his home as well as the Times His unhap-piness at the paper is probably due to his parents' pride in his working there He even gets angry because of their reasonable excitement when he lets them see the cover of the soon-to-be published book he has found time to write Perhaps we are supposed to understand?and bring understanding to—his neurotic inability to like any occupation as long as his parents are alive to approve of it Jake's leaving the daughter he pretends he alone knows how to handle is a completely arbitrary invention by a playwright who cannot find any other way of finishing the evening Maybe Feiffer thought he hit upon a male variation of Ibsen's Nora in A Doll's House In a recent column ("Playwrights Old and New," NL, November 16, 1981), I observed that Nora's husband—not "Nora" as it mistakenly appeared—has some contemptible traits In Feiffer's pseudo-Ibsenian last scene of Grownups, by contrast, the spouse who's departing has the contemptible traits Yet Feiffer appears to approve of him, as do those who wrongly consider Grownups the writer's most moving and provocative work THE FIRST THING I did after seeing Little Me at the Eugene O'Neill Theater was to dig up the original—Patrick Dennis' book of the same title, published in 1961 with marvelously funny photographs by Cris Alexander Going through those pages certainly offers better laughs in greater abundance than the musical comedy by Neil Simon, first written some 20 years ago and lately revised Indeed, the show lacks any trace of Dermis' satirical humor, some of Simon's jokes and one-hners are probably among the most inane and tasteless available on Broadway Dennis was writing in the days of " the Dagmar phenomenon," when stardom could be built on a big bust and nothing else He invented the "memoirs" of such a luminary "as told to Patrick Dennis," providing her with a crazy past According to Dennis, Belle Poitrine was born Maybelle Schlumpfert in Venezuela, Illinois, and her first husband was a soldier, Fred Poitnne Belle's mar-ried name is quite apt, as any French-Amencan dictionary will attest Simon gets his first chuckle by having her hail from Twin Jugs, Illinois After that, he invents feeble new episodes for her memoirs Indicative of Simon's taste for out of place laughter is her presence on the Titanic when the ship hits the iceberg Apparently he finds it droll to have other icebergs bobbing by while on the listing deck non-swimmers are being hastily instructed in a few basic strokes before jumping into the Atlantic Ocean Apart from this lapse, Tony Walton's sets, enhanced by Beverly Emmons' lighting, are pleasantly picturesque cartoons Cy Coleman's music—when the orchestration doesn't abuse the big drum—is often very good, and Carolyn Leigh's lyrics are miles beyond Neil Simon's spoken lines But the music and lyrics cannot compensate for Simon's aggressive failure of comic discernment throughout As for Peter Gennaro's choreography, its one bnght spot is "The Rich Kids Rag," a beautifully conceived and executed dance number that mocks the airs of snobbishly indoctrinated "upper class" children James Coco is quite amusing in three or four different parts, and Don Cor-reia has an impressive acrobatic solo as a dancer (he is much less impressive as an actor) One of Simon's or director Robert Drivas' unhappy ideas is to portray BellePoitnne(Mary Gordon Murray) as a blond so dumb that she seems to have come straight out of an earlier mishandled adaptation by Simon called Fools Jessica James, as the older Belle, who does the narrating, appears more amply endowed mentally as well as physically In all departments, the two Belles in the latter-day Little Me never come close to Jen Archer, the actress-model used by Dennis and Alexander in the book Much more theater is evident in Alexander's still photographs than at the Eugene O'Neill...

...On Stage FROM FAIR TO WORSE BY LEO SAUVAGE ATLEAST one aspect of Dream-girls, at the Imperial Theater, is very satisfying It employs a large number of performers, and what with the ovations from audiences and the critical raves none will have to worry about another job for a while If that sounds patronizing, I believe it is less so than calling this big production—costing some $3 million—a great musical The Dreamgirls are no Sophisticated Ladies The show purports to follow a black trio patterned on the Supremes from a Chicago ghetto to the career-crowning, rich white nightspots in Las Vegas or Hollywood Along the way it examines the human problems behind the success story The trio's chief difficulty lies in having to adopt a style not their own In between glimpses meant to demonstrate how good they are when they are " themselves," we see the predictable breakdowns in their private lives and the tensions brought about by their growing status Some of the other black singers-there are several in addition to the female trio—are quite willing to shift to an artificial, commercially more rewarding act A tew, though, cannot help lecling they are betraying their talent and their heritage, and they quit Thus the possibilities exist for a profound treatment Unfortunately, the blacks in the 1982 Dreamgirls ultimately are made to resemble those shown on the screen by deep-thinking Hollywood "progressives" 20-30 years ago That is why I was not impressed by Tom Eyen's book It is neither innovative nor daring, and certainly not rebellious, despite its pretensions to all three adjectives Furthermore, Eyen's lyrics are uninspired and clumsy, syllables are repeated or otherwise stretched out to fit the music, and syrupy sentimentality is passed off as "soul" poetry The spoken lines are even worse, and they are not improved when for no comprehensible reason they become recitatives Michael Bennett's direction and choreography glistens with Broadwav professionalism to the point of almost becoming an involuntary parody He relentlessly drives Dreamgirls forward at full speed, yet his technical skill cannot mask his tailure to convey amthing dramatically convincing Robin Wag-ner's contribution as set designer consists of various abstract struct tires given to all kinds of rotations, gyrations and levitations that are completely irrelevant to whatever is going—or rather running—on at the Imperial Henry Kneger's music is the best element in Dreamgirls It often proves quite witty, there are, for example, clever variations on a recurring theme, and contradictory styles are juggled without any loss of continuity or harmony Theom V AJdredge also has provided the very attractive women in the cast with the right costumes—either eroti-cally formfitting or conceived with a touch of humor Several of the performers are quite effective, especially Cleavant Derricks But I cannot share the general admiration for Jennifer Holliday She has vocal cords of steel, and to me her voice sounds more strident than powerful Unlike Dreamgirls, Jules Feiffer's Grownups posted closing notices five weeks after it opened at the Lyceum Theater Happily for the players, it won reprieve at the box office That is not to suggest, as some have, that its disappearance from the boards would have been a blow to American theater The play is in fact an unabashed collection of cliches, and their staleness is aggravated by the author's apparent desire to extract a "message" from them Feiffer seems to believe he can get out from under his mountain of banalities by having the least appealing of his caricatures become a nonconformist hero at the end The characters are stereotypes at a distant remove from any human nuance, or for that matter, from any creative writing The domineering mother (Frances Sternhagen) knows everything better than anyone She particularly lords it over her son Jake (Bob Dishy)—who despises his job at the New l ork Times and invites colleagues he hates home tor dinner—and her slightls unbalanced daughter-in-law, Louise (Cheryl Gian-nim) The less said about the nincompoop lather (Harold Gould), who escapes from his tnghteningwiteonh tor a lurtne swallow Iroma bottle, the better Such travesties—fine in a Village Voice cartoon, perhaps—do not make for an interesting play...