Triumphs of Packaging

...On Stage TRIUMPHS OF PACKAGING BY LEO SAUVAGE For people more eager to watch stars than see plays, it was without doubt a big Broadway event Wooden police barriers held back the crowds on the sidewalk in front of the Lunt-Fontanne Theater on 46th Street Teams of burly policemen were stationed next to the exit doors so that the theater-goers who wanted to leave the area after the performance could get past those waiting outside the stage door in the hope of having their Playbills autographed The show had ended very late, and not only because the second intermission had, for unexplained reasons, lasted over half an hour There had been seemingly unending applause for Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, whose first appearance together on stage was the attraction, albeit not of dramatic significance Rather, the two had come to exhibit before a paying public some aspects of their private lives Most of the personal history, of course, has been available for years to anyone willing to pay 25 cents for various tabloids or a dollar 01 two for certain magazines Here, though, spending $45 on an orchestra scat made one an eyewitness to an "authorized" version authenticated and interpreted by the stormy couple themselves The vehicle for all this is, appropriately, Private Lives The play by Sir Noel Coward had its initial production in London-with the author and Gertrude Lawrence as the principals-in 1930, two years before Elizabeth Taylor was born It has been called a classic, which it is not if one limits that designation to history-making masterpieces The work could be seen, however, as a classic of its genre-the often witty "Boulevard Theater" that contributed some bright evenings to London and Pans, and occasionally New York, between the two World Wars Amanda (Taylor) and Elyot (Burton), ex-spouses whose marriage mixed loving and fighting, meet by coincidence?that is, according to the joint but conflicting designs of Venus and Marson the adjoining terraces of neighboring suites in the French seaside hotel where they happen to both be honeymooning with new partners At the end ot the first act, they slip out ot the establishment, leaving Elvot's bndeSvbil(kath-ryn Walker) and Amanda's groom Victor (John Cullum) to share a feeling of unbelieving despair At the end of the third act, they escape from a Pans apartment where Sybil and Victor had surprised them at the close of the second act The final curtain drops on Sybil and Victor, who are by this time lovers, battling each other just as Amanda and Elyot used to, and were again before they left Coward's conception of married life may be only partially confirmed by statistical evidence, yet it certainly can be entertaining when subtly staged and performed by a clever, highly polished cast I don't know who was in charge of this revival by the Elizabeth Theatre Group, an enterprise co-owned by Miss Taylor and impresario Zev Bufman The Playbill says "Directed by Milton Katselas" and offers a biography of the man with credits that include the original Off-Broadway presentation of Edward Albee's Zoo Story But a white slip of paper inside-the kind that usually announces a last minute replacement for a minor player-reads "Please note an addition to the Title Page in your program 'Production supervised by Lou Antonio ' Thank you " There is no way to tell which elements or segments of Private Lives were "supervised" by this latecomer and which were "directed" by Katselas In any case, whoever had ultimate artistic responsibility has been of no use to Noel Coward, and of less to the leading lady and man Although the underlying assumption of this production-that audiences would have a greater fascination with Taylor and Burton than with Amanda and Elyoth-as proved a sound one commercially, it restricts any possible enjoyment of the play to those anxious to recognize in every turn ot Coward's story a parallel with the off-stage saga of the two celebrities Typical is the triumph obtained by Taylor when, obviously anticipating and coaxing such a response, she leans heavily on the line "I feel rather scared ot marriage really Burton at least has moments when he seems aware that the ovations he receives may represent a Pyrrhic victory He looks as if he would prefer to be somewhere else, more closely resem-bling a Spy Who Came In from the Cold than a honeymooner-even a hardly exuberant one with good reason to know why he is divorced from Amanda and equally just cause for wondering why his second wife should be the slightly stupid Sybil Still, Burton, besides being a star, is an actor, and his somber face always manages to express something despite the fact that it frequently appears to be showing an essential lack of expression Those of us who are not British gentlemen ourselves, moreover, may be inclined to believe that Burton's bored look is a natural one for that class The generally frozen exterior also adds to the impact of his periodic explosions of rage and furious flows of insults (Some of the barbs we hear, to the chagrin of this reviewer, have been added to Coward's text by an anonymous latter-day collaborator ) Burton definitely emerges, if not shiningly, less damaged by the evening than his ex-wife Taylor's acting falls way below the level of her first Broadway assay two years ago in Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes Her portrayal of the bitchy side of Amanda is artificial and amateurish As for filling in the character's lighter shadings, she overdoes a particular form of cute, kittenish purring Dressed in Theom V Aldredge's massive, surprisingly inappropriate costumes, Taylor seems willing to make a caricature of herself If that is the fault of the director and/or supervisor, where was the Taylor half of the producing team...

...Last year we saw the musical Nine, and m recent seasons Broadway has hosted a minimum of the musicals like it shows that, lacking a substantial book, become hits solely on the basis of good music and dancing plus a few spectacular ideas One of these, Sophisticated Ladies, offered a memorable artistic achievement without any script at all The latest try at the form is My One and Only at the St James Theater It has the wonderful music of George Gershwin, picked up mostly from different early works, starting with the 1927 Funny Face, and cleverly arranged in all its jazziness The dancing, a retrospective of tap and soft shoe, is beautifully "staged and choreographed" by Thommie Walsh and Tommy Tune There are seven superior black male dancers, rightly referred to as "The Dancing Gentlemen", six excellent white female dancers, provided with the succinct group title "Fish", and the extraordinarily agile and humorous black stage veteran Charles "Horn" Coles Officially, the book is jointly attributed to Peter Stone and Timothy S Mayer, notwithstanding the numerous pre-opening published reports that each man had come up with his own story (and that no reason could be found to choose either one over the other) The concoction we are finally presented concerns the thorny "get-together" problems of long distance swimmer Edith Herbert (Twiggy) and aviator Captain Billy Buck Chandler (Tommy Tune) She, we are told, has crossed the Channel between France and Great Britain and, circumstances permitting, may do so again He hopes to be the first pilot to fly nonstop from New York to Pans in a monoplane, an ambition we know in advance will not be realized This background having been established, the one and only remaining purpose of the dialogue is to tell us the "why," whether we are interested or not Diverted by the songs and dances, we could perhaps have happily forgotten about the justifications for the plot The show's various producers, changing directors-or "doctors"-and more or less incompatible writers seem to have come to one agreement before unveiling their creation The audience should always be reminded that this is not an ordinary love story The girl is a Channel swimmer The boy is an ocean flyer who might very well have beaten Lindbergh across the Atlantic in l927 if his search for the girl had not forced him instead to fly to Morocco, where she had hidden herself for a time as one of six belly dancers in a desert night club In a way the hero and heroine are original, for I know of no other musical whose main characters are involved in such exotic professions Yet in addition to being impressed by this we are meant to find some meaning in what happens or doesn't happen between them, and that is impossible First of all, it is hard to believe that the lovers are in love They simply say, or sing, that they are, without ever trying to so much as pretend convincingly They are both busy with themselves Consider their first meeting She is stepping down from a train (I rather liked Adnanne Lobel's cardboard scenery) She is the star of a show named European Aquacade (so I must have been wrong when I understood that she wanted to return to the English Channel) She seems to have trouble with her silver-sequined dress (I found some of Rita Ryack's attempts at elegant costumes pompously overblown) She barely looks at him (I forgot what he was doing there) Nevertheless, he immediately falls in love-or at least so he declares, looking away from her out at the house, in a song entitled "Blah, Blah, Blah " It certainly isn't a very good beginning Strangely enough, Twiggy is more attractive as a singer and dancer than she was as a model (To be sure, she ranks among the top performers in neither field ) She works like a trouper, not a famous "personality" who expects automatic applause No less strangely, Tune runs into difficulties Hetwists his awkward six foot six inch frame dexterously in the dance sequences, but when he has to sing or act his straining to smile "appealingly" does not appeal in the least Thankfully, the score and the choreography go a long way toward salvaging the evening Tune and Twiggy have an exciting water splashing number with their feet in a shallow rectangular basin downstage The best scene by far, though, is the one where the great 72-year-old "Horn" Coles gives Tommy Tune an exquisitely funny and finely honed lesson in tap dancing Forthose few minutes, My One and Only really is unique...