Miller's Murky View

...He says he is afraid she may meet the wrong people, and it is easy to imagine he is not keen on her meeting the right people either...

...The first warning of more aberrant feelings on Eddie's part comes in a scene where Bea complains to him that he has stopped being a husband to her since Kathy ceased to be a child...

...But after arousing our suspicions, Miller has Eddie's next scene with Kathy again convince us that they are baseless...

...If Saundra Santiago is not miscast, she is certainly misdirected, as well as badly costumed by Bill Walker...

...Notwithstanding that Kathy has good reason to believe otherwise, Eddie harps on the new arrival's unusual hair color, his manner of joking, his way of playing the harmonica-all, he maintains, sure signs of deviancy...

...Even now that the girl is about to turn 18, Eddie wants her home when she is not at school...

...Henning is meant to command the stage alone...

...Overall, the Long Wharf production leaves much to be desired...

...Some of them here, like the horse and rider who disappear in midair and rematerialize elsewhere on stage, were new to me...

...In spite of being hampered by the choreographers' copying Cats, she moves beautifully to Henning's magic...

...At this point Miller adds a touch of absurd sensationalism to his script, implying that in addition to being torn asunder by unacknowledged incestuous cravings, Eddie may be a repressed homosexual...

...Another hint, we might think, except that the ensuing dialogue merely shows both characters to be ludicrously innocent...

...We are in Brooklyn's Red Hook section, populated principally by Sicilian-American longshoremen, among them Eddie (Tony Lo Bianco), who lives with his wife Bea (Rose Gregorio) and her orphaned niece Kathy (Saundra Santiago...

...Eddie watches Kathy walk, and criticizes her in the tone of a stern, prudish father unsettled by the approach of the day his daughter will leave home nothing more...

...Lo Bianco's sincerity is overwhelming, both in the early part of the play where his naturalistic acting is controlled, and after he transforms himself into a nervous wreck in order to enter the "inner truth" of Eddie's obscure emotions and "live" the part...

...Love blossoms at first sight bet ween Kathy and the younger of the two, the blond, lively Rodolpho (James Hayden...

...With respect to the 11 mystery patterns, let it suffice to say that an author should know what he has written...

...Brown's staging is not particularly impressive...

...On the other hand, his attitude appears to stem from his ambitions for the girl, rather than physical jealousy...

...T That a wonderful evening Merlin would be if magician Doug Henning were not suffocated by a $4 million extravaganza...

...Miller once told an interviewer that to find the right actress to play Kathy he wandered "in and out of side streets, staring at girls, looking for the bloom of youth...

...To crown his argument, he kisses the flabbergasted Rodolpho on the mouth...

...Still, this in no way prepares us for what is to come: the manifestation, after long years of suppression, of Eddie's incestuous fascination with Kathy, and the utter havoc this passion wreaks on the family's life...

...Eddie could at least have invented a somewhat plausible story...

...The plot thickens when Eddie, in keeping with his kind and loyal nature, takes in two of Bea's cousins from the old country, brothers who have immigrated illegally...

...True, when Kathy tells Eddie she has found work as a typist in a plumbing contractor's office, he is upset by the thought of all the young men who might pass by her desk, and the opinion he expresses of the average plumber's morality seems inordinately low...

...Alan Feinstein is excellent as Rodolpho's brother Marco, the most imposing of Miller's Sicilians...

...Brown cannot, however, make it less nonsensical...

...His motivations, moreover, are frequently as murky to us as they are to him...

...We see that practically to the end he remains certain his beloved Kathy is under the spell of an insidious scoundrel, and that he is justified in defending her by the most dastardly, and dangerous, means...

...Santiago exhibits no such quality...

...He doesn't need to be packaged inside a mythical tale of the Dark Ages-nor should a good musical version of the Arthurian romances need him...

...It does forcefully underline the extent of Eddie's lunacy...

...On Stage MILLER'S MURKY VIEW BY LEO SAUVAGE Arthur Miller's/1 View from the Bridge, revived by New Haven's Long Wharf company at the Ambassador Theater, adheres somewhat hesitantly and sometimes clumsily to a conception that dominated the New York stage for almost 25 years beginning in the 1950s...

...Nonetheless, Eddie remains unbelievable...

...The show finally opened at the Mark Hellinger Theater after "previewing" for 10 weeks...

...This time the longshoreman is disgruntled by his niece's acquisition of shoes with heels, despite the fact that they are low and plain, not at all "sexy...

...Hugh Landwehr's sets are particularly unimpressive...

...He suggests that if Kathy feels ready to get a job, she look for one in, for instance, a lawyer's office...

...Director Arvin Brown has the wisdom and taste to play down this gratuitous scene-in contrast to Martin Ritt, who in the original 1955 production pumped it up to grotesque dimensions...

...I read somewhere that Henning himself, not a producer, actually hatched the idea for Merlin six years ago...

...Yet madmen are generally capable of employing some reason in the service of their mad ends...

...Eddie has in effect been Kathy's father for most of her life, and so far as we can tell he has been a good one, albeit extremely protective and possessive...

...When Henning does a show of his own, I also hope the charming dancer Rebecca Wright will still be by his side...

...The best ploy he can think of is to tell Kathy that Rodolpho wants to marry her only so that he can become a U.S...

...The only Broadway elements that enhance rather than hinder Henning's art are Robin Wagner's sets, Sharon Musser's lighting and Theoni V. Aldredge's costumes...

...In the final analysis, therefore, A View from the Bridge offers an interesting glimpse into the lives of waterfront immigrants in the years following World War II, but is undone by its lack of logic and the inscrutability of its main character...

...This heavy-handed Freudian clue undermines Miller's frequent claim that he lets the characters in his plays particularly in this one have a life of their own, preferring, as it were, to stand aside and watch what happens to them...

...As for the homosexuality, it simply does not exist...

...Neither Eddie, nor Arthur Miller, can be very persuasive with the kiss...

...Eddie tries desperately to destroy it...

...The style was "slice-of-life" realism (retrieved by the Americans, incidentally, from Andre Antoine's 19th-century Theatre-Libre), and its master workshop was the Actors Studio, where Lee Strasberg taught Konstantin Stanislavsky's "penetration-of-soul" method...

...Miller's work, originally performed as a one-acter and subsequently expanded to its current full-length version, is far from the movement's proudest product...

...Even in this instance, though, we are uncertain whether Eddie is simply insulted by what seems to him an unwarranted insinuation, or whether Alfieri has really touched a raw nerve...

...While the dancers are energetic and professional, choreographers Christopher Chadman and Billy Wilson seem to have spent too much time across the road at the Winter Garden watching Cats...

...Eddie is so much a tool of forces that well up from his deepest unconscious, which his conscious mind is unable to comprehend, that he becomes a caricature instead of the realistic protagonist he is supposed to be...

...In one scene, for example, we find him consulting a lawyer named Alfieri (Robert Prosky), who throughout the play has been serving as commentator from the sides of the stage...

...She feels a little uneasy about this possibility, but is not ultimately swayed...

...When all his other maneuvers have been thwarted, Eddie denounces Rodolpho and his brother to the Immigration Police...

...he would use his knife...

...Wright makes her Broadway debut in Merlin after stints with the Joffrey Ballet and the American Ballet Theater...

...In the marital interchange the author's voice can be heard quite distinctly through the mouth of the neglected wife, as it directs the audience's attention to a theme he has failed to establish dramatically...

...But I think it is worth seeing, if only because its shortcomings are themselves interesting...

...Indeed, Miller initially goes to great lengths to persuade us that Eddie is an ordinary doting parent who will eventually face the painful realization that his shining light is entitled to her own life...

...There are after all," Miller wrote in the preface to the first published edition of A View from the Bridge, "an incestuous motif, homosexuality and, as I shall no doubt soon discover, 11 other neurotic patterns hidden within it...

...When Alfieri, after informing him that nothing can be done about Kathy wanting to get married, quips that Eddie is disqualified for the girl's hand because he already has a wife, the dock worker goes for the attorney's throat...

...Kathy is not going to believe that Rodolpho would rather kiss her uncle than herself, and the audience will not believe that either man is gay...

...there is no inkling of sexual tension...

...Don Black's lyrics slip from the memory less easily because they tend to be obnoxious...

...citizen...

...Henning is a master, a contemporary court wizard capable of enchanting the public with his amazing imagination, his prodigiously clever use of electricity and machinery, and his theatrically effective illusions...

...All the same, a Sicilian like Eddie would not get rid of an enemy that way...

...Well, an illusionist is not always safe from his own illusions...

...There are some bright spots among the other performers...

...This is another unrealistic twist...

...There is no reason to discuss the superficial, childish, yet not childlike book by Richard Levinson and William Link, or Elmer Bernstein's forgettable music...

...Having failed to convince Kathy that Rodolpho is using her falsely, Eddie becomes completely hysterical...

...Prosky manages to make Alfieri-whose chorus role, from today's perspective, seems rather conventional-into a discreetly powerful presence...

...Eddie, who still will not admit to himself that his morbid bewitchment is in any sense sexual, has by now clearly degenerated mentally...

...Indeed, the apparent function of the rest of the cast is to periodically interrupt his marvelous inventions with second-rate musical "numbers...

...In desperation , he announces to his niece that the young man prefers the company of other men...

...He could have sworn that he caught Rodolpho in the act under the nearby Brooklyn Bridge, or paid a man to say he was the partner, or whatever...