Contrasting Classics
SAUVAGE, LEO
On Stage CONTRASTING CLASSICS by leo sauvage Two productions that opened toward the close of the Broadway season deserve our consideration. One, although no longer on the boards, because it...
...Perhaps that is not surprising in a season whose most admired heroes were David Mamet's foulmouthed real estate salesmen...
...Marc B. Weiss was luckier: Nobody hampered his poetic as well as expert lighting...
...He had to make his entrance reciting two obscure and, on Phil Hogan's decrepit farm, perfectly ridiculous Latin verses...
...Both Peters and Lapine obviously have studied the artist's portrait of her—entitled "Woman Powdering Herself" and now at the National Gallery in London—for theshow gives the painting an amazingly dramatic revival...
...Thus James La-pine, who wrote the book as well as directed, and Stephen Sondheim, who provided the music and lyrics, do not concentrate on the man...
...But the recent revival at the Cort Theater directed by David Leveaux, to me quite absorbing, lasted only around two months...
...Muddled in their thoughts and emotions, they are usually attempting to avoid the truth or evade humiliation through desperate equivocation...
...While studying the work of the scientists he admired and who influenced him, Seurat became excited by the possibility of extending their ideas on how one sees color to the perception of sound...
...There are moments when Sondheim seems to be supplying a short—one could say "dotted"—line of musical punctuation to mark certain phases of Seurat's process...
...The museum is very modern, and we are invited to a superficially satirized cocktail party for the exhibition of an "avant-garde" structure by a young man again called simply George (Mandy Patinkin) who is the great-grandson of Dot...
...For the people haunting Eugene O'Neill—especially those characters based on members of his family, theTyrones of the autobiographical plays—are rather complicated...
...When Hogan teases Jim, who is eager for a drink, by telling him that there is a well full of water at the back, the well-dressed, Latin-quoting man from the big city has to answer with pedestrian sarcasm: "Water...
...At the same time, he wants "no mannish quality about her," emphasizing her "large, firm breasts...
...Indeed, the playwright apparently sees her proper vocation as motherhood...
...By far the most remarkable performance is Bernadette Peters...
...The stage moon, at least, was not misbegotten...
...But when Jim comes to the farm—where her cunning father, plotting to further his own ends, has arranged to leave her alone waiting for hours—nothing happens...
...Happily, after noticing how she systematically crossed the stage placing her bare feet on the floor heel-first, one soon preferred to look at Kate Nelligan's face...
...Seurat himself would never have used the term "pointillism," though, and probably Sondheim would be equally unhappy with the label...
...Josie's breasts are what Jim first noticed about her, as O'Neill has him tell us again and again...
...Vahey followed O'Neill's directions: "The house is not, to speak mildly, a fine example of New England architecture...
...Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten came into theatrical history as a flop: The first production in 1947 never reached New York, and on the play's publication in 1952, O'Neill ruefully observed that there were no "outstanding rights or plans" to mount it again...
...Although "soft and soggy from dissipation" Jim remains "attractive to women, and popular with men as a drinking companion...
...They learned that there was a child when the child died two weeks after the 31-year-old father...
...At dawn, Jim will return to the bars and tarts of Broadway, Josie to the hard work of the farm...
...Seurat's Madeleine is here not very wittily named Dot (Bernadette Peters...
...he seems so distant...
...An old, boxlike clapboard affair...
...We are treated to a re-creation of the birth and development of the painting as it reflects or recalls the life of La Grande Jatte...
...When Jim brought his dead mother back East from California he spent the ride getting drunk not far from the baggage car transporting her coffin...
...The innovative musical, Sunday in the Park with George at the Booth Theater, may not be Broadway's best ever...
...Eventually, though, we get a key to a deeper reason: a sense of guilt...
...Jose Quintero took it up in 1973, however, 20 years after the playwright's death, and it became a Christmas Broadway hit starring Colleen Dew-hurst and Jason Robards...
...O'Neill describes the lonely, unsatisfied farmer' s daughter as " so oversize for a woman that she is almost a freak...
...Or forgive Jamie O'Neill in the name of Ella O'Neill, his mother, who died in California of a brain tumor while Jamie was present but already too drunk to comfort her...
...The woman who finds him most attractive is Phil's daughter Josie (Kate Nelligan...
...In A Moon for the Misbegotten O'Neill is preoccupied with his older brother Jamie, here called James Tyrone Jr...
...Imean, some people...
...That's something people wash with, isn'tit...
...Nevertheless, its defiantly original, artistically challenging approach to the stage makes Sunday in the Park with George an extraordinarily welcome arrival to New York...
...Josie, he tells us, can do the "manual labor of two men...
...Seurat's method consisted of dividing colors and shapes into a multitude of miniparticles, similar to what the human eye actually sees, on the theory that their optical fusion would create a more luminous, more impressive image...
...Its characters are never fully developed and its story, which doesn't take hold until the second half, is rather inadequate...
...As for the principal players, Mandy Patinkin does not have much to do except sing, and he sings well...
...Most of the second half of Sunday in the Park with George takes place in 1984 in a not otherwise identified "American artmuseum...
...Nor is it because he rightly believes Josie a virgin despite her insisting the contrary: "Don't be miscalling me a virgin...
...And he even managed to have with him a "blonde pig" he had spotted on the train...
...Jim talks to her, Josie tells him what he wants to hear, and he sleeps in her arms through that moonlit night of early September, his head on the "large, firm breasts" of Eugene O'Neill's imagination...
...In fact, it was introduced by Seurat's villi-fying critics, and only later did art historians in need of classifications adopt it...
...Perhaps, however , their character George (Mandy Pa-tinkin) does resemble Seurat...
...Very little is known about the private life of the French Neo-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat, whose work is the focus of the evening...
...His grandmother, Marie (Bernadette Peters), appears in a wheelchair...
...Yet they can also suddenly come up with penetrating flashes of insight...
...If anyone seemed miscast initially it was Nelligan, who had to use all kinds of tricks to suggest any resemblance to O'Neill's overlarge Josie...
...Bannen, like Nelligan, had understandable difficulty adapting to O'Neill's tangled instructions and to certain almost amateurish passages...
...But the accent at the Booth is on the resurrection of Seurat's large masterpiece, "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte," currently at the Institute of Art in Chicago...
...He has been wasting his years on the Gay White Way's bars and women, having given up on its theaters...
...Could this be musical "pointillism...
...They also were beautifully performed in my view by Kate Nelligan, assuredly a great actress, and Ian Bannen, whom other critics found miscast...
...Phil is a lazy, shrewd drunkard mainly interested in preventing Jim from selling the farm to a rich neighbor and in keeping Josie to run it...
...She is lovely whether singing, acting or impersonating Madeleine Knobloch...
...The new George arrives there on an official assignment and, while looking at today's streets and buildings, dreams that he meets Seurat's mistress in the old landscape...
...His friends knew he lived with a woman named Madeleine Kno-bloch...
...It took a good part of the first of the play's four acts for Kate Nelligan and director Leveaux to overcome these contradictory intentions without short-changing Josie's nonphysical qualities...
...the other, a box-office success, because it brings something new to the American musical...
...This is not because Jim had been idling at the nearby inn...
...There are intensely dramatic scenes in the second half of A Moon for the Misbegotten, and along with the rest of the production at the Cort they were intelligently staged...
...Fortunately, a few scenes in the second hour bring us back to 1884, the painting and the island of La Grande Jatte...
...or Jim (Ian Bannen...
...Jerome Kilty alone seemed completely at ease from his first appearance on stage...
...You'll ruin my reputation if you spread that lie about me...
...At least nothing Phil Hogan and perhaps Josie might have expected...
...Set designer Brien Vahey cannot be faulted either for having constructed an exaggeratedly primitive wooden shack more appropriate to Erskine Caldwell's Deep South than to a part of Connecticut Jim Tyrone has no difficulty reaching from Times Square in 1923...
...Dominated by the idea that a painter in front of his canvas cannot ignore the laws of optical science, he was a taciturn, egocentric genius...
...As the popular saying goes—and it may have applied to the playwright as well—he drinks to forget what's upsetting him and is upset because he drinks...
...So Jim and Josie sit together in front of the farm...
...That is the great miracle on West 45 th St...
...One, although no longer on the boards, because it bravely sought to revive atroublesome American classic...
...Jim dreams of confessing his guilt and instinctively sees in her the woman who will understand, yes, forgive him...
...One man he drinks with in Connecticut is his Irish tenant farmer Phil Hogan (Jerome Kilty...
...Josie is afraid of loving Jim too much...
...A hundred years ago, the narrow green island in the Seine River, a few miles northwest of Paris, was where people enjoyed a leisurely Sunday afternoon...
...By translating his paintings to the medium of the stage, Lapine and Sondheim have produced some wonderful Neo-Impressionist theater...
...Less successful in the first hour are the few discreet hints that can be recognized only retrospectively as indications of the hardly ingenious story to come...
...Although I have limited my enthusiasm for Sunday in the Park to its first hour, that is strong enough to place this musical far above the season's competition...
...Their enterprise has been ably assisted by Tony Straiges' scenery, Patricia Zipprodt and Ann Hould-Ward's costumes, Richard Nelson's lighting, and Bran Ferren's "special effects" (when they don't succumb to the temptation of outshining Broadway's Cats...
Vol. 67 • June 1984 • No. 11
