On Stage
SAUVAGE, LEO
On Stage MISSING THE MARK BY LEO SAUVAGE Although the Group Theater first presented Clifford Odets' Awake and Sing almost half a century ago, it is hardly a museum piece. Many young men today...
...In the tradition of The Second City, both should graduate soon to long careers on the stages of the first city...
...Ralph urges her to run off with Moe Axelrod (Harry Hamlin), a family friend who lost a leg in World War I but manages to dress and live well, thanks to some deals he has made on the side...
...First, though, she must somehow reach an understanding with her mother...
...Angel'Sanger is allayed, and the show ends with the two women reconciled...
...Yet this seems secondary city stuff in New York, which long ago retired the specter of Tammany Hall...
...In another, Love Story, a waitress goes through a cycle of love and rejection with each new, and soon frightened, customer—utterly ignoring a man who is sitting there watching her with disappointment and longing...
...His rebellion, when it finally comes, seems likely to consist of going to protest meetings...
...But this is a musical that very much wants to go beyond mere surface panache...
...Since none of them changes costume, we must wait for Anna to tell us who is her fugitive husband, her father-in-law, her uncle, her admirer...
...As for the central part of Bessie, the role as written by Odets may well be unplayable...
...The most ferocious satire of the evening is aimed at TV talk-shows...
...To begin with, adding a little Shakespearean flavor to an imprecise play on words merely underlines the triteness of the title in a year when so many are cashing in on Orwell-worn formulas...
...All of this is what the ultimately persuaded Clurman hailed in The Fervent Years as the " Hugoesque imagination" of Odets...
...Many of them also probably dream of a world where life and love will be free from being "printed on dollar bills...
...For example, the six wreckers are good as a group, yet they soon get lost when in addition they assume the roles of different family members...
...The ensemble remains first-class, even if some of the sketches at the Village Gate are not...
...Sam loves her slavishly...
...When the wreckers arrive at the rink, Angel suddenly materializes to stop the imminent destruction—and start rebuilding ties to her mother...
...Benjamin Hendrickson sounds like anywhere except the Bronx, even though his way of silently portraying the innocent Feinschreiber provides one of the evening's few moments of stage humor...
...Under her rule, husband Myron (Dick Latessa) is a whining milquetoast...
...He obviously can't follow the example of his rich Uncle Morty (Michael Lombard), who started poor but now has a booming garment factory...
...Indeed, she and the other young lady, Isabella Hofmann, are the standout performers of the excellent six-member company Bernard Sahlins has brought to Bleecker Street...
...The strains between mother and daughter begin when Angel discovers that her father is alive...
...Terrence McNally's plot is not improved by the way Antoon has spun it out in confusing flashbacks...
...We have earlier seen Angel in a prologue where, dressed by Theoni V. Al-dredge as a wandering ex-hippie, she dreamed of "Colored Lights...
...In one, titled "Nothingness and Being," Jean-Paul Sartre can find no exit from heaven because, whenever he opens a door, he is overwhelmed by a wave of angelic music...
...The old student catches the two in the act and holds them in check with a gun—then meekly submits to the schoolmistress when she uses the commanding tones of a bygone era...
...Meagan Fay plays Mother Teresa beautifully...
...John Kander furnishes some humable tunes and Fred Ebb adds several quotable lyrics...
...Peter Larkin has designed a picturesque dome and side entrance for a former roller skating rink...
...Pregnant and abandoned, Hennie had been quickly married off by Bessie to Feinschreiber, a recent immigrant from Odessa...
...By reputation, Awake and Sing is supposed to be a deeply felt and committed drama of despair and hope during the Depression years...
...Many young men today earn little more than 1984's equivalent of the $16 taken home by Odets' Ralph Berger in 1935...
...But the two young women and four young men of the current group are worthy descendants of early Second City members such as Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Alan Arkin, Zohra Lam-pert, Barbara Harris, Alan Alda, Valerie Harper, and Peter Boyle...
...After Angel was born, he ran off and Anna told her daughter that her father was dead...
...Still, one cannot help wondering whether a Jessica Tandy might have given it the human touch so totally absent from Nancy Marchand's hard-bitten performance...
...Antoon and choreographer Graciela Daniele...
...But they certainly didn't need The Rink for that...
...That is double-thinking, and it is doubly effective...
...Their son, Ralph (Thomas G. Waites), is an angry weakling wavering on the edge of revolt against the Depression and his mother...
...One reason I wasn't quite as carried away as I have been in Chicago is the abuse of George Orwell's name...
...Having reached 1984 without Big Brother telling it what to do or where to visit, "The Original Second City Company" is now presenting its Orwell That Ends Well at the Village Gate in New York's Greenwich Village...
...Much better is a sketch about a pair of teachers who burglarize the home of a former pupil who has done well for himself, while they continue to have difficulty scraping by on their skimpy salaries...
...Yet despite the endlessly recurrent talk about dollar bills, unemployment, shoddy clothes, and apples instead of oranges, this mainly seems an ethnic drama about a lower middle-class family, run by a matriarch who dominates more than she loves...
...She becomes even more unhappy as she realizes what her father was, and is...
...The witty, literate cabaret, occupying a former Chinese laundry atop a flight of iron steps in the Off-Off-Loop, was founded in 1959 by Bernard Sahlins and Paul Sills...
...Her potential for being affectionate is destroyed by an almost cynical display of prejudice mixed with megalomania...
...Anna had married the alcoholic, unfaithful son of an Italian carnival family...
...His occasional hamming is a bit of welcome relief from the Actors Studio angst weighing down some of the other performers...
...Hennie hates him enough to tell him the truth about "their" child...
...Happily for her, Angel has an apparently stable boyfriend to whom she can return (she calls him several times on the telephone, making him a shadowy, awkward plot device...
...Such entertainment as there is during the evening is largely provided by Chita Rivera's and Liza Minnelli's singing...
...It had counted on McNally to turn out a tale with something to say...
...The only true "original" is Sahlins, who has directed this 65th Second City revue...
...Anna then describes the life that she has endured, and explains why she wants to go to Italy with an old admirer...
...Odets' idea of a happy ending is to have Ralph encourage his sister Hennie (Frances McDormand) to leave her child and her submissive husband, Sam Fein-schreiber (Benjamin Hendrickson...
...The circumstances...
...The late Harold Clurman, who was eventually won over and directed the original production, was right in initially complaining about the play's "rather gross Jewish humor and a kind of messy kitchen realism...
...Angel's grandfather, the old-fashioned patriarch of the carnival family, rejected his worthless son and left the rink to Anna and Angel...
...Above all, a revue using his name should offer far more Orwellian satire over the course of its 90 minutes...
...Here the main problem is that Terrence Mc-Nally, the author of the musical's book, has given us a story possessing less meaning than he appears to recognize...
...The Circle in the Square treatment of Awake and Sing doesn't help matters...
...Many more of the sketches are enjoyable as well...
...This is not a work of permanent value, worthy of presentation to each new generation...
...True, Big Brother appears as the ghost of Richard Daley in Mayor Harold Washington's Chicago, reminding political hacks that the best way to power is through double-talk...
...As if that is not confusing enough, the six demolishers also play two old ladies, a priest, a nun and three punks who mug and possibly rape Anna (this is a family musical, so the outrage is ambiguously staged...
...When Bessie forces him to abandon the impoverished, thus "unsuitable," girl that he loves, Ralph's only response is an empty tirade...
...Moreover, what we have in the current production at the Circle in the Square is a badly conceived revival of a not very good play...
...He clearly intends some kind of social message, however it is impossible for us to tell just what this is...
...She had spent several years in a California commune, learning the conventions of the unconventional while joining in sex, protest and marijuana...
...But if the play is timeless in social terms, it is less durable esthetically...
...For Anna and Angel are virtually driven by their circumstances to fight, rather than to love, each other...
...Anna (Chita Rivera) has sold for demolition the rink that she jointly inherited with her daughter Angel (Liza Minnelli), who is estranged from her mother and living "somewhere on the Eastern seaboard...
...Another failed family affair is The Rink, at the Martin Beck Theater...
...Another "capitalist" solution for Ralph would be the $3,000 in insurance money that his grandfather Jacob (Paul Sparer) tries to give him—and which Bessie conspires to take "for the family...
...Fed up with the scene, she has come back to claim her part of the rink, the home of her innocent childhood...
...The most entertaining character is the grandfather, and Paul Sparer gives him a full-blown turn...
...Bessie (Nancy Marchand), the mother in charge of the South Bronx Berger family, is a rather ugly character...
...The skating rink is slated for demolition by a team of wreckers, who are put through some pleasant song-and-dance routines by director A.J...
...what I always enjoy most on trips to Chicago is getting to see The Second City...
...It revolves around how two idiotic, grimacing, and fairly recognizable hosts might behave—and what questions they would ask—if their guest was Mother Teresa...
...Director Theodore Mann seems mainly preoccupied with having his actors sound Jewish, and most of the accents ring false...
...That judgment must surely have made Victor Hugo turn over in his grave...
Vol. 67 • April 1984 • No. 6
