On Stage
SAUVAGE, LEO
On Stage MUSICAL MYSTERIES BY LEO SAUVAGE wILLARD HuNTINGTON WRIGHT called it" a straightaway detective story which might almost be used as a model for this type of fiction." Better known as S....
...It begins with the unexpected appearance of a bearded, shaggy, unrecognizable sleuth whom they call Dick Datchery...
...Rupert Holmes knows he is no Sherlock, let alone an Edgar Allan Poe...
...William Cartwright (George Rose) eventually presides over the "dangerously democratic" voting as "Your Chairman...
...Martins' nine dancers form a winning conglomerate of young talent that never lets you down...
...But being the actor-owner of The Music Hall Royale, he starts off playing the part of Thomas Sapsea, Mayor of the cathedral city of Cloisterham...
...Otherwise the lyrics are by Don Black (the "book" is by nobody)— but regular or additional, they can be heavy and clumsy, although sometimes they are crisp and to the point...
...Then there is that sophisticated gentleman from Sophisticated Ladies, Gregg Burge...
...Three or four of the songs are very good...
...But at The Music Hall Royale any critical vacillation is quickly swept away by the upcoming big laugh...
...The latest, and perhaps most inventive, approach to the task is that of Rupert Holmes...
...Another expert, Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie's most famous rival, regretted that Edgar Allan Poe had died 21 years earlier, because in her eyes the man who wrote "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" was the only one who could have finished— and solved—The Mystery of Edwin Drood...
...Four members of the troupe, Cynthia Onru-bia and Mary Ellen Stuart, together with Christopher and Charlotte d'Amboise, who have a great name to maintain, are particularly dynamic...
...She therefore can start making hats in New York and confine her amorous adventures to a single one of her former temporary companions...
...We are asked to determine as well who is doing the sleuthing, and to resolve several other questions indirectly "suggested" by Charles Dickens that the Chairman now puts to us directly...
...It is not really a musical, at least not if that designation is supposed to mean a show based on a story or developed from an idea...
...Emma does not have to go back to England because meanwhile she receives—and lyrically swoons over—an immigrant's green card, or work permit...
...Indeed, a few might have been profitably passed up...
...The main reason, however, is that choreographer Peter Martins uses the loud but j oyously rhythmic cadence of Webber's variations on the Paganini A-minor "Caprice" for a freewheeling, freejumping, freebouncing, completely uninhibited yet strictly professional parody of rock...
...Then there are two perfidious looking twins from Ceylon, Helena and Neville Landless (Jane Schneider and JohnHerrera), and the very Dickensian Durdles (Jerome Dempsey), an upgraded gravedigger who haunts the crypts of Cloisterham Cathedral...
...What he gives us is a kind of neo-Dickensian show in the form of 19th-century theatrics fueled by 20th-century gimmicks...
...From the incomplete tale Holmes has picked up his somewhat modified characters and a few limited episodes of the complicated plot...
...He has done the book, music and lyrics for a new show bearing the title of the unfinished novel...
...Dickens' whodunit, however, has remained a literary puzzle whose solution defies as well as tantalizes writers and even composers...
...Furthermore, Peters has to overcome the effect of the audio tyranny that is imposed on the helpless public in many theaters these days...
...It has mood, grace and sinuous acrobatics, with four sexy succubi coming out of Jasper's bed to undulate around his exploding complexes...
...all 20 are beautifully executed by Peters...
...Thanks to the subtle wisdom Rose lavishes on Mr...
...A hatmaker from England named Emma tells us in some 20 songs how she has walked into the bedrooms of numerous American males, lovingly or submissively stayed for a limited time with a variety of unseen and uninteresting types—or stereotypes—and then despairingly or irritatedly walked out again...
...The musical, though, does not attempt to provide any answers on its own...
...William Cartwright's second-rate repertory company at The Music Hall Royale in Victorian London, the New York audiences are invited to freely decide who the murderer might be on the basis of what they have just seen...
...His witty, technically amazing tap-dancing is, like Bernadette Peters' singing, a personal triumph in Song and Dance...
...For this production pursues the trend—often, albeit unsuccessfully, denounced by otolaryngologists and theater critics alike—of treating theatergoers as if they were disco fans who enjoy submitting to psychedelic assaults through their eardrums...
...In the second part of SongandDance, Webber's music does less harm, perhaps because our predeafened ears have become less vulnerable to aggression by sound...
...The musical Song and Dance, which opened the 1985-86 season atNew York's Royale Theater, poses amystery of a different kind...
...Moreover, the production is wonderfully served by picturesque settings (Bob Shaw) and costumes (Lindsay W. Davis), ingenious lighting (Paul Gallo), and a mercifully tempered sound system (Tom Morse...
...John Jasper (Howard McGillin), a church member, teaches piano to an orphan named Rosa Bud (Patti Cohenour) in his house at Minor Canon Comer and is supposed to take care of his nephew, another orphan named Edwin (played, Mr...
...A theatrical piece should be able to retain attention without having the actors leave the stage to take hold of the spectators from the aisle...
...Crisparkle (George N. Martin...
...I remember a production at Joseph Papp's Public Theater where my wife and I refused to be dragged from one bench to another as part of the play...
...Naturally, whatever our answers—as indicated by the votes recorded in the various electoral districts formed among the rows of seats we occupy—Holmes will manage to have the last word...
...And if you succeed in ignoring the threadbare story line, thanks to Bernadette Peters, Song and Dance does in fact emerge as a brilliant one-woman performance complemented by a shorter, independent modem street ballet...
...That's probably why she manages to distinguish him from the others...
...Finally, there is a non-Dickensian bit actor named Baz-zard (Joe Grifasi) who will do anything to become somebody in The Music Hall Royale, and fully succeeds at the Imperial Theater...
...I generally am not favorably disposed toward what is sometimes forced on the public in the name of "audienceparticipation...
...William Cartwright, and to the entire company enthusiastically entering the game, the author and director Wilfred Leach do not miss any of these opportunities...
...An extraordinarily vivid and winning Mr...
...It comes from the opportunities for humor offered in showing a dyed-in-the-wool Victorian company performing a sinister melodrama with all the theatrical trimmings of the period...
...Several authors have tried to produce a conclusion that was as Dickensian as the first half, yet could pass for "a straightaway detective story...
...One feels that if she is meant to be just a cat's paw for Andrew Lloyd Webber, she is simply much too good for that, while Webber's music, in this case, is not good enough, either...
...Everybody seems happy, and you do not participate less if you abstain from raising an arm when the calls come for the votes...
...I also like the way the choreographer (Graciela Daniele) handles John Jasper's pre-Freudian nightmare in Princess Puffer's opium den...
...Thus the musical happily does not insist onits sleuthing, except for laughs...
...Song and Dance is directed by Richard Maltby Jr., who is also credited with the "American adaptation and additional lyrics...
...At the Imperial, though, Holmes and Leach and their emissaries avoid any trace of aggressiveness...
...It was published in installments during the spring of 1870, but Dickens died before writing the second half...
...Alone on stage, Bernadette Peters diversifies the songs and the moods without much help from anybody in the orchestra pit or the wings, giving a miraculous dramatic reality to the empty character she has to carryunderEmma'shat...
...One should be able to listen to a Bernadette Peters without losing some of her nuances under the onslaught of an electronic artillery of decibels...
...That Jasper is domineering and villainous we soon discover from the way he treats his charges and from his visits to the opium den run by bawdy Princess Puffer (Cleo Laine...
...here actually Betty Buckley...
...The most amusing aspect of the enchanting evening is not the tongue-in-cheek treatment of what we have of the mystery Dickens concocted in his most Gothic vein...
...in any case, no time is wasted in giving a better reason...
...Better known as S. S. Van Dine, creator of the Philo Vance novels, he was giving his expert opinion of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the last work started by Charles Dickens...
...As a result, we are not only faced with the question of what happened to Edwin Drood...
...True, there is the pretense of a book in the first part, Song, and the pretense surfaces again toward the end of the second, Dance, for a ridiculously contrived happy ending...
...The second half is equally entertaining...
...He is the main dancer of the second part, a guy named Joe (Christopher d'Amboise), recognizable by the red Nebraska jacket and the cowboy boots he likes to wear in Greenwich Village...
...It merely wants to be funny, and much of the time it is...
...Next, we are introduced to The Reverend Mr...
...For while the boards of the Imperial Theater Actively belong to Mr...
...But this new Andrew Lloyd Webber product aspires mainly to add a Broadway Kitten to the clever hit-breeder' s Cats...
...Joseph Papp has brought it to Broadway's Imperial Theater after having had it blossom into a big success last summer at Central Park's open-air Delacorte Theater...
...He further realizes how frustrating it would be to put oneself in Dickens' gumshoes after the great storyteller has accumulated the most sinister implications and multiplied the most divergent suspicions in order to make a really dark mystery out of the disappearance of a young man named Edwin Drood...
...The cast of The Mystery of Edwin Drood is perfect...
...Cartwright informs us, bythe "male impersonator Alice Nutting...
Vol. 68 • November 1985 • No. 15
