On Stage

...Goldstein, or some equally obvious Jewish name...

...In fact, whatever the author may have intended, Biloxi Blues becomes first of all an attack on militarism...

...They seemed to forget they were doing a stage musical, not a straight translation into a foreign language...

...The play, a droll recounting of Simon's basic training at an Army camp in Mississippi, is certainly well-made...

...In Biloxi Blues, though, the war appears to be a very minor item of conversation and concern among the soldiers drafted to fight it...

...Either way, the need to wonder about Twain's mysteriously wandering into the play slightly spoils our enjoyment of the opening scenes as t hey start Big River rolling in a winning direction...

...Attempting to remain wholly faithful to this work in bringing it to the stage is without question a risky business...

...Nevertheless, the United States had been engaged in the conflict for over a year...

...I do not object in principle to the playwright's recourse to old-fashioned devices, but it strains credulity that at age 19 Eugene should be so embarrassed at the prospect of making love to a hooker...

...Biloxi Blueshas been directed well by Gene Saks and performed well by an ensemble of excellent actors, several of whom play outstanding characters outstandingly...

...Indeed, one wonders why it was thought necessary to mention the expected...

...To any normal human being that means World War II...

...Despite these failures, it should be stressed that Big River is one of the best shows of the season...

...For lovers of the book who cherish their own mental images of Huck, Daniel H. Jenkins may at first appear to be wrongly cast—he is too tall, for instance...

...That may require dropping some segments...

...The sole suggestion of what these young men will soon confront, however, comes in a sort of postscript: On a train bringing Eugene and his comrades to the embarkation port, he tells us their respective fates...

...it is about how different types of individuals react when put into a military uniform and forced to accept someone else's absolute authority for no better reason than the stripes on his sleeves...

...His nervous behavior is particularly surprising if we remember that as a young teenager in Brighton Beach Memoirs he was eager to get to the bottom of these matters...

...thousands of Americans had already been killed, wounded or captured...

...Interestingly, neither Matthew Broderick nor his Eugene Morris Jerome head either category...

...One final and especially happy note...

...Not that I could see...

...So is the magnificent comic pair of Rene Auberj onois and Bob Gunton as the Duke and King, respectively, to say nothing of John Goodman's excellent Pap Finn...

...In any case, here he is merely a mute and ephemeral presence...

...This duel between two kinds of power is a powerful moment of theater...

...When Roger Miller's music and Des McAnuff s direction manage to find the right tone they are perfect...

...Is there a connection between this character and the original author...

...Granted, they are far from the bombed-out cities, the countries being invaded by Hitler's panzer divisions, the refugees and murdered millions of Europe...

...His scenes with the sadistic Sergeant Toomey —a role Bill Sadler expertly pushes precisely to the limit of tolerance—culminate in a final confrontation where mad brutishness is rendered helpless and intellectual preparedness triumphs...

...Nonetheless, half a good Twain on today's troubled Broadway is something to enjoy and be grateful for...

...The true central figure of BiloxiBlues is Arnold Epstein, a Jewish intellectual, masterfully delineated by Barry Miller...

...Yet on occasion that urge really does lead the production far astray...

...The scenes involving the troops, happily, display a deeper humor...

...It has funny lines and situations—some genuinely witty, some designed to win automatic laughter of a rather low sort —and a story whose unequal episodes are fashioned into a whole without excessively visible stitches.The problem is that only rarely does the work achieve dramatic originality...

...Having Twain in the narrative from beginning to end—the storyteller inside his story—might have worked...

...Hauptman is remarkably successful with the first part of his treatment...

...Ron Richardson's Jim, with his great Mississippi voice, is a winner from the outset...

...Always perfect are Heidi Landesman's sets, poetically lighted by Richard Riddell...

...The second part of this production is chiefly an accumulation of sequences that are much too condensed to contribute anything...

...More fundamentally, the makers of Big River erred in trying to include every single Huck.adventure the public might conceivably remember...

...Then Simon comes up with the punch line that gets the biggest laugh of the evening: The pious young Catholic is now a Mrs...

...Broderick is very good when he is feeling his way around in the barracks, but in his two big conventional scenes tailor-made to amuse the audience he gets carried away and resorts to even easier gimmicks...

...He disappears until we recognize him again, just before the end, as a character in the musical...

...Otherwise the play is not about war...

...On Stage LIFE ALONG THE MISSISSIPPI BY LEO SAUVAGE Almost all of the flags on the Great White Way have gone up to salute Neil Simon's Biloxi Blues as the first "comedy hit" of the current season.The latest installment of the famous playwright' s so-called autobiographical series is precisely that—largely, alas, because the current season has been extremely poor...

...After gaining much needed sustenance from Neil Simon's comedy hit, the season has actually been enlivened in its waning weeks by a welcome entry in the field of musical comedy—Big River,William Hauptman's adaptation of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at the Eugene O'Neill Theater...

...Still, he develops an attitude toward authority that in effect amounts to a new model of passive resistance, based not on instinct or peasant shrewdness (like the Good Soldier Schweik's) but on sophisticated thinking which builds up to a strategy...

...Several of them should have been left out and the time thus gained used to develop others...

...Simon's second focus is Eugene's unfolding love life: the nice Jewish boy's initial sexual experience with a prostitute (Randall Edwards), and his subsequent affection for Daisy Hannigan (Penelope Ann Miller), achurch-going virgin...

...I frankly doubt it...

...For example, as the beautifully designed and lit Mississippi curtain rises, an actor made up to look like Twain is wandering around the stage with nothing to say and nothing perceptible to do...

...When William Hauptman's text is good it is very good...

...The time is 1943, we are told...

...In creating a play based on a classic work the key is preserving the spirit of the original while making it an effective piece of theater...

...It may seem paradoxical to say that the enterprise falls short of real greatness because of Hauptman's desire to push as much of Mark Twain into it as he can...

...the second part, for all its meticulous accuracy, I found confusing and in spots almost boring...

...The black theatergoers within mv view on the night I went to see the musical were not shocked by the repeated use of a generally unmentionable word, and they applauded heartily at the end...

...Clever, albeit not terribly far above the level of an average standup comic's gambit, and perhaps a little too pat in its pandering to the desires of a Broadway audience...

...Eugene Morris Jerome (Matthew Broderick), the hero and "author" of Brighton Beach Memoirs, is now six years older, or of conscription age...

...The bad news surely must have reached Biloxi, not to mention Brook-lynite Eugene Jerome and his knowledgeable buddy Arnold Epstein (Barry Miller...

...But one's awareness of such physical details soon vanishes, a tribute to Jenkins' acting ability...

...Simon may well have been conscious of this, for he apparently tried to blunt the thrust by making Sergeant Toomey (Bill Sadler) exceptional—a man clearly in need of psychiatric treatment, not your typical noncom in charge of teaching blind obedience to civilians he professionally despises...

...Upon losing his virginity Eugene falls for the innocent Daisy, who hesitates to allow a first kiss not only because of her mother's warnings but also because it is Good Friday...

...If the author can be believed, in 1943 Biloxi had both the nastiest sergeant and the sexiest whore in the country...

...Even so, Biloxi Blues is quite likely to survive at least as long as its predecessor, Brighton Beach Memoirs—recently moved from the Neil Simon Theater to make room for the new production, yet in its third year still entrenched on Broadway at the 46th Street Theater...

...Big River handles the tricky racial aspects of Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—often and mistakenly criticized recently—with tact, understanding and a complete absence of sanctimonious pusillanimity...

...Epstein is the sort of rational philosopher who seems utterly unfit, if not for fighting a war, certainly for life in a training camp under military—that is, stupid—discipline...

...If the idea was to suggest Samuel Longhorne Clemens returning to check out Haupt-man's version of Huckleberry Finn, and leaving soon because he was so satisfied he had no need tocheck further, theconceit would be extraordinary.I don't believe this was the significance of the episode in question, but whatever it was supposed to mean it was definitely not a good idea...

...Although Penelope Ann Miller nicely prevents her character from drowning in absurdity, such scruples were outdated before the end of World War I. Since the girl is Catholic and the boy Jewish, one is not surprised to learn in the last scene that she is married to someone else...

...The very attractive Randall Edwards, incidentally, is much too elegant, and too patient, to be convincing as a woman turning tricks on weekends for waiting soldiers...