Broadway Fits and Starts
SAUVAGE, LEO
On Stage BROADWAY FITS AND STARTS BY LEO SAUVAGE BY tradition, the New York theater season begins with the arrival of fall. Yet it was only after several weeks of false starts thata 1987-88...
...here Smuin gives us an extraordinary succession of tangos—sometimes performed simultaneously in the different areas provided by Walton's set—and they combine elegance with humor...
...Wodehouse, Howard Lindsay, and Rüssel Crouse (Timothy's father) originally concocted...
...Nearer Times Square things began inauspiciously...
...he has just died in a boating accident with his male lover...
...Nevertheless, thanks to the unmeasured raves of some critics, the play seems destined to hang on longer than Pale and Anna do...
...The latest case in point is the rousing revival of Anything Goes, a musical that had its initial 420-performance run back in 1934 with Ethel Merman as the brash nightclub singer Reno Sweeney...
...To make matters more convoluted, we suspect Pale might be a latent homosexual too...
...he then sets it on fire, per Larry's instructions, and the house lights come on...
...Yet it was only after several weeks of false starts thata 1987-88 production brought us, if not the thrill of an original dramatic triumph, at least the pleasure of a successful revival...
...Apparently Burn This is intended to throw new light on the mystery of relations between the sexes...
...Okun's romanticized tenement was confusingly built on three-and-a-half levels, with two dozen unworkably tight acting sites and open stretches where everyone got lost...
...He returned to France in 1945 after having completed the manuscript of Education européenne, the first of a long string of books (five of them written in English for the challenge...
...Although the playwright is obviously aiming for ambiguity, the direction and Joan Allen's interpretation strongly suggest that the attractive and somewhat nervous Miss Mann is a repressed lesbian...
...A clue may lie in her surname (she's the only character who has been supplied with one...
...Unlike Late Nite Comic, the musical Roza had a director, and a good one— Hal Prince...
...But Roza cannot be forgotten so quickly, nor should the failed production be forgiven too easily...
...That is the pregnant line Lanford Wilson gives Malkovich to help us understand the character of Pale...
...In this instance the right mood is set well before Porter's irresistible melodies and lyrics are heard (indeed before one has even taken one's seat) by the fascinating way set designer Tony Walton has built up the Beaumont's fourth wall...
...Many theater-goers probably never got wind of Late Nite Comic...
...Seberg was found dead in her car one day in September 1979...
...This "Public Enemy Number 13" is disguised as a parson, and blessedly rescues any number of jokes that would otherwise have fallen flat...
...For years it was David Mamet who relied most heavily on the dubious dramatic value of gutter language, but in Burn This Malkovich sprays out more fourletter words in 20 minutes than Al Pacino managed in all of American Buffalo...
...Equally effective is the contribution of Michael Smuin, the miraculous choreographer of Sophisticated Ladies...
...While this tends to overload the production, one hates to blame the two for exposing a new generation to as much of Cole Porter's incomparable art as they possibly could...
...In that show the accent was on jazz, and both the dancers and the musicians were masters of its rhythms...
...His name became familiar to millions of Americans when he married Jean Seberg, whom Otto Preminger had earlier taken from a small-town Iowa drugstore and put into the armor of George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan...
...One of her roommates, Robbie, used to be her dance partner...
...But despite the concluding note of optimism, conversations overheard on 45th Street gave the bizarre couple a strictly limited time together, punctuated by much shouting and fighting...
...Previously she had deflected her inverted urges onto her late roommate, who had great artistic influence on her and whom she never ceases to mourn...
...Anna is not too keen on this square, however...
...Entering the diplomatic service, he did a stint as the French consul general in Los Angeles...
...We are treated to the enchanting sight of an ocean liner with two decks and two grand staircases connecting them...
...Romain Gary was discovered with a bullet in his head late in 1980...
...What accounts for Anna's sudden and perhaps unintentionally unconvincing passion for this brute, who enters rooms by beating the door down...
...The book was later made into the important film Madame Rosa, starring Simone Signoret...
...The upper deck accommodates a 16-man band in white naval uniforms at the foot of a red, white and blue chimney...
...Inserted in thePlaybill was a slip of paper saying the director "voluntarily withdrew" 11 days before the opening...
...Though Patti Lupone dominates the cast and the house, Bill McCutcheon also sparkles in the role of the gangster Moonface Martin...
...now his brother serves as a plausible replacement...
...Given the violent, foul-mouthed and frequently stoned/drunk way he comports himself, one may wonder how eating establishments in that state are managed...
...Granted, the revised book by Timothy Crouse and John Weidman is not a big improvement on what Guy Bolton, P.G...
...But the only possibility for romantic love taken seriously by the play is homosexuality...
...He too is gay, but is more philosophically than sensually inclined, a kind of "moderate" homosexual who is able to grasp that heterosexual ties might work for other people...
...He might have taken over as artistic director of the Vivian Beaumont with avant-garde designs in mind, yet under his stewardship the once troubled Lincoln Center playhouse has become a prime spot for good popular theater...
...Crouse and Weidman have squeezed in a few extra Porter numbers, including the famous "Its De-Lovely" (from his 1936 musical Red, Hot and Blue...
...At the end of Burn This Pale reads aloud a message from Larry expressing the hope that Pale and Anna will learn to make their stormy liaison endure...
...Finally, it boasted a formidable stage designer, the Russian emigre Alexander Okun, a 10-year veteran of the Moscow Arts Theater...
...Anything Goes is directed by Jerry Zaks with a sustained level of imagination and skill that befits such an amazing theatrical space...
...The warmly received production at the Plymouth Theater extends to Broadway an often happier collaboration between writer Lanford Wilson and director Marshall W. Mason that started long ago downtown at the Circle Rep...
...A Broadway musical, of course, needs a director...
...But Cole Porter is still Cole Porter, and when he's got the audience in the mood even the most feeble one-liners are amusing...
...It is a shame that seven years after his suicide Romain Gary was buried again in New York...
...The music seemed to have been retrieved from Bécaud's wastebasket, and More's words reduced the plot to a populistsentimental muddle...
...the rest are merely good, although Kathleen MahoneyBennet is too guileless as Hope Harcourt to be a credible rival to Reno Sweeney...
...But it's worth the trip...
...He still does, but Wilson and Mason, in having him expand and explode on every possible (and sometimes impossible) occasion over the course of a long three hours, are not deploying his talent to its best advantage...
...Anna Mann (Joan Allen) is a dancer living in a spacious Manhattan loft...
...And his caricature of the forgotten hippy, complete with shoulder-length tresses, comes off as slightly ridiculous...
...the lower is a revolving stage that reveals various interiors—cabins, the ship's nightclub and the brig...
...Aspiring to become Anna's husband is Burton (Jonathan Hogan), a "bourgeois" screenwriter, well-heeled and utterly conventional in his tastes...
...Billed as "a new American musical," it closed after a mercifully brief run...
...I should think most people today find this less shocking than boring, much as it would be if the characters ceaselessly employed such sanitized variants as "darn" or "shoot...
...It also needs at least an inkling of a book and a score...
...It is not until Pale (John Malkovich), the straight brother of the deceased Robbie, arrives—erupts, rather—on the scene that her amorous instincts are engaged...
...It also featured a composer with a winning reputation, the French singer-pianist Gilbert Bécaud (popular on these shores as well), and a writerlyricist, the Englishman Julian More, who adapted Irma La Douce for Broadway...
...Half of my f___life, IsweartoGod, has been spent looking for a place to park...
...Gregory Mosher is responsible for the happiest production thus far this season, which I mentioned at the outset...
...Soon it developed that the real author was Romain Gary, who had already won this most coveted of French literary awards 20 years earlier (Emile Ajar was the name of a distant cousin...
...A second "new musical" (albeit not "American") did not last much longer...
...The other roommate, Larry (Lou Liberatore) is in advertising...
...Curiously, for all of their talent, these individuals did little to enhance the story of a retired Parisian prostitute and concentration camp survivor who takes in and raises the bastard children of her younger colleagues...
...When John Malkovich arrived a few years ago from Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater, he represented a powerful contribution to the New York stage...
...Among the supporting cast, the lovely Linda Hart is exceptional as an ebullient flapper...
...Romain Gary was born of Russian parents and fought in World War II, initially from England with the Royal Air Forces, then with the Free French Air Force in Africa...
...The first legitimate play to hit the boards this fall that seems certain to survive the winter is called Burn This...
...The novel on which il was based, La vie devant soi ("Life in Fronl of You"), by one Emile Ajar, was published in Paris in 197 5 and took the Prix Goncourt...
...In Cole Porter's Anything Goes, Patti Lupone resurrected the half-century-old role of Reno Sweeney and provided what turned out to be the first kick of the Broadway season—even though Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater is a bit uptown from the Great White Way...
...Pale (the reason for the nickname is obscure) manages a restaurant in New Jersey...
Vol. 70 • November 1987 • No. 17
