Worlds Apart
SAUVAGE, LEO
On Stage WORLDS APART BY LEO SAUVAGE Of the few legitimate plays that have opened on Broadway this season, August Wilson's Pulitzer Prizewinning Fences at the 46 th Street Theater is far...
...I have no idea what Trevor Nunn's contribution to Starlight Express is, since there is nothing to stage in the theatrical sense of the word...
...Mary Alice plays his loving and admiring wife Rose with a delicately tuned restraint that evolves into uncompromising strength once she sheds her submissiveness...
...Andrew Lloyd Webber, Trevor Nunn, John Napier, and David Hersey —to whom investors already owe Cats —are now offering Starlight Express, and audiences have paid some $6 million in advance to see them produce the equivalent of a P.T...
...As the playwright draws it, the hatred that develops between father and son is all the father's fault: Troy is absolutely stubborn in his conviction that he is always right, and never stops taking his frustrations out on Cory...
...While I love many of Coward's confections, this is not one of them...
...The technical coordination of acrobatics is, of course, a job requiring formidable skills, but not those of a director...
...Except for the last scene, the time is 1957-58— before the racial progress of the '60s...
...Troy Maxson, at 56, is a bitter man...
...It may be the faultof thecast...
...Much emphasis is put on Troy's sex drive (with an actor of Jones' build in the role, this hardly seems a racial stereotype...
...What Lloyd Webber (music), Nunn (direction), Napier (sets), and Hersey (lighting) treat us to is an extraordinary demonstration of roller-skating acrobatics that no aficionado of the sport should miss...
...hair being ruffled by undetected hands...
...If the roller-skating performances were orchestrated by Arlene Phillips, who is credited with the choreography, then hers is a name to remember...
...But like the sorcerer's apprentice, this charlatan-medium has so far been unable to come up with the formula to banish Elvira's spirit...
...On Stage WORLDS APART BY LEO SAUVAGE Of the few legitimate plays that have opened on Broadway this season, August Wilson's Pulitzer Prizewinning Fences at the 46 th Street Theater is far and away the best...
...Elvira eerily juggling flower pots and tossing pillows...
...My summary cannot begin to convey the dramatic qualities of August Wilson's text, the subtleties of his social and racial observations, the liveliness of the badinage between Troy and Jim, or the strangely significant part played by Troy's mentally retarded brother Gabriel (Frankie R. Faison...
...I do not intend to reopen the debate that raged when this extended joke about dead wives had its premiere in London in 1941, as German bombs were killing real human beings outside the theaters (and a few inside of them...
...He is quite physical with his wife, and he also keeps a mistress on the side who dies while giving birth to a daughter named Raynell (later played by Karima Miller...
...in this science-fiction paradise, however, one has no assurance that everything is not being done electronically...
...Troy, recalling his own dashed baseball hopes, will not let his son accept it...
...Martin Levan is charged with the sound...
...The world of Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit, over at the Neil Simon Theater, could not be more different...
...James Earl Jones as garbageman Troy Maxson—whose youthful aspirations to a baseball career were frustrated by the color of his skin—shows yet again what a powerful actor he is...
...perfumed breath issuing from an invisible source, etc...
...Rather, he is angry because his considerable baseball talent was never allowed to flourish in the major leagues...
...I can't comment on Andrew Lloyd Webber's music, because I spent most of the performance protecting my ears against its aggressively amplified decibels...
...Some of the females are rather pretty— much prettier than their Roller Derby counterparts—yet to appreciate them one must overlook the ridiculous metallic "costumes" they have been put into...
...besides, it has fun with dead wives, not dead husbands, fathers or sons...
...The steaming, irresistible Judith Ivey is also ill at ease in a part she was obviously not made for that leaves her out in the cold...
...Starlight Express does have a story of sorts...
...Charles (Richard Chamberlain), looking quite comfortable, appears with a black mourning-band on each arm...
...A decibel is equal to 20 times the logarithm of the pressure produced by the sound, 1 am told...
...One can hear the skaters singing and see their lips moving...
...In addition, it has been superbly cast...
...Barnum extravaganza on the modern stage...
...In any case, the play pleased audiences for four years in the West End and had a 657performance run on Broadway...
...Although his motive seems to be protective, he is actually overwhelmed by envy for his son...
...What gnaws at his pride is not so much that he spends his days collecting white people's garbage...
...Under Lloyd Richards' insightful direction, aided by James D. Sandefur's realisticsymbolic sets, all is flawless—until the author unexpectedly inserts into the narrative his version of the clash-ofgenerations clich...
...Warornowar, Blithe Spirit is a tasteless and not terribly funny affair...
...Still, that story makes Fences a show not to be missed...
...She had been dead for several years when Madame Arcati (Geraldine Page) conjured her into Charles' living room in the course of a séance...
...These are all represented by male and female roller-skaters...
...As for David Hersey, the man responsible for the wonderfully poetic lighting in Les Misérables, what he does here is a competent electrical job without much drama...
...As far as I could tell it concerns the ups and downs of a series of races between locomotives pulling various train components, including a romantic red caboose...
...When he brings the illegitimate daughter home, Rose tells him that the girl will have a mother, but he will no longer have a wife...
...Indeed, we get the impression that Charles can do without women in general, except perhaps his marvelously stupid maid Edith (Nicola Cavendish...
...I have no degree in acoustics, only sensitive hearing...
...And Coward obviously supposed that audiences would be delighted by the old tricks that can be played when a ghost is seen and heard by one person but not another: Ruth taking her husband's remarks to Elvira as addressed to her...
...Initially, Charles was delighted by the spectral return of his first wife, despite the jealousy of the skeptical yet hurt Ruth...
...He is wearing the smart uniform of a Marine corporal, no doubt to signify that enlistment was his way of escaping his father...
...But I wonder how even the great cast of almost 50 years ago managed to propel Blithe Spirit into the stratosphere of theatrical hits...
...Jackie Robinson would come along 20-odd years too late for him...
...This is confirmed at the conclusion, when Madame Arcati finally hits upon the right formula for exorcism and Charles appears quite satisfied with the results...
...At the Gershwin Theater those British specialists in spectacular commercial hits with an artsy veneer are at it again...
...the job at least provides a living for his family and pays for the whiskey he shares with his friend Jim (Ray Aranha...
...Worse, besides being weakly founded, the secondary one is irritatingly misused...
...On the surface, the conflict is over a football scholarship offered to Cory by a local college...
...Yet the production does not offer the enchantment usually associated with the past master of elegant amusement...
...John Napier deserves an engineering award, not a Tony...
...The characters are little more than cardboard figures, the play's pretext is cheap spiritualism, its theme is man's need to escape women, and its format seems designed to elicit bursts of automatic laughter rather than real enjoyment...
...Troyalso has sons from an earlier marriage...
...The other anticipates the hoped for departure of the ghost of his first wife, Elvira (Blythe Danner...
...The painfulness of his past—which, it turns out, also involved a stint in jail—can be detected behind a facade of boisterous exuberance...
...Rose is his second wife, and the mother of Cory, now 17...
...Fences might in fact have been the best play to hit Broadway in many a season, had not the undeniably talented Wilson blurred its impact by mixing up two story lines...
...One is for his second wife Ruth (Judith Ivey), who has just perished in an accident of which he is not entirely innocent...
...In New York, the Playbill assures us, Blithe Spirit opened a month before Pearl Harbor...
...In the concluding scene, set seven years later, Cory returns after the death of Troy (but avoids the funeral...
...Although the playwright wittily contrasts the different natures of the two wives, his protagonist longs for solitude and wants to be rid of them both...
...Wilson should have saved the intergenerational business for another play —which might just as well have been about white people—and left us with the deeply human story of a black family in the late '50s...
...The work is set in a poor black section of a Northern industrial city...
...They move at breakneck speeds through a perfectly articulated giant erector set that Napier has constructed, reportedly at a cost of $2.5 million...
...Wemeettheoldest, Lyons (Charles Brown), who is in the music business and has a distinctly middle-class appearance...
...Blythe Danner is a little too alive for a ghost, Géraldine Page too conventional for a caricature of a spiritual medium, Richard Chamberlain too cold-blooded for a mystery writer confronted with a mystery he has no choice but to believe in...
...That's where Rose's patient love for her husband reaches its limit...
...etc...
...The biggest laugh of the evening— and a typically morbid one—comes at the opening of the third act...
...Others, however, might after a half hour or so start to feel that they are seeing the same brilliant performance repeated again and again...
...After Ruth dies and similarly reappears as a ghost—apparently without Madame Arcati's assistance—things get a bit too busy for Charles...
...Then there is Courtney B. Vance, who as their son Cory dramatically asserts himself by finally standing up to his domineering father...
Vol. 70 • April 1987 • No. 5
