On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage NOTHING NEW ON BROADWAY BY STEFAN KANFER Joe Allen's restaurant on 46th Street features a celebrated Flop Wall: posters of Broadway musicals that bombed big time. Kelly is there,...
...Joanna Gleason, his co-star, had crisp comic timing, but nothing worthy of herpanache...
...What the makers of Nick and Nora failed to acknowledge was that City of Angels had an original conception, an accomplished cast, good lines, andawitry score...
...Clearly, he is writing down to the audience at the Music Box, pleasing crowds at all costs ??”including the integrity of his dramatis personae...
...every season producers are certain to glance longingly at the receipts from Andrew Lloyd Weber's musicals and lick their lips...
...he likes to establish a character even before the man steps onstage...
...Dutch settlers and English esthetes established the first roads and villages...
...this year Kenneth Branagh did inDeadAgain...
...World, the history of the Jews in the Catskill Mountains from the 18th century to the present...
...and cheap...
...And every season those refurbished Salvation Army antiques are guaranteed to end where they belong, diverting the diners at Joe Allen's Flop Wall...
...He flunked them all...
...Why go to see Alan King when he spieled for free on the Johnny Carson show...
...There is no reason to suppose that a wisecracking shamus in '30s Los Angeles would tickle anyone in the '90s...
...There are three easily discernible reasons...
...Marilyn Michaels, a talented mimic, does impressions of more women than you can shake a stick at, if that's your idea of agood time...
...Andthree: ScratchBrackishandhe turns out to be made of halvah...
...Arthur Laurents (La Cage aux Folles) wrote and directed this debacle...
...except that City of Angels, also starring a wisecracking shamus in '30s Los Angeles, has been packing them in for two years...
...He shamelessly labeled his show "the ultimate tummel...
...Once upon a genre, the American musical was recognized as an authentic art form...
...The trio starred in six pictures between 1936 and 1947, then faded away when screwball comedy went out of style...
...Last year Patrick Swayze came back as a Ghost...
...That saccharine and reiterative piece provides a summary of the evening...
...This process works just often enough to keep the fantasy alive (Phantom of the Opera and Grand Hotel are recent examples, although it is worth noting that both are imports...
...Nick Charles was a posh private eye who solved mysteries between martinis...
...Yet there are a few things that ought to be said, because this production is emblematic of so much that afflicts the American musical theater...
...Vitus could have been a consultant on the choreography...
...Nick and Nora, like most "book" musicals, was based on a prior production in another medium...
...She never lets the pace of dialogue or action slow for a nanosecond...
...look like a tranquilizer, and his delivery, honed for three decades in the casinos of Monticello and Liberty, New York, is infallible...
...In Kathleen's case the F prevented her from winning a scholarship to college, and a chance to better herself...
...Richard Maltby Jr...
...All he wants is to bellyache at Kathleen, at the radio and at life itself...
...So creators and investors shun the inventive in favor of the Sure Thing...
...After Barbra Streisand, Pearl Bailey, Joan Rivers, Judy Garland, Liza Minnelli, Carol Charming, and Dr...
...Actually, I never cared much for borscht...
...Brackish is far too crusty to engage in any folderol...
...But landsmen did not dominate Sullivan County until the late 19th century, when Jewish farms failed upward into resorts...
...He plays Jacob Brackish (no subtlety for Horowitz...
...I have no wish to add more yardage to the shroud...
...The supporting cast, costumes and set were elemental...
...Porter, the Gershwins, Kern and his lyricists, Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, set standards for the world...
...There are a lot of those folks around, and it may stay open longer than Grossinger's...
...Could George Bush be Herbert Hoover redevivus...
...No attempt is made to class up the performers or to modernize their routines...
...meals a day...
...Brackish is not even allowed an exit worthy of his name...
...Things began to come apart in the '60s, when rock overtook Tin Pan Alley...
...so did Julia Roberts' boyfriend in Dying Young...
...The Catskills provided the launching pad for Milton Berle, Jerry Lewis, Sid Caesar, Danny Kaye, Alan King, Woody Allen, and others too humorous to mention...
...labor and technical costs undid the rest...
...Out of some 50 songs, 14 made it to opening night...
...Today, before the curtain can rise on opening night, the bills for a major musical amount to over $3 million...
...Nice...
...Higher incomes and network television ruined the resorts...
...When the curmudgeon advertises for a housekeeper, along comes the spiky young widow Kathleen Hogan (Judith Ivey), ready to do his bidding...
...Four of them animate Catskills on Broadway, whose title is a model of truth in advertising...
...Kelly is there, along with The Yearling, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Lolita, and several dozen others, now mercifully forgotten...
...I wonder how far he would have gone with fresh material...
...These kinds of Dickensian shenanigans are not what one would have expected from Horowitz, whose trenchant works have been significant off-Broadway fare for more than 20 years...
...later, Ku Klux Klan meetings were held not far from the place where the American Communist Party was founded...
...I suppose that qualifies me as some sort of authority onwhatused to be referred to as the Borscht Belt...
...in this case the Thin Man movies, starring William Powell and Myrna Loy...
...He mulls it over, then brightens, pleased with his invention: "you do...
...His name was Jackie Mason, and he appeared, of all places, in a Broadway theater...
...One: Robards and Ivey are experienced professionals who skillfully expand their underwritten roles...
...Nothing sexual here...
...Along with Mason and Roman and Michaels and Capri and Lawrence, they have gone legit...
...AyyVoffered none of the above...
...Summer World concentrates mainly on the region's unique social history...
...Yet audiences have been crushing him to their bosoms for a month now...
...Ruth pass in review, Mal Z. Lawrence comes on as the closer...
...All I know is what I see in the moviehouse and at the theater...
...Scott and his progeny went to heaven in On Borrowed Time, and now comes Israel Horowitz' play Park Your Car in Harvard Yard, in which Jason Robards takes two acts to expire without noticeable anguish...
...But don't look for any breakthroughs for the rest of this century...
...Two: Director Zoe Caldwell understands that in skating over thin ice, her strength is her speed...
...Why go to the Mountains when you could afford Miami Beach or even Israel...
...The retired high school teacher is holed up in his Gloucester, Massachusetts, home alone, save for a cat (unbilled, and even more inert than Riley...
...Even the dog, a terrier named Riley, seemed listless...
...but Cole Porter used the very same rhyme in "You Do Something to Me" back in 1929...
...These ramshackle dwellings grew until they provided thousands of Lower East Siders with places to breathe country air and eat four Lucullan...
...The last time painless death was so popular in show business, the Great Depression was on everybody's mind...
...Even this was not enough to keep the clientele coming, and eventually the owners added free entertainment...
...The genial Freddie Roman, a 40-year man of the Mountains, opens the program with time-tested patter: "We came back from Mexico on a plane with 300 seats and two toilets...
...Ticketholders who would not be caught alive in the Borscht Belt are lining up to see the same old shtick on Broadway...
...Far more often the result seems as tired as the businessman it is expected to please...
...They will shortly be joined by Nick and Nora, which previewed for months, opened to catcalls and lasted exactly one week at the Marquis Theater...
...His energy level makes Sammy Davis Jr...
...The others must have given new meaning to the word throwaways...
...For as it turns out, she and most of her family were once students of Brackish...
...So he appears to be...
...Miss Saigon) was responsible for the lyrics...
...If the Brooks Atkinson Theater could be metamorphosed into a Masonic temple, it was inevitable that other tummlers would follow...
...His effervescent wife, Nora, tagged along, accompanied by their child-substitute, a dog called Asta...
...Like his male colleagues, Lawrence long ago sized up his audience, and decided to specialize in the problems of failing financial, sexual and digestive powers...
...Every season secondhand stuff will be bought, worked over and advertised as new...
...Thus the tummler was born, and that all-purpose clown was to influence show business for three generations...
...Onstage, GeorgeC...
...Broadway is still dream street...
...People of the Hebrew persuasion were there almost from the beginning (I found a deed granted to one "Jacob the Jew" dated 1753...
...Roman is followed by the show's only goy, Dick Capri: "I had an uncle with ItalianAlzheimer's...
...The Borscht Belt unbuckled more than a decade ago...
...Charles Strouse (Annie) composed the banal music, and he composed a lot of it...
...Employee and employer begin a long war of attrition, complete with sight gags and pseudofolksy lines ^'Saying that you're a hard man to please," gripes the housekeeper, "is like saying a rattlesnake is a hard animal to hug...
...That's whenyouforget everything except a grudge...
...Maltby didn't even ransack the right decade...
...One quote should serve to encapsulate his work...
...When he breathes his last, the music coming over the airwaves is PachelbeF's canon...
...It was a smash...
...Then in 1988 a funny thing happened...
...It should have been the other way around...
...Little Macaulay Culkin dies romantically in his new movie, My Girl...
...Ditto the script, with its coincidences and revelations (Brackish knew Kathleen's mother in all senses of the word...
...Catskills on Broadway is a show for the middle-aged and the middle-aged at heart...
...During the first number Nora challenges Nick to find a rhyme for "voodoo...
...All she wants is a measure of revenge...
...Thousands of hours are spent in libraries and at VCRs, searching for the proven story that can be festooned with melody...
...As Nick, the amiable Barry Bostwick could just about carry a tune across the stage...
Vol. 74 • December 1991 • No. 14
