On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage LOOKING BACKWARD BY STEFAN KANFER Neil Simon's 26th stage play, Lost in Yonkers, at the Richard Rodgers Theater, could operate under many of his previous titles. The Odd...
...Director Richard Jones, who has done a lot of work in the opera houses of England, treats La Bête as a procession of arias and set pieces...
...That is not how shows earn big ratings or theater parties...
...Theother, Valere (Tom McGowan), is La Bête, The Beast, a gross and self-infatuated nobody who substitutes chutzpah for talent...
...Set in the foppish court of 17thcentury France—and written in rhymed couplets no less—it found room on Broadway because of a name sitting at the highest point on the marquee: "coproduced by Andrew Lloyd Webber...
...Fair enough: David Hirson's idea of dramaturgy is a cascade of monologues punctuated by heavy breathing...
...The others are forced to act adorable and warped, a dual assignment that would defeat all but a handful of stars...
...The kangaroo court orders him out of town...
...At a timeof strangulated budgets, 29 actors are featured in this production, and every one of them embodies William Blake's dictum that energy is eternal delight...
...In Act Two Jim is put on trial before a gaggle of sunny Baptists and uptight Methodists...
...Speaking of vulgarity, McGowan seems vastly amused at his own music hall postures and sitcom mugging, yet whatever laughter he engenders dissipates as fast as it gathers...
...No, it must have been the dénouement...
...Solution: Park them with his mother in Westchester...
...The Prince embraces it, his sycophants fall in line and Elomire is forced to leave...
...The pleasures, though, are not in the text...
...One daughter can scarcely aspirate in her presence...
...Mule Bone, at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, is politically incorrect...
...Grandma has buried two of her six children and tyrannized the remaining four...
...In Act Two, Valere presents his own fatuous farce within the farce...
...Accordingly their play, based on Hurston's short story, is as elemental as a recipe for collard greens...
...Cumsty has the jutting look of a colonel at a CNN briefing...
...These are performances well calculatedforTonynominations...
...She is an imperious and misanthropic German Jew in sensible shoes...
...Happily, two of them are in Lost in Yonkers, and Director Gene Saks elicits bravura performances from both...
...Onesonisa gangster, and Eddie is so repressed that even his wardrobe is clenched...
...The young brothers—yet another narcissistic echo of Neil Simon and his brother Danny—are basically there to recite an anthology of excellent Grandma jokes...
...With three musicals running in New York and four onstage in London's West End, Lloyd Webber could afford to produce King Lear starring the British royal family...
...The playwright gives an impassioned "either he goes or I go" ultimatum, His Majesty provokes acontest, and the rivals spend the rest of the evening in a crossfire of iambics and aphorisms...
...Like the Kurnitz children, he wants to be amusing but aches to be loved...
...An occasional Pope-ish line turns up: "Beware of those who laud you to the skies / It is themselves they wish to lionize...
...That face in the crowd is James Earl Jones' father, Robert...
...The first, Elomire(Michael Cumsty)—an anagram of Molière—is a famousplaywright/impresario...
...He has also created marble busts of Greek philosophers who swivel on cue, turning their backs on some of the show's vulgarities...
...If narrative were all, Mule Bone would deserve to be exiled as well...
...Richard Hudson's ingenious set features walls, sconces and a giant chandelier tilted, like most of 17th-century Europe, at a wondrously bizarre angle...
...Conti petulantly demands that Elomire take the fraud into his troupe...
...Scrupulous direction and an irrepressible cast have finally given Mule Bone the production it deserves...
...The truly lost are the simpleton, Bella (Mercedes Ruehl), and her misanthropic Mama...
...Director Michael Schultz never allows a scintilla of condescension...
...the hilarious "lawyers" for the prosecution and defense, Arthur French and Leonard Jackson, are abetted by some gifted veterans of the Negro Ensemble Company...
...Here, if nowhere else, La Bête, which opened at the Eugene O'Neill Theater February 10, defied convention...
...And yet there are some things to admire in the belly of this Beast...
...The key to most theatrical enterprises lies in the names below the title: author, director, stars...
...But that would require darker colors, and given Simon's yearnings and earnings, it is about as likely as his getting lost on 45th Street...
...Hence the bluebird finale in which all comes right, even for Bella and Grandma...
...Whyshould we ask for more...
...The lumber is brought on, the power tools plugged in, and a tongue and groove construction rises before our eyes...
...Still more banal is the punchline...
...Kurnitz (Irene Worth) is not your average old lady in sensible shoes...
...It would be intriguing if this prolific craftsman ever confronted the real consequences and pains of dislocation...
...the other is a damaged 35-year-old who will never be more than a child...
...But when all the ironies and editorials have come and gone he proves to be the winner, fooling a ruler, foiling his foes and weeping all the way to the banque...
...Grandma'ssentiments were extinguished long ago, and now she moves with the bulk and authority of anguished old age, exhibiting no weakness but her lame leg —until the face-offs with Bella and Louie...
...No pine detritus, no severed thumbs—but no breakthroughs in design, either...
...Surely that could not have been enough to attract the world's busiest composer...
...Once again he has come up with a situation tragedy and then papered it over in pastel shades...
...Well, for one thing the script must have seemed irresistible: period settings, duels fought in rhymes instead of by swords, and above all a triumph of veneer over substance...
...Hughes and Hurston intended to "act out the folk tales, with the abrupt angularity and naïveté of the primitive' bama Nigger...
...In the court of the gynandrous Prince Conti (Dylan Baker), two figures vie for favor...
...Irene Worth is the black hole of this family constellation, her gravity so dense that it pulls in light...
...The Odd Couple would suffice...
...Both men are as much at war with the text as with each other, and they are not helped at all by a cast of exaggerated archetypes: the camping aristocrat, the zombie servants, the trimmer, the fop...
...It must have been that, as Monsieur drew nearer, The surface of La Bête became a mirror...
...A guitarist, Jim (Kenny Neal), and a dancer, Dave (Eric Ware), fight over a beautiful young woman (Akosua Busia...
...they come from Taj Mahal's lilting score, and from a spirited and sensitive ensemble...
...Its protagonists refer to themselves as Negroes, say things like "Chile, if you listen at folkses talk, they'll have you in de graveyard or in Chatahooche," and when its village folk are depressed or excited they burst into song...
...Alas, Mrs...
...Sonny Jim Gaines, who has written better plays than this for the New Lafayette, here is content to animate the role of a local loudmouth...
...Inaplaythatnotonlytakes place in 1942but seems to have been written then, a family struggles to stay nuclear...
...so would Promises, Promises, or Fools...
...That constitutes the emblem of Lloyd Webber, marking everything from his hyperthyroid retelling of the Gospels (Jesus Christ Superstar) to his pastiche of Puccini (Phantom of the Opera), and it can be seen fluttering above every aspect of this smug production...
...There are small parts but no undersized performances: TheresaMerritt was apowerful Ma Rainey years ago, and as a townswoman she becomes the lyrical, throaty Ma all over again...
...And so we have Lloyd Webber's motivation— A reason for admiring this creation...
...It wasn't for the rhyming gags and curses (The lowly critics can produce such verses...
...To please ticketholders, Simon offers them everything except the truth...
...Translation: In art, the cheap drives out the good —an insight presented as if Hirson had just bitten into the original apple and found the world's first worm...
...Yet he chose La ßeie Why...
...As their crooked uncle Louie, Kevin Spacey proves to be one of those rare actors who can be funny and malevolent, particularly in his acetylene curtain speech...
...the work seems to have been deliberately preserved in an ice floe so that it could be melted some fine night at the Barrymore...
...Eddie Kumitz (Mark Blum), a recent widower, is forced to become atraveling salesman...
...Ruehl's Bella bends like a folding ruler, ungainly yet accurate as she measures her mother's sins...
...Although this "Comedy of Negro Life" was awarded a major grant from the Fund for New American Plays, the work is in fact 60 years old...
...None of the Kurnitzes, however, has his or her bearings (non compass mentis is my diagnosis...
...Never mind...
...Nevertheless, it is the season's most rewarding exhumation...
...Watching Simon work with this material is like viewing Bob Vila on reruns of This Old House...
...Ostensibly the bewildered of the title are Jay and Artie...
...True, Valere is a Philistine...
...Its authors, Längsten Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, had a falling out in 1930, and it has taken this long for scholars to pick up the pieces...
...In the course of combat, Dave gets bopped upside the head with a mule bone...
...An audience can always relax in Simon's presence: He unfailingly produces mirth, and he never shoots off a gun in our ears or makes us brood about the cast of characters after we have left thetheater...
...Problem: What to do with his two young sons, Jay and Artie (Jamie Marsh and Danny Gerard), while he is on the road...
...If one 10,000-candlepower grin seems eerily familiar, but older than you remembered, look again...
Vol. 74 • February 1991 • No. 3
