On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage STAR WARS BY STEFAN KANFER GRAHAM Greene predicted that long after the war was over, Americans would be paying a high price for their Vietnam adventure. He was right. They are now...
...Still, even Harris is not unlimited...
...The star's long career is filled with distinction...
...and the Act II opener, an exploitative film clip of biracial orphans, rips off every Jerry Lewis telethon...
...A good thing, too...
...They are now spending $ 100 a ticket for Miss Saigon at the Broadway Theater...
...Harry Houdini is yet another faded name now appearing on Broadway at the Eugene O'Neill Theater...
...That show allows patrons to grieve over the 19th-century poor of Paris while stepping over the 20th-century homeless on Manhattan's Eighth Avenue...
...Or so he thinks...
...Hissing his temptations, flicking out his tongue and coiling before he strikes, The Engineer all but sheds his skin as he slithers away with the show...
...So is his producer, Gary Peter Lefkowitz, hilariously played by Alan Arkin's son, Adam...
...The headliners, Perm and Teller, are the best kind of deconstructionists: They make things vanish, then repeat the effect slowly to show how it was achieved...
...A trail of Vietnamese refugees recalls the displaced peasants in Fiddler on the Roof, a balcony scene between Kim and Chris is straight out of West Side Story...
...Long ago, the Boulevard farce ruled the rialto...
...Her lover, Denys Finch-Hatton, was not a blond humanitarian on the order of Robert Redford, who played him in the movie...
...Julie Harris, one of the theater's remaining grandes dames, impersonates Karen Blixen, better known as Isak Dinesen...
...She has won five Tony awards, more than any other performer, playing an enormous range of female leads—from a 12-year-old (Member of the Wedding) to St...
...he has long since returned to a civilian life and a blonde wife, Ellen (Liz Callaway...
...Chris knows nothing about his child...
...At his side is Salonga, who has the phrasing of Streisand—with a far greater emotional range...
...He was a white hunter who helped to push species onto the endangered list...
...For three years Kim defiantly survives the Vietcong takeover, if only to protect her little boy...
...To the bicoastal vulgarian, money is life's report card...
...and Battle, previously celebrated for his dancing, who projects the ardor of a gospel singer...
...Today that genre has been replaced by the Condo comedy, a one-set affair occurring high above the plastic garbage bags and crimeinhibiting street lights...
...a helicopter landing and takeoff is prodigious...
...No wonder the French want to hector us about modern military catastrophe in Southeast Asia...
...It occurred to them that the New York and road companies could give employment to scores of minority performers...
...The opening bar of "Why, God, Why...
...In fact, it is the observation of a shrewd theater analyst...
...On one level, I Hate Hamlet is a reworking of Woody Allen's Play It Again, Sam, in which the shade of Bogart gave lessons in Seduction 101 toayoungfan...
...the orchestral arrangements are sumptuous, and the star has no equal on Broadway...
...For anyone who has trouble translating the Gallic version of history, Stanley Karnow's definitive Vietnam should prove instructive...
...Harris picks up the story almost 50 years later, on New Year's Eve 1958, as the Baroness is about to leave for a lecture tour of America...
...She is now an anorexic old lady, chatting amiably about her childhood, her servants and such literary admirers as Marilyn Monroe...
...The comedy has a pleasant mix of uncertain young talent and old pros, and it contains a storehouse of laughter...
...could have been lifted bodily from the 1936 Rodgers and Hart song, "There's a Small Hotel...
...Harris displays her subject in the manner of an astronomer showing the moon's orbit: The dark side is always out of view...
...Those in charge of the production, he declared, "could have had something really extraordinary, they really could have let it take of f to the moon...
...The real Isak Dinesen was conniving and manipulative to the end...
...Barrymore knows better...
...But it could have taken flight...
...He contrives to bring husband, wife, girl friend and child together for some difficult choices and a tragic finale...
...Director Michael Engler has limited Broadway experience—Mastergate, an outrageous political comedy, bombed last year—and here, at least, caution has become his subtext...
...Barrymore was pure Smithfield ham, but Williamson is seldom allowed to go over the top...
...The Baroness' first betrayal was self-induced: She married an aristocrat for whom she had little feeling in order to assume his tide...
...Andrew's agent, Lillian (Celeste Holm), wants him to do Hamlet in Central Park...
...In both acts bathos reigns supreme, interrupted by the galvanic entrances of Pryce...
...As for Hamlet, what is it but algebra for the stage...
...Nevertheless, Williamson is right...
...Despite Harris' halting attempts at a Danish accent, Karen seems the kind of gossipy, name-dropping biddy you might find at a Palm Springs retirement home...
...Her most effective roles have featured quavering, wide-eyed ingenues...
...Surrounding them are the victims and predators of conflict: soldiers, businessmen, hookers, and below all a Eurasian pimp known only as The Engineer (Jonathan Pryce...
...1 cannot imagine any performer, of any race, who could establish a persona so convincingly...
...In turn, that notorious womanizer presented his wife with syphilis that eventually killed her...
...One could blame playwright William Luce for an absence of truth, except that the work was commissioned by Harris herself...
...For Andrew to seek a career in New York means a future of Chekhov on folding chairs...
...The collaborators update her attitude with a number called "My American Dream," a parody of stateside excess that concludes with Pryce date-raping a huge chrome and cream sedan...
...Occidental and Oriental fall in love, share a few delirious days, then get separated during the fall of the city...
...But these assets are repeatedly squandered...
...Joan (The Lark) to Emily Dickinson (The Belle of Amherst...
...Lucifer's Child, at the Music Box, also employs a live star to play a dead one...
...Streep played the thirtysomething Karen coffee farming with her faithless husband in Kenya, and indulging in a doomed romance before going home to reinvent herself as a Danish Scheherazade...
...Postwar an old buddy, John (Hinton Battle), learns the truth...
...This will come as no surprise to those who have witnessed Les Misérables, also written by the monotone composer Claude-Michel Schönberg, and his banal lyricist Alain Boublil...
...That ultimatum wonderfully concentrated the minds of the union leaders...
...The implication is clear: Vietnam's anguish, its neon bars and materialistic B-girls, its ravaged past and bitter present were all born in the U.S.A...
...She throws away some of Dinesen's best lines and chatters endlessly and inanely about her wardrobe...
...In this one a television actor, Andrew Rally (Evan Handler), moves into the former digs of John Barrymore...
...The last time we saw this writer of elegant gothic tales she was represented by Meryl Streep in Out of Africa, the phoniest portrait of an author since Warren Beatty's masquerade of John Reed in Reds...
...Fred Allen once spoke of a man whose hobby was collecting old echoes...
...But neither of them ever sold T-shirts at the exits...
...In the process they add fresh fillips of mystery...
...Pryce is the one who triggered the famous controversy last winter...
...Hate Hamlet deserves to run...
...Here Lieutenant Pinkerton is Chris (Willy Falk), a GI stationed in Vietnam during the Walpurgisnacht of 1975...
...Although some lyrics and "additional material" have been contributed by Richard Maltby Jr., Schönberg and Boublil are principally responsible for this latest in a long parade of French anti-American entertainments...
...But Andrew is terrified of Shakespeare...
...Lucifer's Child wants no part of this...
...Even after the house lights go on a surprise is in store...
...He would have prized this musical...
...It seems almost churlish to point out that the music is derivative, the lyrics are out of the Hallmark school of poetry, the plot is incredible, and the project is morally dubious...
...Those extinct celebrities were all very well in their way...
...Their latest work, aMadame Butterfly for the '90s, sets new standards for hypocrisy...
...Marguerite Duras' smug polemic, Hiroshima, mon amour set the tone back in 1959...
...Director Nicholas Hytner and choreographer Bob Avian keep the echoes reverberating...
...On her American tour she took amphetamines in order to provide enough energy to dominate dinner parties...
...This sounds like the ravings of a disappointed man who wanted more and bigger moments...
...And "The Last Night of the World" is, to put it charitably, reminiscent of Leroy Anderson's decades-old instrumental, "Serenata...
...From films like Brazil and Baron Munchausen to such plays as Comedians, this unique British character actor has displayed a genius for making audiences squirm while he beguiles them...
...As Penn and Teller proceed to demonstrate, the theater has progressed mightily since the epoch of Houdini and Barrymore...
...Williamson recently went on record concerning Paul Rudnick's play...
...In the process he dispenses some wise shop talk...
...Seatholders get a big return on their investment...
...Pirouetting 180 degrees, Equity conceded that the Pryce was right...
...The chorus line is long, fullthroated and gorgeous...
...They invented it...
...No doubt it is unwise to let an actor become a critic (and vice versa...
...Alternately bawdy, boozy and poignant, The Great Profile convinces Andrew to opt for the Melancholy Dane...
...Parts of his old act can be seen in The Refrigerator Tour, an amalgam of screwball comedy, magic and absurdity...
...Alas, America may be responsible for much Southeast Asian misery, but there is more than enough blame to go around...
...The year was 1946, the place Haiphong, the speaker General Etienne Valluy...
...Heading chapter four is an epigraph: "If those gooks want a fight they'll get it...
...A star turn cannot save Miss Saigon, but it rescues I Hate Hamlet at the Walter Kerr Theater...
...Producer Cameron Mackintosh refused: Either his man headlined on Broadway, as he had in London, or the curtain would never go up...
...Actually, Barrymore's ghost (Nicol Williamson) still inhabits the premises, invisible to Andrew's veggie, virginal girl friend Felicia Dantine (Caroline Aaron...
...Cio-Cio San is Kim (Lea Salonga), an orphan of the war, forced to become a prostitute in the tumultuous sinkhole of Saigon...
...If only geopolitics were as simple as lyrics like "You will not touch him, don't touch my boy/he's what I live for, he's my only joy...
...Andrew's nasal Method acting, for example, is succinctly put down: "We mustn't mistake truth for asthma...
...The demonic Lucifer's Childis not on her waif length...
...The second level is more serious, hence funnier...
...Actors Equity demanded that an Asian assume the star role...
Vol. 74 • April 1991 • No. 5
