On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage THE LAST ROUNDUP BY STEFAN KANFER True patriots all, for be it understood We left our country for our country's good... And none will doubt but that our emigration Has prov'd...
...small wonder her adventures have become a feminist favorite (I have yet to meet a man who read the tale in childhood...
...Flo loved the ladies, but he believed in laughs...
...Patinkin, as usual, vibrates a little too ostentatiously for his role...
...From a cossetted life in India she is abruptly returned to Yorkshire where her uncle Archibald (Mandy Patinkin) maintains a gloomy foreboding estate...
...Director Tommy Tune makes everything move with brio...
...Even so, this simple-mindedness has its moments...
...At the center, Frechette can do little more than radiate an earnest decency...
...sitting in a box throughout the performance urging Will to go up and get killed...
...Nor is the drama about sexism and racism, for all its rapid changes of gender and color...
...An excellent replacement has since been found...
...it tells us that Rogers perished in a 1935 plane crash and even has the fatal pilot, Wiley Post (Paul Ukera Jr...
...Later, James Thurber was able to look at Will without tears: "The bosom friend of senators and congressmen was about as daring as an early Shirley Temple movie...
...He also had an endless variety of other acts to dazzle the eye and beguile the time, ranging from elephants to jugglers...
...In a musical version of any classic—especially a children's classic—pretty is never enough...
...In this case the stage truly is the world...
...Brutalized since their slum childhoods, these born losers know all about the fallacies of hope...
...2) Tell 'em...
...But during one moving duet, "In Lily'sEyes,"whenhe and his brother Neville (Robert Westenberg) realize they were in love with the same woman, the musical reaches an operatic plane...
...3) Tell 'em what you told 'em...
...Without exception every scene follows the plan given to entrylevel sitcom writers: (1) Tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em...
...Christopher Barreca's superb settings are timeless and placeless...
...Essentially, it is about the power of good theater...
...But it is now more than 100 years later, and in Edwardian England cruelty arises from circumstance, not policy...
...The scantily clad Ziegfeld girls, with 32 of the longest legs in the Western Hemisphere, are led by a spectacular beauty (Cady Huffman) who could have stepped from a Petty Girl calendar of 1936...
...The number suggests what might have occurred had the rest of Lucy Simon's music been equal to the task of tragedy, rebirth and celebration...
...for one number he even sits the chorus down and creates a showstopper with the use of nothing but hands and hats...
...The event became famous and the above prologue, supposedly written by a jailbard, touched many hearts...
...When Rogers went to the last roundup, there came a great outpouring of sentiment for the Oklahoma philosopher who never met a man he didn't like...
...Peter Stone's narrative is to most musical books what a baseball card is to a baseball game...
...Australia's gloom is illuminated by ensemble energy, and its population redeemed by art...
...The Will Rogers Follies has a fine lasso artist and a sad little dog act...
...Players kept leaping out of character to billboard the next scene with titles concerning "The Savage" or "The Authorities...
...Susan H. Schulman's direction and Michael Lichtefeld's choreography add to the enchantment, shuttling easily between the formal and the fantastic...
...It makes contemporary references to the recession and the helicopter in Miss Saigon...
...a line aimed at any potential throat-clearers in the audience...
...Yet the script keeps reminding us that this is a Thirties Ziegfeld show, complete with disembodied instructions from Flo himself, voiced for no discernible reason by Gregory Peck...
...No one can accuse The Will Rogers Follies of a tune shortage...
...An irrepressible comedy breaks into the drama...
...Lieutenant Ralph Clark (Peter Frechette) attempts to civilize his charges by directing them in a Restoration play...
...Garden's book and lyrics were written by Marsha Norman...
...But director Mark Lamos has evoked just the right timing and grit from those who surround him—particularly the women—and Poe is a standout in the dual roles of governor and artist in the rough...
...That is about the only irony left untouched by the creators of Our Country's Good, adapted from Thomas Keneally's novel, The Playmaker...
...Like all such locales in English fiction, the manor contains many weird elements...
...Then, as the weeks grind on, the novices begin to identify with their roles...
...When I saw the original production in England last year I was impressed by the vigorous performances, and dismayed by playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker's attempts at echt Brecht...
...At first he is greeted with derision, not only by fellow officers but by convicts who resent the hard labor of rehearsals...
...Heidi Landesman is both co-producer and set designer, and she seems to have denied herself nothing...
...Her most celebrated previous work is 'Night, Mother, a drama about the suicide option...
...Item: Last month, during a dueling scenein I Hate Hamlet, Nicol Williamson administered a few ad-lib whacks to the co-star he had disliked from day one...
...Sophie Tucker worked for him...
...By the time the curtain rises on their production, at the very moment it descends at the Nederlander Theater, everyone and everything has been altered for the better —including Broadway...
...Despite Wertenbaker's radical posturing, Our Country's Good is not really about politics: Who needs to be reminded that King George Ill's Britain was a wellspring of oppression and hypocrisy...
...Instead of their usual exchange of threats and insults, the new actors quarrel about motivations, meanings and the size of their roles...
...For there is no story here, no conflict, no growth, no believable characters...
...Cy Coleman could probably set the Land's End catalogue to music and make it hummable...
...When the set is the most appealing part of this Garden, something vital is lacking: namely melody...
...nothing more and nothing less...
...I'm a Democrat," and "Mr...
...Of all the contributors, Barreca comes closest to realizing the subtext of the play...
...A Jewish prisoner (Richard Poe) discovers that language is the one place where he is allowed to roam freely, and becomes an amateur poet...
...And none will doubt but that our emigration Has prov'd most useful to the British nation...
...To call it elemental would be flattery...
...His skeletal convict ship suggests the beached whale that disgorged Jonah...
...This one is about the sunny side option...
...In-jokes abound: One convict explodes, "People who don't pay attention should not go to the theater...
...Ziegfeld has spent millions of dollars on costumes so I can't figure out why he don't let the girls wear 'em...
...He whispers of a long-shuttered grove...
...As a convict cries under the lash, a group of English outcasts land at the open air jail Down Under...
...The rest of the time the ladies wiggle in and out, and Mrs...
...The Will Rogers Follies is all wrong in the Palace Theater, once the mecca of real two-a-day vaudeville...
...As Mary's late aunt, Luker combines ethereal beauty with a powerful cabaret voice...
...My quarrel with this final musical of the season is its arena...
...En route she matures, raises her cousin from his sickbed, and contrives to heal Archibald of his grief...
...Heading the cast, 11-year-old Eagan has all the attributes of freshness and none of the tricks of cuteness...
...sickness can be healed with a good attitude, and death only means that you dance in twilight instead of sunlight, and sing in a minor key instead of a major...
...Affirmation is the operative theme...
...His Majesty's imperialism also serves as a backdrop for The Secret Garden, adapted from Frances Hodgson Burnett's durable bestseller...
...nooses dangle overhead like stalactites in some vast and primal cave...
...Will (Dee Hoty) and their four children watch Rogers get celebrated in New York, Hollywood and Washington D.C...
...The same applies to his show...
...Two centuries ago George Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer was enacted by an all-convict cast in Sydney...
...Mary finds the key and oversees the greening of this withered patch of earth...
...This was Williamson's first attempt at theater criticism...
...It also has a pious and inflated notion of its hero...
...Few people knew then— or know now—that it was composed years afterward by a London hack...
...Quite a girl, Mary...
...Fields, and others too humorous to mention...
...Imaginative cross-casting, though, almost rescued the stop-and-start production: Performers doubled (and sometimes tripled) as illiterate felons and haughty aristocrats, an actress impersonated a female convict and a male minister, a black was an aborigine and a white captain...
...A hellcat with broken teeth (Cherry Jones), who is to be executed for insubordination, picks up a makeshift fan and learns to carry herself like a noblewoman...
...Throughout, this Follies wants it both ways...
...I suspect the real Ziegfeld would applaud the opulent musical numbers and then quote Ronald Reagan: "Where's the rest of me...
...so did Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice, W.C...
...Yet one overseer refuses to dismiss them out of hand...
...It should be in Radio City Music Hall, the place where green kids and out-of-towners confuse high-kick precision with choreography, and glitz with gold...
...The child of colonial civil servants, little Mary (Daisy Eagan) loses her parents during a cholera epidemic...
...It was not enough to let the hideous penal colony speak for itself...
...Livid, Evan Handler walked off in the middle of the first act and never returned...
...just Will twirling a rope and delivering some of his most anthologized and toothless remarks: "I'm not a member of any organized party...
...A scene on the moon has so many lame jokes that when a tolerable one is spoken—"There's a full earth tonight"—the mirth has wholly dissipated...
...Mary's idealized surroundings are reminiscent of Pollock's Toy Theaters, well-known to every British child, and the finished garden might have been shipped wholesale from Oz...
...Betty Comden and Adolph Green have supplied him with pleasant, professional lyrics, and as America's Poet Lariat, Keith Carradine makes an appealing social commentator...
...With any luck it will be his last...
...They include the ghost of Archibald's wife, Lily (Rebecca Luker), who died in childbirth, and their crippled son Colin (John Babcock), who has never been out in the daylight...
...The American production retains the Royal Court's style and narrative, and shrewdly discards its ideological straitjacket...
...Playing the heroine, a dish-faced prostitute (Tracey Ellis) assumes a new beauty and dignity...
...Initially confused and resentful, Mary starts to blossom at the hands of a benign household staff, led by the gardener, Ben (Tom Toner...
Vol. 74 • May 1991 • No. 6
