On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage HOSTS AND PARASITES BY STEFAN KANFER REAL estate and AIDS remain the prime components of New York chatter, and by battening on both subjects Terence McNally has...
...A: His work was too experimental and therefore ahead of its audience...
...G.B.S...
...Patrick Tuli is spirited and funny as the greengrocer...
...Sally harbored incestuous feelings toward her late brother, and Chloe has a similar yen for her brother, Sam (Nathan Lane...
...When the theater flourished so did its backbiter...
...Reverend Bridgenorth (Lee Richardson) provides the epicenter...
...Surely D.H...
...Soon or late, everyone in the play turns from character into monograph, retailing opinions on polygamy, ménages à trois, and prénuptial contracts...
...by A Woman Who Has Done It...
...Inconsistencies surface: Chloe, who boasts nonstop about her starring roles in amateur musicals, unbelievably confuses the overtures of Gypsy and Annie...
...When the ensemble is in working order, though, it can do some needed numbers on the bogus...
...Andtalk...
...Very well then, Forbidden Broadway 19911/2 at the Theater East will range backward and forward in time...
...Cullum...
...Sister-in-law to the greengrocer, she is also Mayoress, anonymous writer of love letters to the bishop, and clairvoyant who can see far into Woman's emancipated future...
...Thespectrum includes a group of highly individual women, plus an army officer, a greengrocer, a gentleman, a snob, and a bishop...
...So far, so familiar...
...A pair of straight couples, John and Chloe Haddock, Sam and Sally Truman, spend the July 4th weekend in a foreign country: Fire Island, 45 minutes from New York City...
...Still, creator/writer/director Gerard Alessandrini is nothing if not game, and his game is nothing if not defamation...
...As the hour grows near, the prospective bride and groom providentially come upon a pamphlet entitled "Do You Know What You Are Going to Do...
...every time someone trots it out and dusts it off, the play's momentum stops in its tracks...
...And, miraculously, the production has not suffered with a 50 per cent change in personnel (because of previous commitments Swoosie Kurtz and Christine Baranski came and went in a month...
...At the Circle in the Square George Bernard Shaw's symposium on coupling is being presented...
...John (Anthony Heald) is suffering from cancer, a catastrophe he refuses to disclose to anyone but his hyper wife Chloe (Deborah Rush), even though he and Sally have been much more intimate—their affair is now banked but smoldering...
...On an arena stage the large cast enlivens the first, static act with brio...
...He was generously providing grounds for divorce so that Leo would be free to marrySt...
...Then she is revealed as the only one who helped her brother die...
...and Jones (Bridey in the overproduced TV version of Brideshead Revisited) and Potter are standouts as a checkmated husband and wife...
...Everyone palavers and no one listens until Mrs...
...All is not perfection...
...One of the bishop's brothers, an ostentatiously uniformed general (Nicholas Coster), believes in marriage, and he sighs of his undying love for the bishop's sister-in-law...
...That lady, perhaps significantly named Lesbia (Victoria Tennant), speaks well of motherhood but cannot tolerate the idea of having a man around the house...
...The current Miss Saigon and the now ancient Phantom of the Opera are properly lampooned not by their texts but by their props, in a street fight between the helicopter and the chandelier...
...An offstage drowning fails to shock or even surprise...
...Sex is only manifested in infidelity...
...hardly enough corpuscles to keep a pest alive...
...For bidding Broadway" would be a sadder but more accurate title...
...After the intermission when matters are supposed to pick up, an irreversible slalom begins...
...For the past decade, Forbidden Broadway has played mosquito to almost every major musical...
...Yet none dip so much as a toe in the swimming pool because the water may contain IT, the disease that kills THEM...
...Proof begins immediately, and the permutations increase...
...Alas, this season offered all of three big productions...
...In order to mock the various productions, Alessandrini always has to receive permission from the creators, a condition analogous to Gary Trudeau getting a note from George Bush before he draws the next Doonesbury installment...
...On Stage HOSTS AND PARASITES BY STEFAN KANFER REAL estate and AIDS remain the prime components of New York chatter, and by battening on both subjects Terence McNally has practically guaranteed himself a hit...
...The two men fight, but at times they lower their guards...
...Its capsule version of Aspects of Love ("I, I sleep with everyone...
...Getting Married was first performed at the Haymarket Theater in 1908...
...Change the key...
...Partly this is Thorson's fault...
...But Reggy is not the cad he appears to be...
...Last time the Pulitzer Committee met, it awarded the theatrical prize to Lost in Yonkers, a comedy with no connection to a recognizable America...
...Suddenly terrified, the couple does what all Shavian characters do: they talk...
...In every passage G.B.S...
...McNally possesses the best ear on or off Broadway...
...With an irony that Shaw might not have appreciated, director Stephen Porter front-loads the comedy...
...Saure is A parasite, rarely stronger than its host...
...Mary Denise Bentley is gorgeous but a bit too languid for lampoonery, and the high voltage Susanne Blakeslee might profit from a soupçon less Carol Burnett in her hugger-muggery...
...Yet no passion accompanies these elective affinities, and no satisfaction attends this failed experiment in plotless comedy...
...The women alternately contend and make up, but they and their husbands are knowledgeable and jocular when it comes to the subject of sex ("all this talk about dildos—I don't think this is what Thomas Jefferson had in mind...
...The playwright has in fact managed to catch the spirit of the age in three quirky acts...
...But the major triumph is McNally's...
...To G.B.S., he said, "marriage is sexless, null...
...For Sally (Roxanne Hart) has been willed the place by her brother David, recently dead of AIDS...
...Must I mend your clothes and sweep your floors as well...
...He offers no special pleading, no finger wagging polemics aimed at the Church, the President or the Governor...
...Lawrence was thinking of Getting Married when he spoke of the "curious blank" in the Shavian makeup...
...And Jeff Lyons' impression of Lea Salonga is almost as adroit as the one he does of Jackie Mason...
...But most of the blame lies with Shaw's anticlimactic feminism: "I gave you eternity in a single moment, strength of the mountains in one clasp of your arms, the volume of all the seas in one impulse of your souls...
...Eight years later the play opened at the Booth Theater on Broadway...
...It is a staple of this kind of drama, pioneered by Edward Albee and polished by his onetime acolyte McNally, that heterosexual unions are every bit as hypocritical, promiscuous and bitchy as those on the opposite side...
...The "It" in this case is marriage, with all the legal, financial and psychological limitations...
...If sex crops up in marriage it is because one party falls in love with somebody else and wants to be unfaithful...
...The difference here is not the figures but the marionetteer...
...But these are small flaws in an exceptional Manhattan Theater Club offering...
...Sally spends many minutes praising David's unseen and saintly lover Aaron, the sole witness to his final throes...
...This is a case of ? minor...
...and he is hilarious as he modulates the score of Les Miz past the point of no return ("God, it's high...
...Splendid woman...
...The inaction takes place in his kitchen, and it is his youngest daughter Edith (Jane Fleiss) who prepares to wed the callow Cecil (J.D...
...Its restaging of the never-surprising Tony Awards comes complete with a citation for Nick and Nora—even though the show will not go on until next season...
...Herndon Lackey sends up the kosher ham Topol in Fiddler on the Roof(" If I sang it...
...assembles agroupofl3 refractions of himself and allows them to pontificate about the institution of marriage...
...Next time it might consider getting its act together for Lips Together...
...The women are not so effective...
...argues that the chains of matrimony are so heavy it takes two to carry them—or better still, three...
...As enchanted as Shaw was with Shaw, he obviously sensed that an excess of such earthbound chatter was the equivalent of Veronal, and late in the day he brings on the protean Mrs...
...But the musical that is most deserving of savagery, The Will Rogers Follies, is scarcely mentioned...
...George delivers the soliloquy that begins as aria and ends as kvetch...
...When a great playwright fails on both sides of the Atlantic it is usually for one of two reasons...
...Richardson is the essence of befuddled dignity...
...This Elizabethan device has been out of style for 400 years with good reason...
...The quartet's fears are not only palpable but plausible, and their abrasive weekend amounts to a journal of the plague years...
...ends with the nude cast wrapped in a single sheet à la Oh Calcutta...
...Ensconced in a beach house they find themselves surrounded by a gay men's chorus, Sondheim fans to the left, opera buffs to the right...
...Will Rogers' collaborators said no, thereby revealing their richly deserved insecurities, and giving new meaning to the term theatrical censorship...
...But there is more to Lips Together, Teeth Apart at the City Center than a shrewd merchandising of contemporary obsessions...
...This song's too high...
...John Hotchkiss (Scott Wentworth), "the snob with a face like a mushroom...
...A paucity of contemporary targets...
...Endlessly...
...So does everyone around them...
...It did not enjoy a long run...
...Do You Know" is not the only pamphlet in Getting Married...
...And finally, long, long after the audience gets the idea, he arranges for several of his couples to become triples...
...Pity me...
...His dialogue, alternately comic, savage and poignant, is wholly convincing: This is the way people really do talk and act and react...
...And talk...
...she lacks the requisite fire and otherworldliness...
...John Lee Beatty's set is brilliant down to the shimmering pool...
...Or B: Something is wrong with the play...
...But it had already begun to seem smirky by 1908, and in 1991 the play has become no more than an Edwardian bibelot best left in the attic...
...McNally attempts some stoptime soliloquys—the action freezes and a character speaks quasi-poetically about life...
...John Tillinger's direction is an ideal mix of sunshine and squall...
...slo-o-o-wer...
...The bishop's other sibling, Reginald (Simon Jones), once abused his wife Leo (Madeleine Potter) and ran off with a streetwalker...
...Although the homosexuals stay out of sight, they remain a presence...
...George (Linda Thorson...
...Its failure in the West End nearly bankrupted the producers...
...When you werealittle boy," Mrs.PatrickCampbelltoldShaw, "somebody ought to have said 'hush' just once...
...No doubt Shaw's wit provided a jolt in fin de siècle England...
Vol. 74 • August 1991 • No. 9
