From Berlin to Long Island
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage FROM BERLIN TO LONG ISLAND BY STEFAN KANFER Irving Berlin died in 1989 at the age of 101, gifted, beloved and mingy to the end. No matter how many millions he earned, the old man would...
...His parents, Paul and Bunny, inform him that some day there will be a violent revolution in this country, and that he is going to lead it...
...For all through his youth and early manhood, the narrator is assailed by guilt: Abandoning the barricades for the bedroom, Josh feels he has let down the team...
...Josh Kornbluth, scion of radical parents, remembers his mother's disapproval of "Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning...
...Onto Randy Benjamin's inex-cusably hideous set steps a pudgy young man...
...Curtain...
...But after an hour Lucian speaks a little too intimately of manslaughter...
...He is American music...
...Customarily, two paths are open to the children of those who carry placards, attend rallies and fill the air with Marxoid doctrine...
...Janney was particularly effective as a leggy druggie whose blue garment appeared to have been sprayed on ("I feel immortal in this dress"), and Alcott was both plausible and creepy as a deranged villain...
...He calls up a recollection from early childhood...
...None of them are truly happy...
...It is as a writer that he falls short...
...Lucian has an antic charm, and at first the little crowd finds him entertaining, especially when he naively produces a revolver and offers it to Patina...
...The aptly named Hack (Damian Young) natters on about his painting career, while his hyper wife Nyla (Allison Janney) keeps excusing herself to snort another line of coke...
...One of her students is a zaftig housewife...
...Happily, those are exactly the kind of players who enliven Say It With Music...
...Next line...
...He was saving his life...
...Yet no matter how agreeable the performer, no matter how adroit the direction of Josh Mostel, Red Diaper Baby finally avoids much more than it confesses...
...About time...
...Amused, she turns him down...
...After ceaseless effort, he winds up with a knitted door for his room (Bunny will not permit him to have a wooden one), and his first seduction...
...Kaye Ballard, veteran of burlesque, Broadway and nightclubs, is no longer as certain in the low registers as she is in the high ones...
...In Alec Wilder's classic volume, American Popular Song, every major composer receives a scholarly appreciation—save one...
...Among other things, Say It With Music, the anthology at Rainbow and Stars, high atop Rockefeller Center, confirms the lightness of Jerome Kern's remark, "Irving Berlin has no place in American music...
...All three Berlins are represented here...
...Then comes a pivotal moment in adolescence...
...To get close to Marcie, he takes lessons in crocheting...
...Why doesn't she take the Saturday Night Special for protection against urban marauders...
...the other half aspired to Grand Guignol excess, complete with gunshots, gouts of blood, and a beheading...
...Act Two features the elimination of one guest after another, in the ugliest possible manner...
...Next line...
...Coincidentally, Berlin made another appearance Off Broad way this summer in the one-man comedy, Red Diaper Baby...
...As Lucian slices, slits and bludgeons his victims, he speaks of his recent sojourn in a hospital for homicidal maniacs...
...Damned if he would permit so much as one chorus to be quoted in an encyclopedia...
...In Woody Allen's memorable phrase, I have a low threshold for death...
...With the sole exception of Arsenic and Old Lace, now more than 50 years old, I cannot think of a truly pleasing farce that derives its strength from multiple murder...
...we automatically mouth, "Land that I love...
...If you wanted to study his work, you paid good money for the song sheet...
...But a funny thing happens on the way to the insurrection: Paul and Bunny take a detour to Splitsville...
...But the tightrope between horror and humor has always been wobbly, and long before the end the inexperienced playwright and his play lose their balance and crash nastily to earth...
...These constitute a mere fraction of the numbers in Say It With Music...
...The words of a suicidal killer are mined for meaning...
...The philosophy of Charles Manson is parsed: "No sense makes sense...
...Berlin," Wilder laments, "has not given the author permission to use any musical excerpts from his songs...
...From his cell he addressed a crowd of would-be saviors: "I wish you had one neck and I had my hands on it...
...She probably would have had a syncope if she heard Berlin's final rhyme, a suggestion of serial murder: "And then I'll get the other pup/the one who wakes the bugler up/and spend the rest of my life in bed...
...The evening begins without a hint of promise...
...In years to come, other conquests follow, including one aboard a train in Russia...
...The author/performer never dares to pose the question because there is nothing amusing about it...
...It occurs on the day Josh attends a writers' workshop, run by Bunny in the living room...
...Alan Jay Lerner, lyricist of My Fair Lady, was one of the last to praise his colleague's "disarming simplicity...
...Kornbluth has chosen the latter route...
...All are hilariously recounted...
...She thought the words were far too bellicose for young ears: "Some day I'm going to murder the bugler/some day they're going to find him dead...
...Irving's top hat could never top that...
...Irving the Second went Hollywood for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers ("Isn't this a Lovely Day to Be Caught in the Rain...
...You're the top," goes Cole Porter's famous list of superlatives, "You're a Waldorf salad/You're the top/You're a Berlin ballad...
...Jason Graae, in what amounts to the juvenile lead, caroms irrepressibly from corner to corner like a featherweight boxer en route to a title...
...Steam forms on Josh's glasses when he gazes at her...
...Too bad...
...Rounding out this repellent sextet is an uninvited drop-in, Lucian, played right by the playwright...
...Alcott has a fine ear and an experimental spirit...
...Under the no-nonsense direction of Randy Rollison the game cast did what it could with such grisly material...
...Strangely enough, he never put the praise as well as his main competitor...
...The host, Wes (Frank Deal), contributes very little besides drinks and finger food...
...The show overflows with surprise and whimsy...
...His heroes are all mass murderers-and all white men, one of many arch ironies...
...Lucian's observation," I think I would have been good at government work," after the dismemberment of a victim, is a fair-sample of the wit in Act II...
...Because of this vast range, Berliniana needs interpreters who can express the boisterous and the delicate, the comic and the catch in the throat...
...Director Neal Kenyon has found ways of expanding a stage only slightly larger than a paperback...
...As Say It With Music amply demonstrates, Berlin was about as simple as a Byzantine chapel...
...he has heard it all before...
...Irving the Conqueror, ne Israel Baline from Mohilev, Russia, paved Tin Pan Alley ("Always," "Say It With Music," "Alexander's Ragtime Band," "Puttin' on the Ritz...
...In consequence, all the examples illustrating specific musical analyses have had to be deleted...
...The same holds true for "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas...
...When the others express their nervous irritation he draws his pistol...
...Her yuppie husband Guy (David Thornton) listens with half an ear...
...It is Stalin's last laugh...
...The youth retreats into a progressive school world, organizing his fellow students and encouraging them to finger paint in Social Realism style...
...You said it...
...No matter how many millions he earned, the old man would never let anyone near the small change...
...There were no exceptions...
...If they are presented a little too hurriedly, without narrative or reprises, it hardly matters...
...How about "I'll be loving you always...
...Top Hat, White Tie and Tails," "Cheek to Cheek," "Change Partners," "Let's Face the Music and Dance...
...his wife has just left him and he has retreated into sullen self-pity...
...And baritone Ron Raines and soprano Liz Callaway provide the proper resonance and respect for the cranky genius who made all this possible...
...In his day such musical sophistication was found in the concert hall, not the dance hall...
...Still, there are few chanteuses who can wring more meaning out of a couplet...
...Berlin's melodies and lyrics have long been stored in the national memory bank...
...An infinite amount of hyperbole has been written about America's most popular composer—including some by the tunesmith himself...
...Only now, three years after the Master's death, have his executors allowed a medley of his songs to be performed Off Broadway...
...On it, a trio of merry instrumentalists are joined by an even more exuberant quartet of singers...
...The kid who forsook such a background was not storing up memories for standup comedy...
...Goodbye politics, hello sex...
...Todd Alcott's One Neck was the most schizophrenic Off Broadway production of the summer...
...One half offered a wry take on the way we live now...
...They either pass on the Left, speeding to some new and outrageous destination (Kathy Boudin comes to mind), or else they jettison the ideological baggage and become independent thinkers, often of the droll persuasion...
...At a Long Island dinner party, Patina (Melissa Hurst) bombinates about "our dusky brothers" who cause so much social disturbance in New York City...
...The only thing I got from Group," the assassin recalls, "was some pointers on technique...
...Guy runs for help and Lucian shoots him in the back...
...Exactly: "Just like the ones I used to know...
...Kornbluth is 32...
...Marcie is politically incorrect and better at crocheting than writing, but who cares...
...Throughout Act One all is talk, some of it quite diverting...
...Irving the Great ruled Broadway with shows like Annie Get Your Gun and Call Me Madam ("Doin' What Comes Natur'lly," "It's a Lovely Day Today," "I Got the Sun in the Morning and the Moon at Night...
...Berlin was just as ungenerous about cabaret...
...He never learned to read a note, but he could begin "Let's Face the Music and Dance" (1932) in a moody C minor, hit an Enatural in the eighth measure, and then slide dramatically into C major...
...When someone sings "God Bless America," for instance, no one has to whisper the next line...
...It is a fatal error...
...That would make Paul and Bunny unabashed Communists in 1964, eight years after Nikita Khrushchev's famous denunciations, and a generation after the Moscow trials and the Ribbentrop pact...
...What kind of fools were these...
Vol. 75 • August 1992 • No. 10
