On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage TOXIC FAMILY VALUES BY STEFAN KANFER Last year at about this time I predicted that the star of Mambo Mouth would be rich and famous. 1 got the outcome of the World Series wrong,...
...I'm Spictorious...
...The magic at the Nederlander Theater consists of very special effects, including six featured players who never appear in person...
...Javier is all too familiar...
...By Jingo if hedoesn'tget$100.000 for his young brother-in-law...
...Ben Edwards' amiable set provides a striking contrast to Kelly's rough construction and predictable gags...
...The youngest, Miguelo ("Miggy") Gigante, is a buck-toothed, hyperkinetic nine-year-old in orange jogging pants, flannel shirt and violent purple knitted hat...
...it has arrived...
...How's that for a surprise...
...Fisher (Richard Woods) shows his disdain by stomping out of the living room whenever Aubrey enters it...
...1925...
...In the matter of John Leguizamo, though, my crystal ball was cloudless...
...By Act Three the show off has been hauled into court for running into a policeman with a borrowed car...
...They plan to do away with their boss, Richard Jannings (Keach), a superrich recluse reminiscent of Howard Hughes...
...Chief among them areConroy(Art Calvin), a black security guard, and Fleischer(Carl Huffman), a villainous accountant...
...Far more challenging are Leguizamo's portraits of mama and papa Gigante...
...The other characters are revelations to the outsider's eye...
...He had," noted Clurman, "perhaps decided that he had no more to say...
...With many a howl and imprecation, the widow Fisher is forced to take in the impoverished couple...
...It features the other Gigantes: his mother, father and three older brothers...
...For his debut he impersonated seven highly differentiated characters...
...The star of Solitary Confinement described the play as "really more a mystery than a thriller, and more a magic show than a mystery...
...The third brother is Javier, afflicted with cerebral palsy, who is bound to a wheelchair...
...Two younger siblings are unseen...
...He even answers the classic conundrum in A lice in Wonderland, "Why is the raven like a writing desk...
...With her Mrs...
...call him "spic," as a neighborhood punk does, and he turns the taunt around...
...He hates the father's aimless existence, his windy self-promotion, but most of all his potency...
...That's why I dropped out of high school...
...Rafael gets off a few aphorisms worthy of Oscar Wilde: "I don't know why people insist on knowing themselves...
...They have long been relegated to the status of antiques, fit for college exhumations and summer stock...
...Take away the Hispanic intonations and he is the centerpiece of My Left Foot, the dwarf in Ship of Fools, the soothsaying cripples of Carson McCullers and Flannery O'Connor...
...Her estranged husband, Felix, is subject to "discount dreams...
...Those are not enough to pull such a creaky vehicle...
...This delightful actress has been working for 45 years, too many of them spent in standup comedy and on TV game shows...
...Carroll is Mrs...
...By the way, the answer to that riddle is, "Because Poe wrote on both...
...But he has no more real sophistication than Willie, the macho bridegroom...
...here he has cut the number by one—but this time they are all members of the same toxic family...
...Carlos Santana once called him a dynamite maracas player...
...Then again, excess is Leguizamo's shtick: He is presenting a world of people who overstate to make themselves heard above the din of the barrio...
...Suffice to say that the cast members are all related, and that playwright Rupert Holmes likes riddles...
...No point in prophesying a brilliant future for him again...
...Mrs...
...Unbeknown to his inlaws, the show off stops by the big company's offices and, straightening his wig and puffing himself up, demands twice the fee...
...The mogul is seen dictating his memoirs and ordering breakfast, but never actually working...
...Willie went off to Desert Storm where, he resentfully recalls, "I shot people with towels on their heads to protect our American way of life...
...Fisher dies in Act Two, possibly pushed to the grave by his bottled-up rage at Aubrey...
...The boy who will never make love to a girl rages, "You're doing what every man has done since the beginning of time...
...Naturally, Amy rushes to the altar, with catastrophic consequences...
...One of those zoids is Miggy's maricon brother Rafael...
...So they should...
...Only once has she reached her true potential, in the title role of Gertrude Stein Ill, though she stopped many a performance of The Merry Wives of Windsor when she played a rumbustious, hilarious and unique Falstaff...
...When we first encounter him, Miggy is presenting a slide show to his fourth grade class in Jackson Heights, Queens...
...Otherwise, "I'll take the Virgin Mary and tie her up, put her in a brown paper bag, and if you ever want to see your mother again you'll do what I tell you...
...What possessed the Roundabout Theater to produce a revival of The Show Off is beyond reckoning—unless it is to give audiences a chance to see Pat Carroll...
...In the '20s it was a cue for the good old deus ex tnachina...
...Pulling on a diet Coke, feeding her latest infant, yapping at a toddler, Gladys runs a laundromat and laments the past ("I had the brains but not the clothes...
...It would be unsporting to give away any of the ingenious yet undernourished plot...
...George Kelly's biggest hits, Craig's Wife and The Show Off, were considered mature and diverting in their day (c...
...Three performances almost redeem the evening: Esterman as the neglected daughter, Hayden as the loved one and, of course, Carroll as their mother...
...Frustrated because he is undersized, he warns Jesus to make him tall...
...In the '90s this is a prescription for matricide or fratricide...
...Amy picks this time to announce her pregnancy...
...Where's my respect...
...The playwright was wiser than his resuscitators...
...Humor is his weapon, his shield, his home...
...The late director and critic Harold Clurman once ran into Kelly in California, many years after he stopped writing...
...Ironically, although this is Leguizamo's most poignant vignette, it is Spic-O-Raina's weakest...
...Leguizamo ignites the Westside Theater like the tail of a comet...
...It is kinder to remember the author as Grace Kelly's uncle than to witness his work...
...if in doubt, mug" seems to be the order of the day...
...Grabbed God by the ears and kissed him smack on the lips...
...The Show Off allows her to display about half of her gifts for serious drama, and a tenth of her comedic skills...
...Amy is smitten with Aubrey Piper (Boyd Daines), a back-slapping, toupee-wearing braggart who talks like a magnate and works as a clerk for the Pennsylvania Railroad...
...For things are not as they appear...
...What he evidently does not enjoy is making his protagonist believable...
...Miggy says he is a genius, and perhaps he is—a comic genius, anyway...
...Katzenjammer figure and expert timing, accepting tragedy as a part of life along with laughter and grandchildren, she grants The Show Off its occasional moments of credibility and grace...
...Clara's husband Frank (Edmund C. Davys) lends him money, and Joe uses Aubrey as a sounding board, telling him of his plans to become a great inventor...
...Brian Murray, an expert farceur when he acts, is far more uncertain when he directs...
...As for Aubrey, his egoistic maunderings have a purpose...
...It is not to be found at the Gigante house, on the street, or in the eyes of his bride-to-be...
...He unloads his problems on an unseen friend, giving hints of a future Xeroxed from his parents' life, full of infidelities, poverty and children...
...Stacy Keach said it best...
...They have found their laureate, and he has found his subject...
...Distress signals to a secretary, Miss Davis (Jane Rollins), and a cook, Girard (Yves Konstantine), are of no avail...
...The generous Frank turns out to be a cold, unloving husband—no wonder Clara is childless...
...It is now the eve of his brother Willie's wedding, and Miggy is not a happy nino: "Carloads of the most nasty freakzoids are gonna come to my house...
...Even Hughes talked to his vice presidents once in a while...
...Mrs...
...I'm gonna run away, and the next time you see me I'll be on the back of a carton of chocolate milk...
...It enlivens the monologues and enriches the season's most astonishing tour de force...
...There is a surfeit of jokes about genitalia, for example, and almost every scene could have been cut by two or three minutes...
...As in Mambo Mouth, Leguizamo offers an album of Latino life in New York today...
...The tinhorn was solid gold underneath...
...The others are seen on a television screen only slightly smaller than a football field...
...The pleasures of Solitary Confinement derive from watching Keach outwit the malefactors, and from William Barclay's dazzling hi-tech set...
...That kind of exaggerated imagery is scattered throughout Spic-O-Rama, glittering like sequins on a dime store dress...
...Desperate to pass for a gringo, he bleaches his hair ("It's urine colored," he sighs to the mirror), affects an English accent and describes himself as the love child of Laurence Olivier...
...But not everyone is so rough on the show off...
...1 got the outcome of the World Series wrong, and my forecast of Ross Perot's popular vote was off by 10 per cent...
...I'm Spictacular...
...The fine is $1,000—exactly $870 more than he makes in a month...
...Marshall W. Mason keeps things moving con brio until the witty curtain calls...
...Fisher (no first name), matriarch of a family with a married daughter, Clara (Laura Esterman), and two unmarried children, Amy (Sophie Hayden) and Joe (Tim De Kay...
...you're every Hernandez and Fernandez...
...Natasha Katz' lighting expands the narrow stage, and Dennis Diamond's rear-screen videos offer some lively glimpses of Queens and its varicolored inhabitants...
...And Joe's experiments turn out to be profitable: He has just concocted a rust preventative, and a big company will pay $50,000 for the patent...
...after his performance, the town's other one-man shows have a subdued, domesticated look...
...His new work, Spic-O-Rama, is Off-Broadway's hottest ticket, and bids have come in from uptown producers as well as Hollywood packagers...
...Jannings is forced to outwit the plotters on his own...
...Loy Arcenas has provided a lively, intricate set that includes a wrecked automobile, a chain link fence, washing machines, and a schoolroom...
...One, Fillip (Samuel Tate), is a disembodied voice...
...Peter Askin's vigorous direction cannot be faulted, but his editing can...
...We have no idea how he came by his zillions...
...Felix everlastingly laments that if only he had forsaken the Gigante family and gone on the road, he "could have played with one of the great Latin rock and rollers...
...By the time Jannings learns of the plot an assassin, Eldridge (Edward Allesandro), is en route to his 5lst-floor suite...
...Fisher warns her daughter not to marry Aubrey...
...Fisher sees right through him, and Mr...
...It's hard enough to know what to wear...
Vol. 75 • November 1992 • No. 14
