On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage MINING THE MASTERS BY STEFAN KANFER THE SPECTERS of Fred Astaire and Claudio Monteverdi are currently haunting Broadway. Astaire's footprints are all over Crazy for You, a restyling of...
...Elyot admits that he has gone around the globe to forget Amanda, all the way to the Far East...
...The reply catches in his throat...
...a big band could deplete all but the deepest pockets...
...Hayden is one of the few Rosabellas with an experienced face: She looks as if she might actually know what to serve the party at table three...
...The superannuated plot is revivified by all this professional excellence...
...And his...
...His six-volume autobiography is another matter...
...In other words, opera...
...The writer liked to disguise his ambitions: Despite its cascade of songs and brief speeches, he protested, The Most Happy Fella was not opera...
...His dramatic works have become a permanent part of Irish theatrical history...
...Joan Collins at bay...
...I found it mawkish and interminable, and so did George Orwell...
...As preserved as Collins is, she could hardly have a fortyish gentleman playing opposite her...
...Or in this case off-Broadway...
...Melodies are interpolated from other Gershwin shows, among them "The Real American Folk Song is a Rag" from Ladies First (1918), "Someone to Watch Over Me" from Oh, Kay...
...The musical, based on Sidney Howard's drama They Knew What They Wanted, opened in 1956 and played 678 performances...
...He replies tightly, "Mine hasn't started yet...
...Collins, the undisputed lodestar of TV's Dynasty, is by her own admission 58...
...Malas, a veteran of the Metropolitan and New York City Operas, plays and sings with absolute conviction...
...Can the arena be saved...
...Responsibility can be laid at the feet of the man who insisted on substituting two pianos for a full orchestra (Frank Loesser...
...In "Slap That Bass," pieces of rope serve as a string section...
...A problem arose...
...That was what helped to vault Loesser' s show over its competition (except for My Fair Lady, which opened the same season...
...Astaire's footprints are all over Crazy for You, a restyling of George and Ira Gershwin's 1930 production . The original book by Guy Bolton and John McGowan has been heavily rewritten by Ken Ludwig without any discernible improvement...
...The musical theater has progressed a great deal since then...
...Veddy big, the intentions...
...If one has to choose a star it is none of the Seans, but Pauline Flannagan as O'Casey's gruff and empathetic mother, traveling full sail against misery, willing her afflicted son to triumph...
...All 678 were accompanied by 35 instrumentalists making the most of brass, strings and percussion...
...Manifestly the comedy comes not so much in the writing as in the timing...
...No contemporary female lead, for example, can sing "But Not For Me" without seeming insufferably arch: I was a fool to fall And Get That Way Heigh Ho...
...She inquires: "And Japan...
...Very far off, at a warehouse of a theater on First Avenue and Ninth Street...
...Veddy big, China," he recalls...
...The music is another matter...
...On this creaky premise director Mike Ockrent and choreographer Susan Stroman have constructed a smash...
...In "Stiff Upper Lip,'' wooden chairs are turned into a pyramid vaulting toward the sky...
...Peter Howard's arrangements mix the nostalgia of MGM with the brio of MTV...
...SEAN O'CASEY (1884-1964) enjoyed two reputations: as a playwright of such signal dramas as Juno and the Pay cock, and as a memoirist, recalling his youth and manhood...
...Nor is it the fault of the composer (Frank Loesser...
...Numbers like "Happy to Make-a You Acquaina-tance" seem to come from the heart as well as the diaphragm...
...After a series of emotional sturms and mellifluous drangs she comes to realize that underneath the avoirdupois, Tony is truly Signore Right...
...What he wished to do was "create a form so you can say in music what might be too emotional for dialogue...
...It is said, talking of England, that Noel Coward wrote Private Lives in six days...
...And the choral and solo voices have a concert hall authority...
...In a cast of 19, plus three street musicians, there is hardly a minor performance...
...And he is the familiar figure of a scrawny old man (Chris O'Neill) covered with shawl and skullcap, watching his life all over again like a Hirschfeld drawing of an author in heaven, looking benignly down on Broadway...
...Director Gerald Gutierrez knows how to stage the small, pivotal scenes as well as show-stoppers like "Abbodanza" and "BigD, Little A Double-L A S." He is abetted by John Lee Beatty's imaginative sets, Liza Gennaro's crisp choreography, and some charming comedy by the second leads, Liz Larsen and Scot Waara...
...Where do you usually go...
...At the Booth, however, this Fella has the aura of a luxurious backers' audition...
...The missing ingredient is the orchestra, with its unique colors, sonorities and textures...
...When you can go in whistling the tunes, as Ira remarked on another musical occasion: Who cares what banks fail in Yonkers...
...An aisle-struck New Yorker, Bobby (Harry Groener), finds himself in Deadrock, Nevada, a one-horse town with one pretty girl, Polly (Jodi Benson), and one bankrupt theater...
...Alas...
...Fourteen other songs decorate a plot so thin you can't look at it sideways...
...As with all victories, this one has many progenitors...
...His appraisal of the "masses of pretentious writing" in Drums Under the Windows seems to me on the money: "Mr...
...She arrives and promptly gets smitten- and then pregnant-by the wrong man...
...I didn't come here to be insulted...
...Like Astaire, Stroman builds kinetic dances around everyday objects...
...Others may differ...
...On an LP the pair can be heard as the divorced couple newly remarried to others, accidentally meeting on their respective honeymoons, only to find that they are still very much in love...
...Her honeymoon is going along splendidly, she lies...
...The central problem of The Most Happy Fella at the Booth Theater is not the fault of the lyricist (Frank Loesser...
...Coward appeared in his comedy opposite Gertrude Lawrence...
...Exhibited on the stage of the Schubert Theater, the rhymes often undo the sentiment they are trying to convey...
...Enter the graying Simon Jones as Elyot Chase, asked to do little more than bask in the rays of his co-star's glitz...
...A nanosecond off and the gossamer becomes cobwebs...
...In "I Got Rhythm," corrugated tin roofing and tap shoes meet with striking effect...
...The characters possess three dimensions, one more than any of the folks in Crazy for You...
...From his distant vineyard he woos her by mail, but when she asks for a photograph he sends a snapshot of his handsome foreman (Charles Pistone...
...Bobby has an idea: "Let's put on a show...
...For years Ira Gershwin has been prosecuted by his fellow lyricist Stephen Sondheim and defended by his acolyte, cabaret artist Michael Feinstein...
...Joan Collins descending a staircase...
...it seems perverse to propel it backward some 385 years...
...The energy released in these numbers reflects the composer's relentlessly upbeat attitude...
...Yet there are compensations...
...And Pistone's rendition of "Joey" provides just the right mix of grit and nostalgia...
...Few major directors would go this far downtown except for sturgeon, and none but Prince could take such shapeless material and give it life and art...
...He and his set designer, Eugene Lee, use every micrometer of the stage as well as a few of the seats- actors scramble through and behind them, turning the audience into part of Dublin's atmosphere...
...It is the lyrics that show their age...
...I can see its value in small theaters or student productions...
...This cast amply gratifies his wishes...
...O'Casey is seen during three periods...
...O'Casey's outstanding characteristic is the romantic nationalism which he manages to combine with Communism...
...is a fair sample of the wit...
...Her foliowers, of which there are many, may find that a 16-inch actress has a place on a 60-foot stage...
...I am coming around to Sondheim's view...
...Benson, the voice of Disney's Little Mermaid two years ago, here becomes the personification of Western woman circa 1935...
...The script calls for Amanda to be far younger...
...He is a poor and sickly Protestant boy (Padraic Moyles) in Catholic Dublin...
...It was merely a " musical comedy-with a lot of music...
...Either you're smitten or you're not...
...It is to writer/director Hal Prince's credit that so little of the fustian and the politics remain in his adaptation, Grand-child of Kings...
...Set designer Robin Wagner and lighting expert Paul Gallo shift easily from the landscapes of Frederick Remington to the grit of midtown Manhattan...
...Jane Connell is the requisite mother-as-Gorgon, and Bruce Adler has some fine moments as a Flo Ziegfeld caricature, lampooned in turn by the whimsical, rubber-legged Groener in a hall-of-mirrors subplot...
...Veddy small...
...For two hours, the Irish Repertory Theater Company makes the spoken word ring...
...That is exactly how long the first act seems to take in the vanity production mounted at the Broadhurst Theater because Joan Collins wanted to play Amanda Prynne...
...Nevertheless, he always cherished the idea of a concert version, and shortly before his death in 1969 Loesser commissioned the duo-piano arrangement...
...Indeed, during rehearsals Loesser hung an instructive sign: LOUD IS GOOD...
...He is a seedling writer (Patrick Fitzgerald), searching for meaning and love...
...Still, the assets of Crazy for You far outweigh the rhymes...
...and al-So, Lackaday...
...1926), "I Can't Be Bothered Now" and "Things Are Looking Up" from Damsel in Distress (1937), both written for Astaire...
...Instead, Prince has chosen to go the Nicholas Nickleby route, with multiple narrators and a cast flowing back and forth in time and space...
...Ockrent activates the cast like a man clicking switches in a dark house...
...Other forced couplets can be similarly cringe-making...
...And the satisfactions...
...Their emotions spring from the story of Tony (Spiro Malas), a fat, unprepossessing Italian immigrant who spots a waitress, Rosabella (Sophie Hay den), in San Francisco and instantly falls in love...
...Back in 1607 Monteverdi introduced audiences to a sound they had never heard before in music drama: the sound of brass...
...Better to see or read this production, I think, than to wade through the prose of an Irishman whose true revenge on England was the mangling of its prose...
...Jones, as well as Edward Duke and Jill Tasker as the stuffy new spouses, attempts tosave the evening .But Arvin Brown's direction sacrifices pace for vignettes: Joan Collins at midnight with a distant view of the mountains...
...Veddy small...
Vol. 75 • March 1992 • No. 3
