On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage FLASHBACKS AND THROWAWAYS BY STEFAN KANFER Early or late, almost every playwright gets around to confronting his family onstage. Frequently, as in Neil Simon's Jake's Women, the result...
...One evening he turns on the radio for solace and whammo...
...Rarer still is the writer who can see himself as most artists were in childhood—narrow, resentful and self-centered...
...He looks upon his wife much the same way...
...Independence has become the thing he dreaded most: a burden...
...The Golden Door has great visual appeal...
...The producer, Cameron Mackintosh, has been responsible for some 200 shows, among them Miss Saigon, The Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables and Cats...
...On one occasion, pages shower down from above, with a set of lyrics printed on one side: push ka pi shi pee—eh EH push ka pi shi pie—eh eh oobli—aayee eyeyay abla it's the new calypso be bop Not exactly Lorenz Hart...
...The balcony is exhorted to sing along, then the orchestra is asked to compete...
...Women are entreated to sing, then men...
...Lines like "It must be jelly cause jam don't shake like that" also were used up before Jordan ever cut a record...
...Frequently, as in Neil Simon's Jake's Women, the result is comic evasion: Even death can be merchandised for laughs...
...Three standout performances come from Shaloub, whose insights are informed by the writings of Freud and The Joys of Yiddish ("Sleep faster, we need the pillow...
...Five Guys opens with a disc jockey burbling, "For all you night owls that got the blues...
...it is simply an insurance policy, to be used in case of emergency...
...The little refugee fled to the Promised City, which he now regards as Eden without the snake...
...then again, we are living in a prose era...
...Gardner is famous for two long-running comedies that told ticketholders everything they wanted to hear...
...There are reasons for Eddie's misanthropy...
...Ominous, I think...
...His louts accurately reproduce the currency of the '40s when they say the Jews egged the U.S...
...Eddie Ross (ne Itzik Goldberg) is a shanty Jew who uses his mouth the way cops use their nightsticks...
...Sometimes, as in Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa, the result is calculated bathos: Every promise leads on to tears...
...Nomax sighs, "Man, you can say that again...
...No doubt he was encouraged by Five Guys 'reception in England, where the show flourished...
...The records in the juke box include "Rumania, Rumania," sung in exuberant Yiddish...
...The bartender never listened to him in life...
...Jordan's great asset was spontaneity, an ingredient totally absent from this left-handed salute...
...What on earth made a British producer think he could get away with a second-rate night club act at the Eugene O'Neill Theater, once the home of California Suite and M. Butterfly...
...With a narrative trick and some brilliant lighting by Pat Collins, involuntary memory takes over...
...Conversations is really a series of solos, interrupted by incident...
...Most of those productions were marked by an excess of surface and a paucity of content...
...His young son would like to preserve a few items...
...now it's too late...
...Yet standup comics and singing groups can now claw their way from the casino circuit to Shubert Alley...
...No shit from nobody" is his motto, assimilation his credo...
...out of Tim Goodchild's gar-ish set appears a gaggle of song and dance men...
...Portraits of rummy customers and mafia soldiers are equally precise...
...The announcer obliges: "For all you night owls that got the blues...
...His personality is made to keep success at bay...
...Only the older son, Joey (Tony Gillan), receives any warmth, principally because he is a street fighter who intends to turn pro...
...Who needs scripts anymore...
...as Gardner points out, anti-Semitism has been working the streets of New York for generations...
...Jackie Mason's standup routines had become a smash...
...Rare is the writer with enough honesty to present a parent whole...
...Whenever Eddie starts trumpeting the virtues of the good old U.S...
...Not that he holds any belief in religion...
...Still, the monologues are funny and poignant, director Daniel Sullivan makes sure the action never slows to a walk, Robert Wojewod-ski's costumes perfectly evoke a vanished time, and the cast has no weaknesses...
...any other proprietor would have made it a permanent part of the city landscape, like the 21 Club or McSorley's Wonderful Saloon...
...Gardner's principal flaw is a lifelong inability to write short speeches...
...into war, and then made profits from the conflict...
...Since there is nothing original or funny in the show, the players use the hoariest device to elicit applause: They interact with the audience in the manner of Pete Seeger at a hootenanny...
...It is not merely that the songs are devoid of content...
...But the gestalt of the place is overpowering...
...Into this feisty world step a series of visitors: thugs who want a piece of Eddie's business, alcoholic hangers-on (William Biff McGuire, Marilyn Sokol, Peter Gerety), and a robust old Yiddish Theater actor named Zaretsky (David Margulies), who serves as the play's chorus...
...She is deaf and "not exactly 100 per cent in the brains department," but one day he may have a heart attack...
...If places like the Golden Door still existed, New York, N.Y...
...A series of refurbishings and renamings (The Flamingo is one of many short-lived tavern signs) entice no new patrons...
...novelty was what was going down in Jordan's heyday, and that was what he had to offer...
...The unbilled star is Tony Walton's magnificently grungy bar, with its heady mixture of mahogany and malt...
...could get back on its feet without any help from Clinton, Bush or Perot...
...Little American flags decorate every table, a moosehead stares down at the drinkers, and a new juke box is proudly displayed at the end of the bar...
...It is refreshing to find the playwright unsentimental, candid and tough...
...Charlie (Tony Shalhoub), a prosperous fortysomething novelist, is selling off the old family saloon in downtown Manhattan...
...As a small child in Eastern Europe he saw his relatives slaughtered in a pogrom...
...There is no place for nostalgia in the Golden Door...
...And he insists that his children attend Hebrew school...
...A few more guys like Moe and the idea of theater will be as obsolete, and as sadly missed, as the Golden Door...
...The Goodbye People and Thieves were not as soft, and they failed...
...A Moe leads a Conga line up and down the aisles...
...Customers, crooks, children are all treated equally: like dogs...
...today there is not a sitcom writer in all of Hollywood who would sign his name to it...
...of A., the actor tries to inform him that neither FDR nor the New York Times has much to say about the Holocaust...
...If he does, she will be obliged to nurse him...
...Accompanied by Reginald Royal's glittery band, the quintet offers Nomax advice in the form of songs?more than 20 of them, delivered with maximum ebullience and 160 teeth...
...the bogus I'm Not Rappaport featured two old men, one black, one white, and made race relations a matter of whimsy...
...But more important, he could see what was happening in the States—the nightclub was moving into the theater...
...Five Guys claims to pay tribute to Louis Jordan (1908-1975), the black jazzman, scat singer and composer who spent a lot of time on the charts with such hits as "Caledonia," "Is You Is Or Is You Ain't My Baby...
...Hirsch, who gives humanity to a bearish figure...
...The actor, mocked by Eddie for doing one-man shows "in a dead language for a dying audience," had grown rich from canny investments...
...On Broadway, Five Guys is as insubstantial as the lemonade sold in the lobby...
...Herb Gardner's Conversations with My Father, at the Royale Theater, is one of those unusual memory plays that make no concessions to anyone, not to family, playwright or audience...
...Such stuff was tired 40 years ago...
...Of course, all this is indignantly denied by Eddie...
...Here Mackintosh has undercut his own low standards...
...Joey, inflamed by the headlines that Eddie cannot confront, enlists in the Navy as a teenager and dies in combat...
...President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is an icon...
...It is, as Eddie puts it, "a cardiac marriage...
...In a last twist of the knife, Zaretsky dies a millionaire at the age of 93...
...for them it is an unsubstantiated rumor, a political inconvenience...
...Indeed, producers are currently searching for another novelty to fill up the seats and increase the grosses...
...They represent the past, and he lacks the courage to look in rearview mirrors...
...They aren't...
...Everything is hurled at the audience with manic bonhomie, as if the jokes were as fresh as the performers' faces...
...and "Open the Door Richard...
...and Margulies, whose resonance and authority seem to linger after his exits...
...Instead we have an excuse of a plot featuring a lovesick youth, Nomax (Jerry Dixon...
...In time Charlie becomes alienated from everything his old man stood for...
...Eddie has not quite forgotten his origins...
...They are Big Moe (Doug Eskew), Four-Eyed Moe (Milton Craig Nealy), No Moe (Kevin Ramsey), Eat Moe (Jeffrey D. Sams) and Little Moe (Glenn Turner...
...Original dramas, comedies and musicals will never debut in Atlantic City or Las Vegas...
...The show's central liability is Director/ Choreographer Charles Augins' lack of pace and comic timing...
...Not Eddie...
...For that matter, who needs actors...
...Cameron Mackintosh just followed the crowds to the cash register...
...In a casino, this might be a useful way to beguile patrons to the crap table and the slot machines...
...When history breathes down his neck his response is to get hot under the collar...
...False heartiness is barred from Conversations, but it is the principal component of Five Guys Named Moe...
...Charlie wants no part of them...
...A Thousand Clowns took on the safe target of children's television...
...Charlie's late father Eddie (Judd Hirsch) materializes in the shuttered Golden Door, and we are abruptly placed in the past tense...
...Eddie himself grows increasingly angrier and weaker until he is finally silenced by a stroke...
...Although Eddie extols The Family, he exhibits little affection for his wife Gusta (Gordana Rashovich) or for young Charlie (David Krumholtz...
...For Broadway is in every sense a one-way street...
...today the three-man, one-woman Catskills show is an even bigger hit...
Vol. 75 • April 1992 • No. 5
