A Hit and Three Misses
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage A HIT AND THREE MISSES BY STEFAN KANFER Re-viv-al n. ...a series of meetings characterized by public revelation of sins, or professions of renewed faith. Webster's definition may be...
...If only the composer had something to say...
...But the evening really belongs to the second leads, Detroit (Nathan Lane) and Adelaide (Faith Prince), his long-snuffling doll...
...For inexplicable reasons, the alternate show features laser lights and a number of dazzling special effects...
...and Marlon Brando, her calorific antagonist, lover and brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski...
...Damon Runyon, who began it all with short stories about Nathan Detroit and Big Julie, posed as the quintessence of the Big Apple...
...The veteran Brown is especially effective as he suddenly loses his cool, chants a gospel autobiography, and subsides once more into the homely philosopher...
...And Fishburne, outstanding in the film Boyz N The Hood, makes the most of the Black is Beautiful lesson he gives to the pathetic Hambone...
...Playwrights Abe Burrows and Jo Swerling, and composer-lyricist Frank Loesser, caught the essence of that innocent fakery by purifying the original work (Runyon featured characters like Big Nig and Jew Louie) and fashioning a comic strip...
...The greatest, of course, is that of Miss DuBois...
...Brando left a mark so indelible that even two generations later anyone who assumes his role can be considered daring...
...Loesser's music, shortchanged in the two-piano revival of Most Happy Fella, soars with opulent orchestrations by George Bassman, Ted Royal and Michael Starobin...
...The '60s is the backdrop of his latest, Two Trains Running...
...The real mismanager of this production is Gregory Mosher...
...The new version has only one possibility, and she might as well be working alone...
...and "I want my ham...
...I wish it well...
...It is, in fact, a good play with great parts...
...Martell's drag-gy Stepin Fetchit walk, for example, wears out its comedy in five minutes but persists for two hours...
...His shadow falls across Picnic, The Rainmaker, Bus Stop, and other "stud" plays by lesser talents...
...The gesture is a failure...
...It would take a confluence of extraordinary players to get out from under the original production...
...The moment Jessica Lange makes her entrance, the stage is ignited by a presence...
...It won the Pulitzer in 1947, when that prize still had significance, and established him as the tragic poet of the American theater...
...A Streetcar Named Desire is the public revelation of sins, mainly by the director and the performers...
...In violation of every dramatic tenet, it never goes off...
...No mention is made of Vietnam, the youthquake, Martin Luther King Jr., the Kennedys, or any other global personalities or events...
...Because Elia Kazan directed with such discipline, and evoked a palpable New Orleans ambience, the melodrama was mistaken for a great play...
...The Midwesterner worked his way to New York as a newspaperman, and quickly acquired all the characteristics of the '20s Broadway bloodhound, talking out of the side of his mouth, smoking three packs of cigarettes and drinking 60 cups of coffee a day...
...the pale lady speaking a world-class exit line," I have always depended on the kindness of strangers...
...The white folks at City Hall offer less than half that amount...
...He was born in Manhattan all right: Manhattan, Kansas...
...The exchange never took place, and now the obsessive victim can only bleat two sentences: "He gonna give me my ham...
...he could have used a few more hours in acting class...
...Jane Greenwood's costumes are the stuff of summer stock, Scott Lehrer's sound intrudes on the dialogue instead of aiding it, and Ben Edwards' set, which should evoke the French Quarter, is reminiscent of the Latino Bronx...
...Lee dilates on the problem before his small clientele and staff...
...The eccentricities of Metro would have been diverting in a night club, and downright refreshing in a subway station...
...She speaks in a minuscule whisper, and diminishes as the evening progresses...
...Where he should smolder, he sputters...
...Each of us rides them both...
...not exactly compelling dialogue...
...She is Williams' obsession, a surrogate for his mentally ill sister...
...Alec Baldwin has evidently been spending a lot of time in the gym...
...They hardly hear him...
...Yet these performers, and the rest of the sizable cast, have done fine work on other occasions...
...There is life and there is death...
...but then, I have always depended on the strangeness of kinder...
...For despite his flawless ear for the cadence of African-American dialogue, Wilson has produced an airless, plotless work, full of follow-the-dots sociology and entry level symbolism...
...A August Wilson has become celebrated for a cycle of plays about the black experience in 20th-century America, each set in a different decade...
...He is decked out in Dick Tracy yellow, one of many felicities by costume designer William Ivey Long...
...The sole well-adjusted person in this eatery is Hollo way (Ros-coe Lee Brown), a graying, get-along, go-along survivor...
...V Finally, there is Metro, a peculiar Polish import...
...when he ought to radiate a feline sensuality, he yowls in New Yorkese...
...Streetcar served as Tennessee Williams' breakthrough...
...Whoever finds revelation in those 21 words should rush to the Walter Kerr Theater...
...Lloyd Richards has not helped matters with his overliteral direction...
...The 1950 film version with Brando and Vivien Leigh is available on videotape...
...It's not three dimensional, but then neither are the proceedings at the Ethel Barrymore...
...His Stanley appears to be a cousin of Archie Bunker...
...each is absorbed in his or her own problems...
...The number was followed by "I'll Know When My Love Comes Along," "Luck Be a Lady," "A Bushel and a Peck," and "Sit Down, You're Rocking the Boat," all of them show-stoppers...
...Burrows once told me he knew they had a hit out of town five min-utes into the show when applause greeted "Fugue for Tin Horns": "I got a horse right here, his name is Paul Revere...
...Hambone (Sullivan Walker) has been driven mad by a broken promise...
...Nine years ago he painted a white man's fence in return for a ham...
...Most of the time it jettisons the story, and allows its young cast to sing bad rock in indecipherable accents...
...As the unlikely loving couple, high roller Sky Mas-terson (Peter Gallagher) and Sarah the Mission Doll (Josie de Guzman) have big voices and amiable styles...
...But Lange, who has never acted on Broadway before, is manifestly in awe of her role...
...The other three men burn with different desires...
...The instance of renewed faith is viewable at the Martin Beck, where Guys and Dolls is enjoying a vigorous reincarnation...
...Two men still find her irresistible: Wolf (Anthony Chisholm), a num-bers runner with wild eyes and a slick wardrobe...
...This compelling self-deceiver is edging toward madness, pirouetting as she goes, alternately cursing Stanley and enticing him...
...Christopher Chadman's choreography, topped by Scott Wise's acrobatics, made me think of Blake's dictum, "Energy is eternal delight.'' As for Tony Walton's set, ranging from street scenes to a vertiginous sewer, it will inspire homages and ripoffs for seasons to come...
...Despite its printed locale?Memphis Lee's restaurant in the Hill District of Pittsburgh"—Trains is fatally sealed from the actual world...
...In a pseudoprofound program note, Wilson explains his title: "There are always and only two trains running...
...and Sterling (Larry Fish-burne), an ex-con with fancy chatter, empty pockets and a pistol...
...During the last days of the Cold War a performing group made up of Eastern European adolescents gets turned down by theatrical apparatchiks and decides to stage its own musical in the local subway station...
...West (Chuck Patterson), a rich undertaker, has a single object in life, to increase his wealth at the expense of his black brothers...
...Lane's performance manages to recall Lou Costello, Mickey Rooney and Jackie Gleason without submerging his own bumptiousness...
...You had 1,200 opportunities to see that smash in the '50s, and you may have even more chances to see this rendition...
...It also established Jessica Tandy, who played the fluttery, neurasthenic Blanche DuBois...
...But at heart he remained a hick, romanticizing the gamblers, the grifters and their bimbos...
...Amy Madigan looks the part of the bewildered Stella, but plays with a bogus spoonbread accent...
...Risa (Cynthia Martell), the waitress, has scarred her legs 13 times with a razor in order to avoid becoming a sex object...
...Pace Man Dershowitz, chutzpah is not enough...
...he refuses to give Sterling a job washing any of the funeral parlor's seven Cadillacs, and won't part with a dime for Hambone until the poor man dies, alone and ignored...
...Occasionally the slumbering libretto stirs to life and imitates A Chorus Line, with melodic confessions by the players...
...Generosity is not a word in his lexicon...
...In the big crap shoot called Broadway, Guys and Dolls is as close as anyone—producers, performers or ticket buyers—can come to the Sure Thing...
...The wrecking ball is set for this part of the Hill, and Memphis demands $25,000 in compensation...
...Only then does West contribute a pine box...
...Yet the musical is not nearly as bad as some long-running shows down the street...
...The retired house-painter serves as the play's chorus, musing pacifically on Negritude, life and love...
...We know the time because fliers advertise a rally for Malcolm X. Otherwise the action might take place in the '20s, '30s or '40s, as it does in Wil-son's previous works, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, Fences, and The Piano Lesson...
...And Tony Fanning's set has less personality than the chalkboard menu...
...Each of these characters has a big, stagy moment...
...At the Minskoff Theater it seems as out of place as kielbasa at Lindy's...
...Kowalski, the second greatest part, is the prototypical strutting phallus, a favorite of homosexual authors...
...The rest of the cast is in lockstep with the leads...
...Webster's definition may be illustrated by two current Broadway productions...
...Blanche appears, disguised, in several of his dramas, notably The Glass Menagerie and Summer and Smoke...
...By now Stanley and Blanche have become cliches: the Natural Man baying for his wife, "Stella...
...Director Jerry Zaks has preserved the cartoon's best qualities and added some hilarious fillips of his own...
...Prince, a mistress of the double take, could coax laughter from a stone pillar, played in this case by Steve Ryan as Lieutenant Branigan...
...Try that...
...They and their colleagues amount to a seven-piece band with perfect pitch...
...A caveat to all other emptors...
...After years of directing David Mamet plays at a steady con brio, he keeps his Streetcar at a weak, inappropriate andante (the curtain rises at 8:00 and you get to inhale the night air gratefully at 11:20...
...As Harold Mitchell, Blanche's gentleman caller, Timothy Carhart gives new meaning to the word gawky...
Vol. 75 • May 1992 • No. 6
