Stretching, Kvetching and Morals
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage STRETCHING, KVETCHING AND MORALS BY STEFAN KANFER John O'Hara was once asked if he would attend a Frank Sinatra concert. "Why should I go to see him?" the au-thor snapped. "I invented...
...Then there is the matter of sexual and religious identity...
...or more precisely, the playwright...
...Douglas Stein's sets and Ann Hould-Ward's costumes are barely functional...
...Falsettos began as two Off-Broadway one-acters, March of the Falsettos (1981) and Falsettoland (1990), with scores by William Finn...
...Somebody...
...Further investigation reveals that termites have been at the roots, branches and leaves of the family tree...
...With Morton's final breath, the devilish Chimney Man (Keith David) materializes out of the netherworld...
...Whereupon Trina goes ballistic, Jason gets confused, Marvin becomes querulous, and Whiz-zer is...
...Surely not the conduct of gays...
...The small cast, on the other hand, does heroic work...
...Enter Benedict Hough (Anthony Heald), a squinting private eye whose specialty is blackmail...
...That would be antithetical to everything that Marvin represents...
...The star's vocal range is larger than I expected, and he never tries to make hubris cute or endearing...
...gay, straight or just slightly bent...
...The general kvetching has been replaced by a feeling of solidarity and equal rights for all men and women...
...full of bright promising themes that never truly cohere into melody...
...So are the Hunnies (Mamie Duncan-Gibbs, Stephanie Pope and Allison M. Williams), a backup trio with voices that need no amplification to reach the roof...
...Only one solution presents itself...
...until a spiritual solution is found...
...Each sin is accompanied by a hilarious hide-and-seek game, with lovers disappearing into closets, brother selling out brother, and extortionists raising their prices...
...We have only the playwright's word that these brittle people are Jews, just as we have only his word that their palaver is meant to be comical...
...But Sinatra can't dance...
...I think not...
...Finn occasionally pierces the calculated blandness with clever rhymes like "story" and "a priori...
...Jack's brother Cliff (Mark Arnott) is involved in grand larceny...
...Would everyone be so broad-minded if Marvin's new friend was an attractive young woman...
...The doctor...
...The aura of good feeling is punctured by an ominous knock...
...After he left home he often high-hatted black folks and tried to pass as a white New Orleans aristocrat...
...While he was pimping, cheating and self-promoting, however, he was also writing some of the greatest American music of his time...
...What's wrong with this picture...
...Yet in the early '80s no one knew enough about the disease to be called immoral...
...So he is, in a most bizarre manner...
...Falsettos begins with an arch little number, "Four Jews in a Room Bitching" ("Bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, funny, funny, funny, funny,'' goes the chorus...
...At one pivotal moment, a lesbian doctor (Heather Macrae) sings "Something Bad Is Happening...
...Since this is the world of fiction, he gets it all...
...Marvin is about to lose a friend, and Jason a pal...
...Jack's adolescent daughter, Samantha (Amelia Campbell), has been caught shoplifting...
...He has bad news...
...must mean that the medical establishment is immoral...
...And as the blues-belting Miss Mamie, Mary Bond Davis gives more than a hint of what Ma Rain-ey, the '20s blues singer, must have been like on a good night...
...His music is less successful...
...and then only for a short while...
...I could compile a list as long as the lineup of songs (there are more than 30...
...Ferdinand De Menthe "Jelly Roll" Morton is a man after O'Hara's art, and his musical biography amounts to Pal Jelly, a caution-ary tale for the '90s...
...The bad thing, of course, is aids...
...In a This Is Your Death format, the newly departed is given a keyhole view of his origins, rise and decline...
...So Jack leaves the frozen food business and takes over, gathering the family around for a pep talk...
...At the John Golden Theater they are linked into a single opus, staged by the original writer/director James Lapine...
...Whizzer has contracted a mysterious ailment that seems to be annihilating homosexual men...
...But Jelly's Last Jam is considerably more than a jazz anthology...
...For without these the family...
...Those numbers, with splendid arrangements by Luther Henderson and new lyrics by Susan Birkenhead, are given life and soul by a faultless cast...
...He also proclaimed himself the inventor of jazz, a far more outrageous lie...
...In an unintended sense it is: the first major example of special pleading in four-fourths time...
...Jason's Bar Mitzvah will be held at Whizzer's bedside, binding the principals and confirming the various rites of man...
...Despite his bulk, Murray displays the light touch of a gadfly gradually succumbing to DDT...
...Alan Ayckbourn is the English Alan Ayckbourn, sui generis, master of that rarest and most difficult genre, the moral farce...
...Or, for that matter, that these men are homosexuals...
...En route Jelly Roll runs into his young and striving self (Savion Glover), a black friend, Jack the Bear (Wayne Mathis), and a slew of women...
...it would have been to make anachronistic reference to that city's current miseries...
...something immoral...
...The playwright has often been called the English Neil Simon...
...The single element that might be improved is diction...
...is doomed...
...Still, this is a minor quibble in a seriocomic triumph...
...Nothing in their manner indicates aback-ground or a preference of any kind, until in a fantasy number they sing the mincing "Who is man enough to march to the March of the Falsettos...
...When the music stops they fall back into their safe, Regular Guy personae, as uninflected a pair as you could find in a Bud-weiser commercial...
...I invented him...
...Squabbles, inefficiency, white-collar theft will be replaced with the only things that matter: honesty, decency and above all "simple basic trust...
...The light-skinned Morton (1885-1941) came from a Creole family...
...Lagerfelt manages to be sexy, desperate and risible, a rare talent for pretty actresses on either side of the ocean...
...The tapdancing Glover, 18, fluently evokes what pianist Willie the Lion Smith called Morton's "spiritual and magnetic forces...
...From now, he vows, matters will be different...
...Or the Cardinal...
...indeed, the world...
...But what does she mean by immoral...
...It was ignorance that caused the tragedy, not malignity, as Randy Shilts carefully detailed in his history of aids in America, And the Band Played On...
...Ayckbourn directed his own production of Family Business at London's Royal National Theater...
...Young Kaplan may be the only juvenile lead on Broadway whose singing voice never grates on the eardrums...
...Only one other actor has ever conveyed this kind of wounded arrogance...
...Jack McCracken (Brian Murray) is a British executive with a short fuse and a vast ego...
...Confused and insupportable rage puts the false in Falsettos, a show that advertises itself as breakthrough Broadway fare...
...Once again misery reigns supreme...
...Three years later Trina has found romance with her shrink, Mendel (Chip Zien), and Jason, suddenly more interested in girls than in chess, is zooming toward puberty...
...the place, New York...
...and cheap...
...So is Cliff's wife Anita (Caroline Lagerfelt...
...His staccato tap work (with extra steps by Ted L. Levy) makes it impossible to keep your own feet still...
...That comparison will not stand...
...Theft leads to coverups, cover-ups to payoffs, payoffs to debt...
...How easy...
...As it develops, the grown man betrayed every one of them...
...Marvin (Michael Rupert), a Jewish busi-nessman in his early 40s with a wife, Trina (Barbara Walsh), and a preadolescent son, Jason (Jonathan Kaplan), emerges from the closet and runs off with Whiz-zer (Stephen Bogardus...
...The cast is mixed English and American, and several colonials are not up to the intonations...
...So is Walsh, particularly in her show-stopping "I'm Breaking Down" scene...
...Hough, who knows everything and wants ??50,000 to keep the lid on, must be terminated with extreme prejudice...
...From these mendacities about race and music writer-director George C. Wolfe has fashioned the piquant tour de force at the Virginia Theater...
...Bogardus, save for the last scene when he is called upon to make a case of aids ennobling, is credible and even sympathetic...
...With the help of Robin Wagner's scenery, Toni-Leslie James' voluptuous costumes and Hope Clark's choreography, Wolfe summons up the Mardi Gras and the back rooms of Storyville and Chicago...
...The year is 1979...
...This turns out to be the most trivial disclosure of the evening...
...Or the government...
...Chorus of assent, nods and raised glasses...
...The self-indulgent Marvin wants everything: the love of Whizzer, the affection of his wife and the respect of his son...
...His father-in-law, Ken Ayers (Thomas Hill), has grown too potty to carry on at Ayers and Graces, a failing furniture manufacturing concern...
...A ALAn Ayckbourn's A Small Family Business, a British import, can be enjoyed on two levels: The action takes place upstairs and downstairs in a suburban house...
...Another "new" musical pulls the art form in a different direction...
...Tonya Pinkins is moving in every sense of the word...
...He was referring to the hip opportunist and centerpiece of Pal Joey, the 1940 O'Hara, Rodgers and Hart hit...
...And as the sleuth goes, so goes honesty, decency and simple basic trust...
...As the one lady powerful enough to get a grip on the musician...
...Yet with all this to offer, Jelly's Last Jam is, first and last, Hines' show...
...To gain her sizable wardrobe and pricey automobiles, she has been bedding down with the five thieving Rivetti brothers, all from the Cosa Nostra, all ripping off A & G's designs, and all played by the amazing Jake Weber...
...Nobody is pure but Jack, and each ungainly cleanup gets him deeper into the morass...
...Jelly's Last Jam opens as Morton (Gregory Hines) expires in Los Angeles, a place that denied him recognition and comfort...
...If that were all, Jelly Roll could go directly to Hell...
...As Morton's censorious grandmother, Ann Duquesnay covers his early years with impermeable frost...
...It is difficult to imagine how he could have excelled Lynn Meadow's metronomic staging at the Music Box...
...Campbell, who was outstanding in last year's Our Country's Good, is especially memorable as the daughter acting out the corruption she sees around her...
...Ann Roth's costumes vary ingeniously between the dowdiness of the Queen Mum and the kinky glamour of Madonna, and John Lee Beatty's inventive set allows four subplots to go on simultaneously...
...Whizzer, an ingenuous narcissist who likes to sleep around with other men and teach kids how to play soft-ball...
...it is a mark of the show's quality that the temptation is bypassed...
...But it is Lapine's book that ultimately lets the air out of the show...
...Even Jack's sweet, wide-eyed wife Poppy (Jane Carr) has been making off with paper clips...
...Then a shadow falls over their world...
Vol. 75 • June 1992 • No. 7
