On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage THE TRIVIAL, THE TRAUMATIC, THE TRULY BAD BY STEFAN KANFER Sisterhood is powerful. Take Chekhov's The Three Sisters. Wendy Wasserstein did. The playwright transported a trio of siblings...
...They've had a lousy education or none, becauseof the system, and they've seen tremendous violence...
...But Jacob is traumatized by a series of social crimes...
...Pfeni, nee Penny (Christine Es-tabrook), is a travel writer...
...Jackie Mason has turned down better material...
...A big fan creates a lot of breeze, but very little fresh air...
...My daughter teaches semiotics...
...The more important question is: Are the Rosen-sweigs Jewish...
...Gorgeous boasts about her mul-tiplaned life, but in many ways she is the saddest of the siblings, stuck with an unresponsive—and unemployed—husband, deriving her satisfaction from nonstop chatter and constant changes of wardrobe...
...she and Tom plan to fly off to Vilnius...
...The best thing we can do is jettison the first and last words of the title and wish them all well next time...
...Jacob (K...
...It may seem unfair to compare Was-serstein with Chekhov—who could stand against the Master...
...And in the Playbill, the American makes a point of bringing the Russian onstage: "I've always been a big fan of Chekhov," recalls Wasser-stein, "so I thought the idea of three sisters would be a novel one for a play...
...Kahn and Klein, both experienced comedians, are alternately poignant and show-stopping hilarious...
...Much of it is as cheap as Gorgeous' junk jewelry...
...Jacob is arrested for associating—innocently—with antiapartheid "radicals...
...Pfeni keeps on the move because she cannot set down physical or emotional roots...
...Divorced twice, Sara has assumed a gloss of English hauteur...
...The two spend their hours driving Sara up the rose-patterned walls, demonstrating for Lithuanian independence and dining exclusively on "primary color food...
...Into this hothouse world comes Mer-vyn (Robert Klein), a middle-aged American merchant who stops by for a moment, and stays for dinner...
...The one man in her life, Geoffrey (John Vickery), is a self-absorbed bisexual director...
...Wasserstein needed her to make a very debatable point about Jews being on the periphery of world events...
...It was novel, back in 1901...
...The Song of Jacob Zulu is based on the true story of one such provocateur...
...That means she screens Hiroshima Mon Amour once a week...
...In reaction to the ice-cold Sara, her teenage daughter Tess (Julie Dretzin) has fallen passionately in love with an unkempt prole, Tom (Patrick Fitzgerald...
...The killer was convicted but given a suspended sentence...
...They remain very much a problem, no matter the reforms...
...Nothing he says or does suggests that he would be attractive to any woman, and his farewell to Pfeni ("I miss men") is as unsurprising as her reply "Sodo I...
...Love is love," he declares...
...They are, in the words of playwright Tug Yourgrau, "a whole generation sacrificed to history...
...Before he can telephone a warning, the device goes off, killing four and wounding many more...
...Thus, Short plays a man playing a woman playing a man...
...In the Marquis Theater version, the overstated Hungarian director (John Christopher Jones) insists that Richard III must be interpreted as a female masquerading as a male...
...Without their unusual sonorities, Yourgrau's work would essentially be a courtroom transcript, punctuated by flashbacks and illuminated by the glowing performances of Freeman and Mokae...
...The rest of the cast varies between slick and competent, abetted by John Lee Beatty's sumptuous set and Jane Greenwood's witty costumes...
...The song is not over...
...Will she succumb to his advances...
...Alexander, under the bright direction of Daniel Sullivan, lends Sisters an intelligence and flair that are not in the script...
...Manifestly, a lot of brand names were attached to this misbegotten project...
...To celebrate her 54th birthday, Sara's two younger siblings arrive simultaneously at her sumptuous London house...
...That chorus—the nine members of Ladysmith Black Mambazo—makes Jacob Zulu a theatrical event of considerable stature...
...The real reason Tess didn't go is much simpler...
...During the writing of Jacob one of Lady-smith's members, Headman Shabalala, was murdered by a white man following an argument in Durban...
...Men find her threatening, and stay away in herds...
...I must have missed that one on the tour...
...In essence this is Cry, the Beloved Country 45 years later, complete with bewildered cleric and his doomed son...
...However, it cannot save the thousands who have already fallen victim to apartheid...
...Vickery, for example, is a skilled and energetic performer, but all he offers here is a collage of eccentricities and one-liners...
...wthen I was in South Africa three years ago, a witty deduction was making the rounds: "A violent revolution is unthinkable...
...His brother dies because the segregated ambulance arrives too late...
...The police chief gives him an impossible choice: provide evidence against classmates, or face long and vicious imprisonment...
...The dancer, Paula, is played by the chalk-faced Bernadet te Peters, who mugs shamelessly, and caterwauls Marvin Hamlisch's stale melodies...
...He is the first man in years to evince an interest in Sara...
...not yet...
...The police track him down, and a white judge—in South Africa the jury system does not apply for such crimes—sentences him to hang by the neck until dead...
...That evolution is now under way, and it has energized the entire country, British and Afrikaner, Zulu and Xhosa...
...Yet, as the chorus comments, This is a song of a young man...
...At a London rally, she suddenly felt like "an outsider" and decided to stay home...
...they occur because she wants them to occur...
...c) a scene in which a director requires Dreyfuss to play Richard III in a way that would make Liber-ace seem macho...
...Some of it is sharply observed ("What a pleasure," says Sara, "to live in a country where our feelings are openly repressed...
...Gorgeous (Madeline Kahn) is a tornado in the guise of a housewife, mother of four, and host of a Boston call-in radio program...
...Thanks to Lady-smith, The Song of Jacob Zulu really is a song, an extension of Africa's oral tradition, chanted night after night with palpable force and authenticity...
...Today it requires something more...
...Indeed, I wish it were not quite so authentic...
...Toward the end of Act Two she announces that she isn't going after all...
...They have also provoked violence...
...But she invites the comparison: One of the sisters even quotes Masha's famous line about yearning for Moscow...
...They're anarchic...
...Get it...
...Happily, Jane Alexander is still in the role of Sara, a fast-track international banker...
...When Gorgeous insists on lighting Sabbath candles, Sara, who has been fleeing her origins since adolescence, takes it as a personal affront...
...David Zippel, who looked to be the smartest new lyricist since Stephen Sondheim when he made his debut with City of Angels a few seasons ago, here takes a giant step backward...
...But as the play develops, each turns out to be as needy as a poster child...
...But Alan Paton's novel was marked by uncertainty: "When that dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret...
...What concert...
...Gay groups, outraged that anyone would think of homosexuals as effeminate, lobbied for a change...
...In the playwright's uncertain hands, events rarely happen organically...
...Result: a demand for tickets so great that The Sisters Ro-sensweig recently moved from a modest space in Lincoln Center to the full-sized Ethel Barrymore Theater...
...Goodbye...
...then, as the evening progresses, he reveals an intellectual bent and a natural irony...
...Kidd replaced Gene Saks, and it is difficult to know why...
...Todd Freeman) starts life as the gifted child of a minister (Zakes Mokae...
...They prevailed...
...Jacob tries to flee the country, and after more brutal encounters with white authority, decides to strike back by setting off a bomb in a shopping center...
...Who suffered for the sins of South Africa This is a song of those for whom the good news Of the end of apartheid (if it really is the end) Comes too late...
...The musical that follows it is a lifeless adaptation of Neil Simon's 1977 film, starring his then wife Marsha Mason as a dancer who clings to men, but who cannot hang on to them...
...This Is As Good As It Gets" says the first number in The Goodbye Girl, an example of truth in advertising if ever there was one...
...The New England yenta hears Mervyn talking about Metternich and the Concert of Europe...
...and d) Herb Ross as the director...
...His school is invaded by brutal police...
...At first he wants nothing more than a college education and a chance to teach his fellow blacks...
...The only solution is a violent evolution...
...Mervyn appears to be a Bronx Babbitt...
...Well, you can have it...
...Given this shallow, brittle work, several actors perform miracles...
...Jacob Zulu knows the dawn is very near...
...b) Richard Dreyfuss as a prickly actor who shares her apartment but not her bed...
...At first, all three women seem busy and fulfilled...
...As her temperamental roommate, Eliot Garfield, Martin Short is so high-spirited and ingratiating that he becomes wholly unbelievable as the man you love to hate...
...Is Yitzchak Rabin Jewish...
...Saks could not have moved the characters around in an ungainlier fashion, and he might have eliminated the role of the grumbling black lady (Carol Woods), a comic device that wore out its welcome in the 1930s...
...But 90 per cent of the evening is concerned with situation comedy...
...Identity is Wasserstein's subtext, and from time to time she considers the price of assimilation as well as the many ways of being an expatriate from one's spiritual home...
...The playwright transported a trio of siblings from imperial Russia to present-day England, gave their yearnings a feelgood spin, and diluted them with gags...
...Gender is merely spare parts...
...she yaps...
...A peaceful evolution is impossible...
...Similarly, young Tess ceaselessly tells her family how committed she is to the Cause...
...That is not so certain...
...At such moments Sisters edges toward a real theme...
...Moreover, his big moment, when Eliot is required to camp around the stage looking like an overgrown earring, apparently went awry during a Chicago tryout...
...When Pfeni becomes obsessed with the travails of the Kurds, she recovers the social conscience of her late mother—a conscience rekindled in Tess...
...This Goodbye Girl has replaced all four with liabilities...
...The film had four assets: a) Mason...
...Of course she will...
...You can also have the rest of Simon's unfunny book and Michael Kidd's incoherent direction...
...Santo Loquasto's sets and costumes don't do anything for the show, or for his reputation...
Vol. 76 • May 1993 • No. 5
