On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage THE BOTTOM OF THE SEASON BY STEFAN KANFER Somerset Maugham once slyly observed that to write simply is as difficult as to be good. Few authors have ever mastered the uncluttered style...
...a female Dedalus in search of her Ulysses...
...Although Geri's adoptive Daddy was a splendid amateur musician, he preferred to concentrate on the care and cross-breeding of money, and to drown his war memories in alcohol...
...One fateful day he argues with his wife Audrey (Julie Hagerty), skulks out, and knocks back a few drinks at a neighborhood bar...
...Lyman has no wish to communicate with anyone, least of all this half-Orien-tal adolescent who keeps tracking him along the forest floor...
...It concerns the fortunes of three souls, two of them wholly unpersuasive...
...Her consuming desire is to find her biological father, whoever he is, wherever he is...
...The infant caught the eye of a soldier who took her to the States and arranged for legal adoption...
...I doubt if anyone could be...
...The plot is not thick enough to stir...
...Wilson recently combined two dramas to produce this incongruous hybrid...
...The question is supposed to be rhetorical, but the answer is all too apparent: No, it ain't...
...No one except extremely naive audiences, and authors of theatrical exercises that might better have been left in the workshop...
...The pianist eventually tames Lyman with her rendition of one of Erik Satie's "Gymnopedies...
...I wish I could say the same for Marjorie Bradley Kellogg's sets and Ann Hould-Ward's costumes, but both suggest goods that have stayed in cold storage too long...
...A modest suburbanite, Erwin (Randall) spends his working hours writing greeting card doggerel...
...It reads, "A Brand-New 1948 Musical Comedy...
...Not at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater...
...Once upon a war, Geri (Sung Yun Cho) was a tiny statistic, the abandoned child of a GI and a Vietnamese woman...
...Daniels, best remembered for his role as the clean-cut movie star in Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo, fares just as badly behind his matted beard...
...And here it is again, at the same theater...
...Stiller and Lasky do their damnedest to enliven moribund material...
...If you must see Klugman and Randall, try late evening TV on the lesser channels...
...And therein lies the central difficulty with Three Men on a Horse, earnestly revived by Randall's National Actors Theater...
...Except for "A," every word bends the truth...
...Few authors have ever mastered the uncluttered style (Maugham was one of them), and fewer playwrights...
...I only wish that George Abbott had been at the helm a third time...
...Then came Redwood Curtain...
...Alas, neither she nor the rest of the cast can invigorate the proceedings for long...
...Tony Randall is 73...
...A in't Broadway Grand inquires the title...
...Although we only meet one of them, it is understood that Lyman (Jeff Daniels) is symbolic of all the walking wounded...
...When Mama conveniently goes off to Europe, Geri gets to spend the summer with her favorite aunt, Geneva (Debra Monk), near a sequoia forest majestically designed by John Lee Beatty...
...Erwin never bets the nags...
...So do Joey Faye as the bartender and John Frank-lyn-Robbins as the greeting card publisher...
...The poignance of Geri's quest is continually undercut by backchat like, "Half the people in America are looking for their fathers...
...Most of the fault, however, lies in Wilson's artificial creations...
...Patsy rounds up his partners, a couple of small-time grifters named Frankie and Charlie (Zane Lasky and Jerry Stiller...
...One can blame some of this on the lightheaded direction of Marshall W. Mason...
...Who should be standing by but a gambler named Patsy (Klug-man), who learns about Erwin's unique ability...
...Their timing is expert, their situations comically explosive, their characters so firmly inhabited that it has become impossible to see them in anything else without thinking of the neurotic photographer, Felix Unger, and the voluble sportswriter, Oscar Madison...
...Wilson must have assumed that any break in the action would disturb Redwood's mood and vitiate its surprise ending...
...For mystical reasons, Geri is certain that the object of her quest is to be found among the homeless veterans living in the redwoods...
...the last time I heard that music outside the concert hall, it was used as the background for an ASPCA commercial...
...First produced in 1935, the John Cecil Holm and George Abbott farce lit up Broadway in a Depression-dimmed season...
...No doubt they were spurred on by the success of The Will Rogers Follies, another exercise in nostalgia firmly focused on the rear view mirror...
...But I believe he would have done a livelier job than John Til-linger...
...Even the redoubtable David Mitchell, whose scenery has decorated so many Neil Simon plays, has provided uninspired and unfunny sets, and Suzy Benzinger's costumes would be more appropriate for a Las Vegas show...
...Adams, the lyricist, is just as banal...
...They are dangerous to others and to themselves, and no one can hope to change them with a simple tickling of the treble and bass clefs...
...In his leisure time he likes to handicap horses...
...Unless, of course, they can help him get his name in lights on the Great White Way...
...She will not be turned away, and eventually they converse...
...The numbers are period pieces, skillfully belted out by a side-of-the-mouth chanteuse (Nora Mae Lyng...
...The booze has finished him off, leaving a wife, a child prodigy—at 17 Geri has a concert career and a Sony record contract—and a zillion dollars...
...In the first place, Will Rogers was an ingratiating family man with considerable, if calculated, charm...
...The Noble Savage has been an appealing creature since Rousseau invented him in the 18th century...
...There, A in 't Broadway Gross would be applicable...
...he just guesses—correctly—which of them will win, place and show...
...I'm not your father" (true) and "I'm no good with people" (false) is the extent of his autobiography...
...Anyone who finds Lyman believable should be made to walk the wards of a veteran's hospital, or for that matter, the streets of Manhattan...
...Mike Todd (Mike Burstyn) was, and is in this production, a hard-driving vulgarian...
...As soon as the women are together a quarrel begins, because Geri plans to abandon the keyboard...
...Still, it would have helped to have an actress who pronounces "wouldn't" the way it is written, instead of saying "would-unt...
...Only the title song is tuneful, something Leigh obviously knows: he reprises it four times...
...There is noth-ing remotely noble about the homeless in our cities and forests...
...With Talley's Folly, Burn This and The Fifth of July, Lanford Wilson filled out his membership card in that small company...
...Ain't Broadway Grand has only one thing other current musicals don't have: a subtitle...
...It was successfully revived in 1969, at the Lyceum Theater, directed once more by Abbott, this time starring Sam Levene and Paul Ford...
...These men are emotional wrecks —unshaven, hollow-eyed, surviving from disability check to disability check, mumbling to the wind...
...By 1993, we know—or ought to know—better...
...If the project stays afloat the credit will belong to Burstyn's energy, and to choreographer Randy Skinner and her army of Broadway gypsies, who present an array of high-octane tap dances and gymnastic routines...
...The themes of this drama are big and worthy: America's inability to deal with the children of war...
...Geneva is brilliantly played...
...Judging from the book, writers Thomas Meehan (Annie) and Lee Adams (Applause) believe the rise of legendary impresario Mike Todd provides the basis for a hit musical...
...The portrait of the deranged warrior as romantic figure is even less convincing...
...Monk could wring laughs from wood, which is about all she is given to work with...
...Geri is pure marzipan...
...tall trees with more roots than the people who want to cut them down...
...In reruns of The Odd Couple they are eternally 40, a pair of unsuited roommates whose quarrels cannot mask an abiding mutual regard...
...Jack Klug-man is 71...
...The japes are almost as geriatric as the ones at the Lyceum, but the jesters are forever fresh...
...He has no time for his wife, actress Joan Blondell (Maureen McNamara), his mistress, stripper Gypsy Rose Lee (Debbie Shapiro Gravitte), or any of his associates...
...But Wilson is unequal to the challenge, and so are two thirds of his cast...
...Predictable marital and professional miseries occur—so predictable that Tillinger introduces each scene with a song, as if this were a pageant rather than a play...
...Despite the bellowing and fuming, he seems about as threatening as a windup teddy bear...
...But five minutes after the curtain rises the differences are achingly clear...
...his rhymes suggest a man who has spent too much time with Clement Wood's Complete Rhyming Dictionary: Grand, Stand, Band, Demand, Expand...
...The playwright has endowed his waif with magical powers, accompanied by the kind of twinkling sound effects usually found in Disney movies...
...That seems to have been his first and last selfless act...
...The show's second bananas should have been peeled, along with the sub-par subplots...
...Nevertheless, this production has a few virtues: Greene is one of those string-bean comediennes who can carry a tune as lightly as she can bump and grind...
...I know, I know: he's 105 years old...
...Then again, so would Scott Harris' loud, flat-out direction...
...In the second place, Cy Coleman wrote original music for Follies...
...That ends the short list of virtues...
...They glom onto the versifier, aided by Patsy's good-hearted bimbo, an ex-Follies chorine named Mabel (Ellen Greene...
...Unfortunately, the playwright turns out to be the most destructive force of the evening...
...Geri stubbornly refuses to believe him, and he just as stubbornly keeps pushing the loud pedal through a long intermission-less production at the Brooks Atkinson Theater...
...For Ain't Broadway Grand, Mitch Leigh (Man of La Mancha) has composed more than 15 flat, derivative melodies that seem older than the post-World War II period of the evening...
...Moreover, as vibrant and sincere as Chois, she is not up to the role...
Vol. 76 • May 1993 • No. 6
