On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage SOUVENIRS OF THE SIXTIES BY STEFAN KANFER The Shop A round the Corner is one of those projects that keep rising without a trace. The first version, filmed in 1940, offered great...
...Would that they were equal to it...
...An earnest assistant manager, Georg Nowak (Boyd Gaines), and a forthright clerk, Amalia Balash (Judy Kuhn), work at the parfumerie of curmudgeonly yet lovable Mr...
...But no...
...In last year's Roundabout production of The Show Off, much was made of Boyd Gaines' resemblance to the young Jimmy Stewart...
...True, the Roundabout is smaller than almost every other Broadway house...
...Nor can the theater be faulted...
...Guinevere's "The Simple Joys of Maidenhood" and "I Loved You Once in Silence...
...That crazy world was Europe on the verge of war, the Europe of these self-involved Hungarians...
...For Camelot was and is a cumbrous musical, praised today for its historical associations rather than its esthetic qualities...
...In the cast of overactors, first prize for the most egregious hamming must go to James Valentine, who doubles as the wizard Merlyn and the bumbling old King Pellinore...
...The romantic comedy starred Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan under the direction of the great Viennese, Ernst Lubitsch...
...To satisfy these yearnings, each answers an ad in the Personals column of the local newspaper...
...White's luminous retelling of the Arthurian legend...
...Robert Goulet, the first Sir Lancelot du Lac, has been elevated to the royal role of King Arthur and given billing in letters as large as the title...
...Even aristocrats are to learn the principle of equality...
...The first version, filmed in 1940, offered great promise...
...Broadway demands something more from those who would grab a slice of the Big Apple...
...His sense of pacing would make him perfect for a documentary about glaciers, as would his sense of comedy...
...These it received, from Burton, Goulet and Julie Andrews...
...She Loves Me is less ambitious than almost every other Broadway musical...
...The very year they are supposed to be prancing around, Hitler is assuming the Chancellorship of Germany...
...No, I believe the real fault lies with the time and place...
...In fact, Goulet has mellowed and matured...
...Camelot concerns the rise and fall of Britain's legendary ruler...
...Both might have stepped from a Ludwig Bemelmans drawing of the period...
...In the original production the kingdom was given an external grandeur...
...That is all very well for the sticks...
...then again...
...No matter...
...Georg's story is similar...
...Swaggering with irrepressible conceit, McGillin peers down Mayes' bodice with the panache of the born seducer...
...That was all very well in the Hollywood of the '40s, when naivete reigned supreme...
...he initiates a romance by mail with his "dear friend...
...All too soon, shops and people like the ones onstage will be banished cruelly and forever...
...Save for the surnames, She Loves Me might be occurring on Mars...
...Eventually Kodaly is sacked for sexual misadventures...
...Lancelot (Steve Blanchard) has minimal stage presence and long blond curls more appropriate aboard a Harley Davidson than atop a noble steed...
...The new production provides an answer—and creates some fresh doubts...
...For these and many other excesses Director-Choreographer Norbert Joerder must shoulder a good portion of the blame...
...his farewell number, "Grand Knowing You," is so ebulliently delivered that you would think he had won the national lottery...
...Neil Peter Jampolis' sets and Franne Lee's costumes have a garish, tacky appearance, as if they were constantly being packed up and taken on the road...
...According to the program, Joerder is mainly concerned with revivals of Broadway hits, staged in South Florida...
...Nostalgic ticketholders still recall the melodious tones of Barbara Cook and the agreeable personality of Daniel Massey in the lead roles...
...In Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart observes that there are times when lovers' tribulations "don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world...
...King Arthur seeks to create a society where disputes will be solved by negotiation, rather than by armed conflict...
...Knights errant will gather at a round table, so that no one can claim superiority by sitting at the head...
...Toward the close of the 1950s composer Frederick Loewe and lyricist-adapter Alan Jay Lerner wondered what they could do to crown their latest achievement...
...Nine years later the plot provided the basis for a remake, In the Good Old Summertime, with Judy Garland and Van Johnson...
...Amalia receives a poetic reply and begins a frantic, passionate correspondence with her unseen ideal...
...My Fair Lady...
...The ad prompted a rush of ticket sales to those who remembered any of the previous versions, and to others curious to know why memories of Bock's melodies and Harnick's lyrics had glowed for 30 years...
...Not so now...
...It takes sheaves of misdirected missives, innumerable failed meetings, 21 songs, and two acts for them to make this discovery, straighten out complications and end in an appropriate clinch...
...the notorious ego has been tempered by a weary dignity...
...Since neither young person can stand the other, quarrels and outbursts are frequent...
...To succeed, the musical needed the aid of extraordinary performances...
...By the time the show opened in New York in 1960, Director Moss Hart had suffered a major heart attack, Loewe had been laid low by cardiac problems, and Lerner was hospitalized with a bleeding ulcer...
...Predictably, the show went the way of its predecessors: a respectable run followed by obscurity and fond reminiscences...
...Certainly the score is not to blame: Bock and Harnick are, after all, the people who gave us Fiddler on the Roof and The Rothschilds...
...All this altruism comes to pass...
...her phrasing is a duplicate of the original—sans Andrews' humor and bite...
...Arthur's "How to Handle a Woman," and Lancelot's "If Ever I Should Leave You...
...By now The Shop Around the Corner should have filed for bankruptcy...
...What, then, is the problem with this resuscitation...
...After all these years a precis may be helpful...
...The actor's aw-shucks style contrasts a bit too sharply with the rest of the cast, trying their damnedest to accord with the Mittel-European locale...
...The baritone is often described as a walking glossy photograph...
...Maraczek (Lou Zorich...
...She returns his glances with a hilarious mix of intrigue and revulsion...
...It turned out to be Sacher torte to the general: endearing to connoisseurs perhaps, but with a bit too much Gemut-lichkeit for public taste...
...Here he plays Mr...
...John F. Kennedy wore out his original cast LP of the musical...
...And then Arthur makes a fatal error: He trusts his spirited wife Guinevere, and his best friend Lancelot...
...The real center of the Roundabout Theater production is not provided by the stars but by the second leads, Steven Kodaly (Howard McGillin) and Ilona Ritter (Sally Mayes), two other shop employees...
...Which is precisely the case...
...In the process they gave dimension to a seriously flawed work...
...The fact has not been lost on the producers of this revival...
...The revival of Camelot has different troubles...
...Even after seven Presidencies, it is impossible to gaze upon the precincts of Arthurian England without a catch in the throat...
...they know how to evoke a foreign milieu without taking a step away from Tin Pan Alley...
...His performance is neatly matched by Zorich as the cuckolded shop owner, and by Jonathan Freeman and Joey McKneely as an imperious headwaiter and a pratfalling busboy...
...According to my atlas, that is about athousand miles away from Gotham's Shubert Alley...
...In the musical theater of the 1960s, this was daring stuff indeed...
...Smith Goes to Budapest with mixed results...
...The Goulet revival amounts to a vanity production: The star has been living off it for years, profitably shlepping his Camelot from city to city...
...it looked important...
...Tucker McCrady's Mordred is about as mysterious and threatening as an MTV video, and the ensemble barely avoids collisions in the big choral and dance numbers...
...When they betray him, Camelot backslides to war and the Arthurian ideal perishes in the process...
...Whatever the shortcomings of the show, it had a regal bearing...
...The two Anglophiles unwisely decided to take on The Once and Future King, T.H...
...Some 50 years later the affected innocence has lost a good deal of its charm, and the mock-Hungarian rhapsodies have a tendency to congeal, like a smile that has stayed on a face too long...
...Occasionally tunes like "Dear Friend" and "Vanilla Ice Cream" could be heard in cabaret performances, usually by Cook herself...
...This technicolor version also proved to be amiable, saccharine and no great shakes at the box office...
...In the few moments of down time, each dreams of an ideal mate...
...At the Gershwin Theater he is every other inch a king, and that is good enough, particularly when combined with a generosity to his fellow players...
...The trio glamorized almost every important number: the title song...
...The complications provoke a great deal of stage business, funny and forced, depending on the performers...
...Yet Joe Masteroff's book contains no hints of imminent events, no suggestions of irony, as there are, for example, in Cabaret, a musical that takes place during the same dreadful epoch...
...Scott Ellis' direction is appropriately spirited, David Charles and Jane Greenwood have designed attractive costumes, and Tony Walton's sets are, as always, witty and inventive...
...Millions of Americans watched it through a scrim of tears...
...Out-of-town tryouts were catastrophic...
...Kuhn fares better as the breathless ingenue, even though Wilson Mizner's crack comes to mind: "A little more virginity, if you please...
...What they had wrought was hardly My Fair Lady redivivus...
...Bewigged like a scarecrow, lurching, stuttering, honking, harrumphing, he takes Lerner's gentle humor and turns it into flat-out burlesque...
...Once more we are in the Hungary of 1934...
...This Guinevere (Patricia Kies) is in every sense a road company Julie Andrews...
...Throughout his nation, declares the regent, the poor and defenseless will be protected...
...On Stage SOUVENIRS OF THE SIXTIES BY STEFAN KANFER The Shop A round the Corner is one of those projects that keep rising without a trace...
...The lines he loved to hear were: 'Don't let it be forgot, that once there was a spot/For one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot....'" At the 1964 Democratic National Convention the star of the Broadway musical, Richard Burton, read those rhymes in a motion picture tribute to the assassinated leader...
...Of course, the coworkers have unwittingly answered each other's letters...
...earlier this year the Roundabout Theater announced plans to revive its third incarnation...
...The song he loved most," the President's widow was to recall, "came at the very end of this record...
...There were sets that seemed to float on a sea of silver, banners in all sorts of vibrant hues, costumes that simultaneously evoked and commented on the mythic past...
...In 1963 the tale returned yet again, as a Broadway musical entitled She Loves Me, with songs by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick...
Vol. 76 • July 1993 • No. 9
