On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage FAUST AND LAST BY STEFAN KANFER SPORTSWRITERS used to say that there were three things you could always find in the cellar: the furnace, the boiler and the Washington Senators. But...
...Garber, a formidable stage presence in such period pieces as Two Shakespearean Actors, is a little too contemporary here—less the Prince of Darkness than the Duke of Deception...
...The College Boy (Michael Park) is supposed to have sprained his ankle...
...Scarcely three consecutive notes remain in the mind after they are sung...
...Beside himself, Applegate brings in more firepower...
...And Derek McLane's inventive sets use every inch of the Mitzi E. New house stage...
...On this framework director-adaptor George Abbott hung a megahit in 1955, thanks to his slam-bang direction...
...If Neuwirth doesn't smolder the way Gwen Verdon did, she is as agile as a contortionist...
...Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer's lighting is, as usual, fluid and artful...
...Old Joe Boyd bids goodbye to his sleeping wife Meg (Linda Stephens...
...Mitchell and Dossett are especially skillful at fleshing out their spavined parts, and as The Soldier David A. White moves with an elegance that recalls the young Bill "Bojangles" Robinson...
...until the full circle is completed and J makes love to A. Michael John LaChiusa's musical version, Hello Again, overturns almost everything the playwright attempted to express...
...The lyrics are the theatrical equivalent of a laundry list...
...The time is still the mid-'50s, but portraits of J. Edgar Hoover and Joe McCarthy now decorate Applegate's "office" in the basement of the Senate building, and the devil makes flames with the very latest technology...
...Although its personae constantly misbehave, their encounters are handled with discretion and their tales are related with the formality of a waltz...
...To be fair, few of the straight couplings are credible...
...Theoretically a theater in the round should be the ideal setting for a circular work...
...Without Michael Starobin's clever orchestrations, Hello Again would be little more than a medley of monotones...
...FIRST PRODUCED in 1897, Der Reigen is also younger than George Abbott...
...Damn Yankees is a sock out of the park...
...Out of nowhere there suddenly appears the mysterious Mr...
...Blazer, Carmello and Pawk are all comely, without, as Raymond Chandler once put it, making a bishop want to kick in a stained-glass window...
...An era was over...
...Emick is a jut-jawed amalgam of Mickey Mantle and Abner Yokum...
...Better known as The Merry-Go-Round in English and La Ronde in French, the Arthur Schnitzler work is not as frivolous as it first appears...
...Each is more athletic than balletic, yet all are capable of the most intricate movements...
...The price is quite reasonable: an eternity in Gehenna, a place very much like Washington...
...Still, Applegate feels threatened by this display of human affection...
...He told the playwrights that there was something amiss in the script...
...She sings and acts with admirable restraint, so that her character's toughness never quite masks a sad vulnerability...
...and Vicki Lewis makes a hilariously victimized sports reporter—the first of the locker-room ladies...
...Rob Marshall echoes Fosse's choreography without copying it literally, Gregory Meeh augments Douglas W. Schmidt's sprightly scenery with some dazzling special effects, and David C. Woolard's costumes are as risible as the script...
...Where the original is indirect, the adaptation is explicit...
...As for the book, various episodes occur in 1900, in the '40s, the '60s, the' 70s, the '80s...
...The Young Thing and The Writer (Malcolm Gets) collide 60 years later...
...The miracle is done...
...The playwright studied medicine before pursuing a literary career, and his work is informed by an acute clinical intelligence...
...by Bob Fosse's choreography...
...I was astonished," the doctor remarked, "to see what such a writer knows about these things...
...Then, one spring day in 1961, the wisecracks stopped...
...Just give them one fearsome RBI man, he figures, and the Senators could topple the Yankees from their permanent perch atop the American League...
...After the mandatory palaver, Joe agrees —with one proviso...
...He becomes so furious that everything he touches turns to fire, including a sexy little piece of brimstone he brings up from purgatory...
...All this might be tolerable if LaChiusa had composed a memorable score...
...Shoeless is just about perfect, except for one thing...
...Last year he was vigorous enough to act as consultant on this version when it debuted in San Diego, and his influence is manifest...
...The misery was finished...
...But the faithful Shoeless proves immune to her allure...
...George Abbott, however, is still here...
...The supervamp has never experienced masculine indifference and, naturally, she falls in love with him...
...At 106 he is older than the century, older than the Yankees, older even than the Broadway theater, which will enjoy its centenary next year...
...He even rents a room in the Boyd house, just so he can be near Meg...
...Based on Douglass Wallop's 1955 fantasy, The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, the musical is Faust in flannels, brightened with wit and decorated with melody...
...Yes, yes, he knew all about the characters' idiosyncrasies...
...instead his work seems to be the latest illustration of chaos theory...
...As the manager, Dick Latessa is a combination of Casey Stengel and Tug Mc-Graw, especially in "You Gotta Have Heart," a number that still seems greener than Astroturf...
...Yet The Actress (Michele Pawk), a successful woman with an abundance of style and grace, allows him to treat her like a back door mat...
...Actually the musical's shortcomings overwhelm its geometry: Hello Again travels 360 degrees, and always stays far behind the curve...
...There is not a weak spot in the lineup...
...In a few weeks the phenom is batting over .500 and propelling his team to the top...
...The injury causes the barest of limps...
...Where the play is concerned exclusively with heterosexual encounters, the musical relies on two homosexual ones, neither of them remotely believable...
...A makes love to B, B makes love to C, C makes love to D, etc...
...And behold...
...Obviously LaChiusa is straining for timelessness and universality...
...He can void the contract if he steps out of the pennant race before the season closes...
...This devilish stranger offers Joe a hell of a deal...
...Draped in silk and Satan, Lola (Bebe Neuwirth) has a singular assignment: seduction of the young paragon before he slides home...
...The fanatic reaches the end of his tether and snaps, "I'd sell my soul for a slugger...
...If the middle-aged fan signs a magic contract, he will miraculously shed several decades, become a 22-year-old rookie, and lead his beloved losers to the World Series...
...Applegate is only too happy to include the escape clause...
...Saundr a Santiago, best known to audiences as the Hispanic cop on Miami Vice, is superb as The Whore...
...Alas, he lacks the elementary gifts for melody and rhyme...
...young Shoeless Joe Hardy (Jarrod Emick) steps out the door and heads for the Senators' clubhouse...
...Instead, they bagged their loser's franchise, left town and became the Minnesota Twins...
...Yet she clings to The Husband (Dennis Parlato), an aging narcissist who offers neither warmth nor indulgence...
...The Senator (John Dossett) is a drab and possessive figure...
...No wonder it was favored by a young Viennese doctor named Sigmund Freud, then beginning his own explorations of the psyche...
...Yet there is no logical progression of time or attitudes...
...There, Damn Yankees is enjoying the kind of production that gives revival a good name...
...Whatever cobwebs clung to the old version have been swept away, and director Jack O'Brien has added bunches of new gags and some nifty stage business...
...On an ordinary evening in May a 50ish Washingtonian, Joe Boyd (Dennis Kelly), watches his team get beaten once again...
...Toni-Leslie James' costumes brighten the faces and bodies of the cast, to say nothing of the audience...
...and by a new team of songwriters, Richard Adler and Jerry Ross...
...Applegate (Victor Garber...
...The Writer and The Actress are back in the '20s...
...They grimly agreed with John Stein-beck's remark: "There is a Federal law which forbids that team to win...
...Where Reigen has resonance, Hello Again is not deep enough for veneer...
...Fosse and Jerry Ross are gone (the co-composer/lyricist died at the age of 29, only a few months after Damn Yankees opened), and the American musical is all but moribund...
...And as a prognathous ballplayer named Sohovik, Gregory Jbara is Yogi Berra all rolled into one...
...And her equally supple vocal cords enliven the show-stoppers, "Whatever Lola Wants" and "Two Lost Souls...
...To understand those dark times one would have to spend many depressing days with The Baseball Encyclopedia?or two delightful hours at the Marquis Theater...
...It was the setting that bothered him: Where were the doors...
...Stephens is a lovely presence as well as a loving wife...
...No, the Senators didn't make it to the World Series...
...But Senators fans found little humor in the situation...
...Yet his wealthy family has hired a full-time Nurse (Judy Blazer) whose sole function is to wiggle around until she arouses him...
...Here it is almost 40 years later and the Senators are a memory, the Yankees haven't won a pennant since 1979 and Verdon and Walston have more or less retired...
...Musicals this season have been bunts and scratch singles...
...Nevertheless, he brings wit and power to the role, and the supporting players catch his line drives with ease...
...The kid is subject to homesickness...
...no man is small enough to slip through this amateurish little loophole...
...I was once in his office when the ultimate theater professional appraised a new comedy...
...Lola warms to her work...
...Failure to do so will condemn her to becoming the homeliest woman in Providence, Rhode Island...
...Kelly could not be bettered as the good Joe...
...In Reigen, the nature of love—old, young and the kind that can be bought?is initially viewed with amusement, then with sorrow, and finally with sympathetic irony...
...Of course, she doesn't recognize Joe's new self and he can't tell her who he really is...
...They burbled on about plot and motivation until he held up his hand...
...The Husband and The Young Thing (John Cameron Mitchell) conjoin before World War I, aboard what appears to be the Titanic...
...The Young Wife (Carolee Carmello) throws herself at The College Boy...
...In keeping with Abbott's philosophy, the Senators do not look like willowy chorus boys, they look like thick-wristed ballplayers...
...Abbott was aided by the contributions of Gwen Verdon as Lola and Ray Walston as the devil...
...Fortunately, the cast soars far above the material...
Vol. 77 • March 1994 • No. 3
