On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage CULT FIGURES BY STEFAN KANFER STEPHEN SONDHEIM'S resume provides a concise history of modern Broadway. Since his 1957 debut with West Side Story, he has written the music and/or lyrics...
...Fosca is monomaniacal, therefore the composer makes her monotonous...
...This affectionate, shapely blonde has only two faults: She is married, and she refuses to leave her family in Milan...
...Save for Tom Aldredge's dignified Army physician, that ends the list of commendations...
...The score for A Little Night Music, written entirely in waltz time, captured the wormwood spirit of Ingmar Bergman and produced the classic ballad, "Send in the Clowns...
...No one ever accused the star of laziness, but the claims of her hyperthyroid show rang false at almost every turn, not least because she and her collaborators shaped a life to fill their own needs...
...Clara, from her distant station in Milan, grows impatient with her lover's prolonged absences and increasingly disturbed messages...
...One morning his commanding officer, Colonel Ricci (Gregg Edelman), asks for a small favor...
...The production ached for a supporting cast with genuine parts, or even a worthwhile line...
...Why, then, has the composer/lyricist become a cult figure whose followers buy his every album no matter how obscure, and attend every show no matter how short-lived...
...For good reasons, Merrily We Roll Along ran for only 16 performances...
...If you got fruit, you cen't....' Mason has reinvented himself in recent years, moving from standup comic to standup guy, speaking for Joe Sixpack and other victims of the liberal onslaught...
...Some of the tedium is relieved by Jane Greenwood's painterly costumes, which evoke the canvases of Manet, and Adrianne Lobel's sets, which artfully use the palette of Northern Italian landscape...
...In the process, said this short-lived revisionist stage biography, the world has forgotten his familial antecedent...
...No matter how hard he struggles he cannot break her grip...
...the other militiamen are equally rigid and unconvincing...
...Edelman has the authority of a Toys '#' Us soldier, and he is not alone...
...Alas, for most of Sondheim's latest effort, His Majesty is nowhere to be found...
...The lyrics for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum were supple and funny, and the melodies could have been hummed by a stone...
...For what seems the hundredth time, Fosca pops up and battens onto him...
...Sally was Lenny's mother, all right...
...There are, though, a few inadvertent ones...
...And, to be fair, because when Sondheim is on his game he displays a regal talent...
...He careers around like the animated car in Who Framed Roger Rabbit...
...But even at the railroad station Giorgio is unsafe...
...A Another comedian is holding forth on Broadway, at the John Golden Theater...
...Rivers stayed front and center all the time, whether the protagonist was old or young, manic or depressed, courted or hospitalized...
...it made her redouble her efforts to succeed...
...In the absence of choreography, La-pine moves the men about in ungainly close-order drills...
...To make Sally Marr significant, the play stated that she was the original soothsayer, liberating Lenny by showing him the difference between dirty words and dirty minds...
...Be my friend...
...Would the Captain mind chatting with the Colonel's ailing cousin Fosca (Donna Murphy...
...Where she is today is at the summit of her profession: the hyper comedienne par excellence...
...Fosca is also a clinging vine of the wisteria type, capable of choking the vitality out of any organism she encircles...
...Characters and songs wander aimlessly from scene to scene, with no applause solicited until the final curtain...
...Backpedaling, he heads to Milan...
...So did Tim Weil, who played and conducted the coincidental music...
...As an old gagwriter at the Players Club recently observed, "I knew them both...
...His chief distinction came after he changed his name to Lenny Bruce and used scatology and blasphemy in his standup comedy routines...
...Trysting places are everywhere (their favorite is her bedroom, where we first glimpse the pair in flagrante...
...Whatever his excesses, Bruce was sui generis...
...If I had been a hit in the Catskills that summer," she speculates, "I probably would not be where I am today...
...UnderPrice's direction, they moved around vigorously enough, but to a man and woman, the "escorts" remained as silent as the scenery...
...In the least persuasive conversion since Anthony Quinn played Barabbas, Giorgio finally transfers his affection to Fosca...
...least amusing...
...But Rivers and her co-writers, Erin Sanders and Lonny Price, never risked diverting attention from the lady in the title role...
...Politically Incorrect is Jackie Mason's third solo upon the legitimate stage, and his most didactic (i.e...
...Yet her presence is overpowering and her pitch perfect?the requisites of a superstar...
...Otherwise the ticket-holders remain polite, quietly shifting in their seats, keeping their lips shut and their hands still...
...These bleats exemplify what lit crits call the Imitative Fallacy: Giorgio is bored, therefore the director surrounds him with wearisome people...
...Theirs is a schizoid production: half Italian opera, half American musical comedy...
...Those backgrounds were provided by William Barclay, who knew the meaning of self-effacement...
...Rivers didn't...
...and his polished timing reveals decades of nightclub and television experience...
...To deal with the second, Giorgio and Clara sing love letters to each other across the miles...
...In her autobiography, Enter Talking, Joan Rivers recalls a godawful season in the Borscht Belt...
...Resort audiences were "the worst in the world...
...The bathetic monologues were meant to remind us of Rivers' personal tragedy?her husband committed suicide several years ago—and her will to carry on regardless...
...Shea is less military paragon than male model, posing rather than acting...
...As Fosca, Murphy is a pale apparition out of Poe, so insubstantial that she seems to float across the stage...
...Captain Giorgio (Jere Shea) is reassigned from Milan to the backwater of Parma...
...I don't think so...
...The characters who surrounded the indomitable Sally (Valerie Wright, Jonathan Brody, Ken Nagy) redefined the term "subordinaterole...
...The trouble is, Mason's material is as worn as his face...
...For in this airless, intermissionless production there are no "numbers," let alone showstoppers...
...By then, only a Sondheim fanatic could laud the creator...
...There has never been anyone like him before or since...
...Tarchefti, and from the little-known film adaptation, Passione d Amore...
...He has collaborated with Leonard Bernstein, Richard Rodgers and Jule Styne, and contributed to movies as disparate as Dick Tracy and Reds...
...Today every four-letter comedian claims to be a lineal descendant...
...The year is 1863...
...He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, became the first Visiting Professor of Contemporary Theater at Oxford, and received a 1993 Kennedy Center Honor...
...Tarchetti's drama is better suited to La Scala than to the Plymouth Theater, a notion that must have occurred to Sondheim and playwright/director James Lapine...
...Giorgio hates gambling and he already has a woman, Clara (Marin Mazzie...
...One kind word from Giorgio and the man is doomed...
...But Lenny was not her son, if you dig...
...The results are catastrophic...
...There the militia has little to do besides play cards and chase women...
...For the last five years, talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stem have become famous for their lampoons of Political Correctness...
...But since the revelations have been airing gratis, it seems extravagant to pay $45 a seat for dentalized Ts and recycled outrage...
...They hear drums," she trills...
...Flawed as they were, Company, Follies and Into the Woods commented on marriage and mores with incisive rhymes and ambitious staging...
...Fosca shadows Giorgio at dinner tables, private rooms and even hillsides...
...This summer Rivers vainly attempted to set down roots by starring in Sally Marr ...and Her Escorts...
...the bravos properly belong to a trio of performers...
...This casual act is his undoing...
...They thought the peak of sophistication was saying, 'I've seen them all and I've walked out on them all.'" Still, she was grateful for their hostility...
...During the upheavals of the late '60s and early '70s he was regarded as the apotheosis of outrage, a truth-telling clown who perished for his candor...
...Anyone Can Whistle was a creative and stylistic mess...
...Sunday in the Park with George addressed the subject of Art and the Artist with pretension and platitudes...
...Unfortunately, the operatic portion has no real arias and the musical comedy no intentional laughs...
...One hopes that the King will soon resume the throne...
...As Fosca's rival, Mazzie possesses the ideal combination of glamour and pathos...
...We hear music...
...There really was a Sally Marr, a third-rate nightclub performer whose chief distinction was that she gave birth to Leonard Alfred Schneider...
...Day after day, month after month, the woman goes after him with pleas, threats, fainting spells...
...It seems almost impertinent to point out that Sondheim's oeuvre is not quite as impressive as his kudos...
...All are stated in his patented Lower East Side diction: "If you got aids you cen come inta dis country...
...Because, like all cultists, they believe their leader is immune to failure...
...Passion derives from Fosca, a neglected novel by the 19th-century Italian writer I.U...
...At this juncture the audience seems as uncomfortable as the victim, and its snickers are audible...
...Assassins, for example, was actually an ill-conceived, ghastly musical about the killers of Presidents...
...Giorgio complies, but his emotions soon tumble from pity to revulsion to outright terror...
...Between crises he fills the stage with minichoruses of servants and soldiers commenting on the lovers' plight...
...After years of research I have concluded that there are two Sondheims—King Stephen and the Old Pretender—and that it is impossible to predict which one will write the next show...
...Obstacle number one has always been surmountable...
...Sally Marr sought to rectify matters, exploring the life of a woman with a bad marriage, a motor mouth, and an irrepressible kid...
...Although Sondheim's music is earthbound, his lyrics show flashes of fire, as in Fosca's chant of "Love without pride or shame/ Love unconcerned/With being returned...
...Since his 1957 debut with West Side Story, he has written the music and/or lyrics for more than a dozen shows...
...There is, however, a large gap between Las Vegas and the Helen Hayes Theater...
...The cousin proves to be an unprepossessing, self-pitying neurasthenic: "Sickness is as normal to me as health is to you...
...This time out, Mason flails at hypocrites with unlimited zingers...
...Giorgio is only too happy to oblige: Anything to break the ennui...
...Their romance dissolves...
...By the time of his death from a drug overdose in 1966, Bruce had been censored by nightclub owners, hounded by the government and lauded by campus radicals who thought anything foul-mouthed was by definition hilarious...
...Between epistles he daydreams, woolgathers and generally conveys an air of lofty abstraction...
...Falsity in high places ought to be pointed out, of course...
...All too often, though, he offers lines more appropriate for a knitted sampler: "Some say happiness/Comes and goes/Then this happiness/Is a kind of happiness/No one really knows...
Vol. 77 • July 1994 • No. 7
