On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage LIGHT IN THE DARK BY STEFAN KANFER ON MEASURING her accomplishments vs. Renata Tebaldi's: "It is like comparing champagne with cognac. No?with Coca-Cola." On receiving a subpoena: "I...
...Happy, that is, for a few months...
...He did his best in a part that demands more vitality than he could muster...
...On being criticized for a melodramatic performance: "When my enemies stop hissing, I shall know I'm slipping...
...Linda knows better: She understands Johnny's desire, and she desires Johnny...
...Trouble is, Johnny wants to take the money and run...
...Working with this trio, the burned-out singer digs deep into the music...
...Musicologists as well as paparazzi have been accused of taking liberties with her story, but no one took more liberties than Callas herself...
...Some things are more powerful than dreams, though, like his father's orders and the omnipresent bottle of alcohol...
...In the smallest part, a bewildered stagehand, Michael Friel expertly pulls laughs from furniture...
...he really is the dumbest of all singers...
...I want to do my retiring young," he explains, "while I feel good all the time...
...The free spirited Linda Seton (Laura Linney) thinks him the ideal match for her kid sister...
...so are Michael McGarty, who came up with splendid settings, and Jane Greenwood, whose costumes are the wittiest of the year...
...Joan Sutherland is a giantess, too ungainly for grand opera...
...He will go back to the grind when—and if—the loot runs out...
...how dare her fiance resign his commission as a captain of industry...
...Then everything begins to go right for Johnny, and wrong for everyone else...
...His compelling drama, Master Class, recreates—on his own terms—the series of tutorials, given by La Callas (Zoe Caldwell) at .milliard's music school in Manhattan...
...it is impossible to look away from her even when others are speaking or singing...
...Julia's siblings, however, take to Johnny straight away...
...The lone male, Tony (Jay Hunter Morris), enters with a joke about tenors: They are supposed to be the dumbest of all singers...
...It had two film adaptations, the first inadequate, the second terrific...
...With scarcely a nanosecond's hesitation, Callas begins to strut before a group of singers?played by the audience...
...And a lot strikes her fancy...
...Happily, I was proven wrong...
...we sense that she will go nowhere, not because she lacks talent, but because her inner fire is too easily banked...
...She bears only a superficial resemblance to the real thing (the actress is naturally slender, the soprano got there through a severe diet that shed 60 pounds...
...That can be discerned on the stage of the John Golden Theater, and long may it hover there...
...I prefer Holiday, a less polished work of his...
...Not so with McDonald's Sharon...
...She constructs Verdi's Lady Macbeth from the inside out, cracks the mysteries of Bellini's famous sleepwalker La Sonnambula, and analyzes the melodies of Puccini's Tosca...
...She avidly recalls the big performances at La Scala, securing her reputation as the dominant figure of bel canto, and the greatest operatic actress of her time...
...The latest in a long file of examiners, playwright Terrence McNally is more of a fan than a critic, more of a spellbinder than a biographer...
...The youngest daughter, Julia (Kim Raver), has fallen in love with a nobody, Johnny Case (Tony Goldwyn), who is just starting his career as a banker...
...the odd blends of insight and denial, braggadocio and forbearance...
...As Tony, Morris is the quintessential leading man whose vocal abilities are in inverse proportion to his IQ...
...Hers was a performance that augurs a long and large career...
...She holds the stage as Callas did...
...in fact he was one of them, mocking their foibles while he enjoyed their company...
...PHILIP BARRY floated like a butterfly and stung like a butterfly...
...for another, he is self-made...
...Courted and discarded by the equally flamboyant Aristotle Onassis, hired and humiliated by Rudolph Bing, impresario of the Metropolitan Opera, she saw herself as the apotheosis of both the Prima Donna and the Suffering Artist...
...McNally is using her own techniques to recreate a time and a persona, and to offer his own meditations on a woman whose musicianship he manifestly admires...
...She remembers her failed marriage to Giovanni Menghini, who had sacrificed everything to shape her early career...
...Those who want to hear the original lectures can purchase the three-CD set Maria Callas atjuilliard on EMI Classics...
...Three students present themselves for individual attention...
...Blinking up from his scotch and soda, brother Ned Seton (Reg Rogers) finds Johnny a refreshing change from the dullards in his own set...
...woodcut...
...He engineers a successful business deal, enchanting his future father-in-law and making Julia even more enthralled...
...The widower surveys this upstart with a jaundiced eye—bloody fortune hunter, it looks like...
...She summons up the febrile, wasteful relationship with "Ari," and the contempt he expressed for her art form: "The best part of the opera are the intervals...
...Tony Goldwyn was not Cary Grant, yet who is these days...
...In that one Cary Grant was still an emerging personality...
...Yet Tony also has an authentic talent uncorrupted by sophistication or bad instruction, and before it Callas can only genuflect...
...An accompanist, Manny (David Loud), sits at a piano awaiting the appearance of the supernova as the curtain goes up...
...Let no one be deceived by the man's genial self-deprecation...
...Master Class, a certified Broadway hit, has been bitterly attacked by members of the Callas claque...
...The ensemble is faultless under Leonard Foglia's elegant direction...
...No one is particularly sympathetic, but the lines are so good and the criticisms so mild that everyone comes off well, even the brittle losers and what Hollywood calls the "harrumph types" who constituted Society in the theater of the '30s...
...Listening closely, they will find all the externals of the artist, but not a scintilla of her soul...
...They claim the singer was a much more human being than Mc-Nally's monstre sacre...
...Barry once appraised himself as a man who made light of thedark...
...Old Seton will not hear of it...
...Katharine Hepburn had a fortune in cheekbones, her youth, and none of the mannerisms she would later shlep from movie to movie to movie, under the mistaken impression that it was acting...
...David Warren's directorial touch was expert...
...Lecturing to us, the diva seems to have distorted everything except her talent...
...No doubt...
...On receiving a subpoena: "I will not be sued...
...I have the voice of an angel...
...Damned if she will confuse opera libretti with the demands and consolations of real life...
...Still, Callas' memory has only so much room for mistakes and humiliations...
...As Manny, Loud makes his piano talk, and his talk pianissimo...
...After all, it was she who declared, "An opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down...
...Those are the actual words of the soprano Maria Anna Sophia Cecilia Kalo-geropoulos, better known as Maria Callas...
...Out of this confusion of purposes Barry fashioned a romantic comedy with two smashing roles and a happy ending...
...The supporting cast had the '20s patois down pat—a little too pat in the case of Raver and the actors who played Johnny's only friends, Nick and Susan Potter (Michael Countryman and Anne Lange...
...It takes place back when you could make a pile and keep it, before all the balderdash about a graduated income tax and Social Security...
...Callas' ego, never far from the surface, emerges full-blown to put down her fellow divas...
...the beauty and precision is there for all to hear...
...Tebaldi, on the other hand, has been treated unfairly by the reviewers: "How can they call her my rival when no one can do what I can do...
...but she was al so a diva who knew everything there was to know about the power of publicity, scandal and illusion...
...Barry's play concentrates on the kind of rich folks made obsolete by the Depression—the twittering society ladies, their confident, overstuffed husbands and their aimless children...
...The second, Sharon (Audra McDonald), has a golden voice and a garish outfit which Callas instantly disparages, thereby reducing the apprentice to jelly...
...For one thing, he radiates decency...
...The son of a grocer, he found his way to Wall Street without those two traditional requisites, family connections and a private income...
...This gives her ample opportunity to face forward and dilate on the subjects of vocal expression, role interpretation, life, love, philosophy, plus anything else that strikes her fancy...
...A family named Se-ton is living on upper Fifth Avenue...
...Julia is in tears...
...After a fashionable delay she arrives in sty le, wearing tailored pants and shirt, her dyed auburn hair severely pulled back...
...Of course, each family had a seat on the stock exchange, a mansion on Fifth Avenue and a dozen in help...
...Ostensibly he was a critic of the rich...
...She brings him home and presents him to the elder Seton (Tom Lacy...
...They took place three years before her death, apparently by drug overdose, at the age of 53...
...The Depression hit less than a year after the show's original opening...
...Caldwell, a performer given to exaggeration, is finally in the part she was bom to play...
...And those others are no slouches...
...She appeals to him: "There's nothing more exciting than making money...
...In the land of the plutocrats this is heresy...
...and Martin Pakledinaz' costumes were right out of a John Held Jr...
...I thought Holiday had acquired too many cobwebs to be revived...
...Derek McLane's sets worked well in the Circle's difficult theater-in-the-round...
...His most famous play, Philadelphia Story, concerns a stuck-up heiress who suddenly discovers that her ex-husband is a better choice than the man she has picked as his replacement...
...It starts in my imagination, it becomes my life, and it stays part of my life long after I've left the opera house...
...First to display her wares is a pudding-faced soprano, Sophie (Karen Kay Cody), whose dress, like her show of confidence, is all too brief...
...Slick hair and flapper attitudes are no substitute for an understanding of character, even if there is not much character to understand...
...This timeout, Circle in the Square added to the illumination...
...But Linney had enough charm and warmth to erase the memory of Hepburn...
...Victim of her self-created legend, taker of Milan by storm and New York by temperament, she was famous at 20 and finished at 40...
...As Sophie, Cody is hilarious and poignant...
...The astronomers at the Circle in the Square Theater not only refreshed the classic comedy for a limited engagement, they discovered a new star...
...Not every soliloquy is flattering to the speaker...
...But Caldwell has the right imperial tone...
...During these fugue states the schoolroom darkens, the opera house materializes and Callas' recorded voice saturates the night...
...After her initial shyness she bursts forth in brilliant song, and then hotly refuses any more lessons...
...As for Ned, he too fantasizes about retiring young...
...Damned if Sharon will use her teacher as a role mod-el...
...As the students sing, the instructor's mind ranges back through the years to her early struggles and triumphs, her warm appreciators and vicious detractors...
Vol. 78 • December 1995 • No. 10
