On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage WHEN LESS IS LESS BY STEFAN KANFER SOME WRITERS are masters of the exit line. The Argentinian Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a genius of the opening paragraph. Who, perusing the first words...
...Pedro and Pablo loudly advertise their intentions to the horrified townsfolk—and no one lifts a finger to stop them...
...As the lights come up in Act One, Sandor laments the difficulties of beginning acomedy...
...That is exactly what the producers of Chronicle are demanding...
...Santiago, it develops, is one of those victims looking for a victimizer...
...Jess Goldstein's costumes evoke a time of '20s splendor, and so does Stephan Olson's set, complete with view of a twinkling bay...
...On stage, without the author's magic realism, people and events seem arbitrary...
...I found myself beguiled by Solitude and his short works, and progressively disenchanted with each succeeding novel...
...he regards the situation as a challenge...
...FERENC MOLNAR (1878-1952) was one of the most popular playwrights of his or any other generation...
...Now come a series of unmotivated, and therefore unbelievable, events...
...The bridal sheet is unstained by blood...
...Frechette is eager when he should be conniving, Goede makes little of a small but central part, and Smith, in what should have been an actor proof role, has neither the presence nor the verve of a prima donna...
...None of us could go on living without an exact knowledge of the place and mission assigned to us by fate," says Cristo, in a sentence that takes portentousness to new depths...
...Not only can the youth write popular tunes, he is engaged to Ilona (J...
...Toni-Leslie James' costumes are exoti-cally correct, and Christopher Barreca's sets suggest more than they show, abetted by Jules Fisher and Beverly Emmons' elegant lighting...
...But by whom...
...He rises to life when his friend Cristo (Julio Monge), relates the events leading up to the murder...
...Yet this is not a formal musical, or an evening of choreography like her last Broadway effort, Tango Apasionado...
...Why not simply tell the audience whom they're watching, and what the characters are about...
...At that time Macando was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs...
...The trio gathers—and suddenly the smiles congeal on their faces as incriminating noises issue from the adjoining room...
...Angela's thickheaded brothers, Pablo and Pedro (Luis Perez and Gregory Mitchell), convinced that the womanizing Santiago has taken their sister's prize possession, vow to kill him...
...With this character the adapter makes himself apparent...
...Such once-celebrated works as The Guardsman and The Swan have become the property of regional theater, relics to be dusted off from time to time and shown to an uncritical audience...
...While all are asleep, he writes a play in the style of Sardou, the 19th-century French dramatist, that incorporates the compromising dialogue of the previous night...
...The bright one guided new works like Other People's Money and Bubba Meises...
...At such times The Play s the Thing might be Brecht in dinner jackets...
...The whole thing has been a ghastly misunderstanding...
...This is a bravura beginning, yet since we know Santiago is going to die, the suspense is gone...
...Rather than being in love, Ilona and Almady will claim, they can barely stand each other's company...
...In the evening's most theatrical clash, Bayardo returns Angela to her family, wrapped in the telltale sheet...
...They have just glommed onto a fledgling composer...
...And so he does...
...On their wedding night catastrophe strikes...
...Indeed Proia and de la Pefia, both experienced dancers, are only worth watching when they let their feet do the talking...
...Their act of revenge will somehow turn the clock back and restore Angela's maidenhead...
...Those who run the Roundabout are worthy and ambitious, and Muzio has much to offer...
...Sometime in the recent past she has been seduced...
...the ones between men, notably an athletic duet by Pablo and Pedro, have an explosive force, no doubt because most of the performers come from the world of ballet...
...Together they will work on Albert, persuading him that what he overheard was merely a rehearsal for the one-act drama...
...I was surprised to see it last that long...
...When do you sleep...
...The novella starts characteristically: "On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on...
...In the winter, sir," is the reply...
...To prove their sincerity the lovers duly act out the play within the play, with Albert as witness...
...When he gets out of breath, others come along to state it for him in film and stage adaptations...
...Daniele attempts to compensate for these shortcomings with legwork and melody...
...Smith-Cameron), a diva who has promised to star in their new operetta...
...All that tedious exposition...
...He made the upright manservant the shrewdest of the crowd, as well as the one most anxious to please...
...It features double enten-dres, hysterical prompting, and constant aid from a hotel factotum, Johann Dwor-nitschek (Paul Benedict...
...All that wasted time...
...Since these performers have distinguished themselves in previous productions, much of the fault must be assigned to the director...
...That vigorously performed, mindless work had a Broadway shelf life of about a week...
...So it is something of a surprise to see The Play's the Thing on Broadway, mounted by the Roundabout Theater Company at the Criterion Center Stage Right...
...Who, perusing the first words of 100 Years of Solitude, can stop reading...
...Half a century ago P. G. Wodehouse, inventor of the immortal Jeeves, took Molnar's comedy and ran with it...
...Of the actors Santiago comes off second best, combining sweetness and cunning in equal portions...
...In the process, he made the Latino drama of love, revenge and death more significant than the European insistence on logic...
...The fatal countdown begins when a local stud, Bayardo (Alexandre Proia) weds the beau-tiful, allegedly innocent Angela (Saun-dra Santiago...
...Somehow the brothers are unaware of this general information...
...What follows is a heady blend of Spanish colonial Catholicism and Indian village legend, informed by Freudian insight and spun out in elaborate Faulknerian prose...
...For like many another Nobel laureate of recent vintage, the author has one thing to say, says it well, and keeps saying it over and over again...
...They just need properties commensurate with their abilities...
...Ilona is manifestly in the throes of passion with her married lover Al-mady (Jeff Weiss...
...Molnar used a broad brush in this Mit-telbrow comedy of manners circa 1925...
...Unfortunately, beyond the terpsichorean moments all is as static as a mural...
...It is, as the Spanish say, De masiadopor poco—Too much for a little thing...
...That answer could easily have come from one of Wodehouse's own plays (18 in all), musical comedies (33), short stories (300), or novels (87...
...The three men hole up in a picturesque castle-cum-hotel, ready to begin work...
...Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice...
...Two collaborators, the energetic Sandor Turai (Peter Frechette) and the dour Man-sky (Joe Grifasi) have enjoyed fairly successful careers as librettists...
...The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point...
...Albert dashes out, distraught—so distraught that any hope of creativity is dashed, even if he fails to carry out his threat of suicide...
...Ilona and Almady are be-side themselves...
...They are in the service of an interesting but slight notion...
...The entire populace, from the local priest (Jaime Tirelli) to the police chief (Nelson Roberto Lan-drieu) knows that Santiago never pursued Angela because he was too busy with the town whores...
...The lack of memorable tunes is almost covered by Steve Sandberg's canny orchestrations...
...What works on the page, however, is difficult to render on the stage...
...Here, at least, she offers a sustained narrative and, in collaboration with her coadapter, Jim Lewis, a series of lively confrontations...
...Yet if he is remembered at all today, it is because he wrote Liliom, the play on which Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel is based...
...Most of those moments occur early on, when the playwright comments on his own work...
...Here, the author's unaccustomed brevity is his strength...
...There is no equivalent for that form on the stage—unless ticketholders are willing to pay $45 for a mere 80 minutes of intermissionless entertainment...
...Albert Adam (Joe Goede), who looks to be their key to the Main Chance...
...Only Turai keeps his head...
...If we are to be interested and stay interested, the story must compel us with varied personalities, unexpected imagery and twists of plot—and all within 132 pages...
...Although Grifasi and Benedict display the proper deadpans, the rest of the cast has the sophistication of a college troupe...
...Every crescendo is announced in a dance or a song...
...In order to make their stay a complete delight, Sandor has secretly invited Ilona to take the suite next door...
...Would that those inside the clothes had as much flair...
...There seem to be two Gloria Muzios...
...He plans to reveal the surprise to Albert that night...
...Graciela Daniele, billed as having "conceived, directed and choreographed" the Lincoln Center Theater production, has a unique solution...
...As Clotilde, an outspoken bodega owner, Tonya Pinkins almost steals the show, if only there was a show to be stolen...
...Angela is not a virgin...
...If these collaborators are ever to be as prosperous as Turai and Mansky, they have to learn the difference between antiques and bric-a-brac...
...The dull one has been responsible for stultifying revivals at the Roundabout, including Candida and Fifteen Minute Hamlet/The Real Inspector Hound...
...Behold...
...What to do...
...Mansky wrings his hands...
...It is no accident that Garcia Marquez chose to make his tale an extended short story...
...Garcia Marquez covered inconsistencies with an accretion of brilliant detail...
...asks Sandor, amazed at the man's industry...
...Angela is furiously beaten by her mother (I vonne Coll)—and promptly falls in love with the husband she has previously feared and despised...
...But all too soon the wit descends to low farce and the bright pearls, so attractive by moonlight, turn out to be paste...
...Other than in the writing of Dwor-nitschek's dialogue, Wodehouse is at his best when Molnar is at his best...
...All the same, the evening might have been made tolerable by polished farceurs...
...Bob Telson's music ransacks the regions of South and Central America and emerges without distinction...
...Young Santiago (George de la Pefia) begins the evening as a corpse...
...The latest of these retellings is Chronicle of a Death Foretold, at the Plymouth Theater...
...For some, Garcia Marquez' style is as suffocating as a hothouse...
...He'd dreamed that he was going through a grove of timber trees where a gentle drizzle was falling, but when he awoke he felt completely spattered with bird shit...
...The numbers between men and women fall flat...
...By threatening to expose Almady's extramarital capers to the world, he convinces the pair to play along with him in every sense of the word...
Vol. 78 • July 1995 • No. 6
