On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage TRAGEDY AND ART BY STEFAN KANFER PLOT A: An earnest polymath— playwright, composer and lyricist— struggles for recognition. He writes a musical and takes it to producer after producer,...
...As Mark, the video artist, Anthony Rapp projects an appealing and pleasant personality and singing style...
...That was in 1994...
...Bringing a cabaret musical to the massive dimensions of a Broadway stage is like taking an a capella quartet to Grand Central Station...
...Given a $1.3 million budget, Wilson was allowed to take his work on the road for years, tinkering, polishing, cutting whole scenes, and transposing speeches from one character to another...
...Theoretically, Floyd is the lead musician in this opus...
...The ideal mother, he decides, would be Ruby...
...The standard academic line on Wilson is that he needn't have polished so hard, that his plays would have been better had they not been so long in preparation...
...As it is, the story he lived is far more moving than the one he wrote...
...There is time to sit back and listen to Joe Louis KO Billy Conn in the last round, to make love, even to play a few riffs...
...The important thing is that what we have is very good...
...Before Floyd is sent to his grave there are incidents to be recalled, superstitions to be honored, rocks to be thrown at a neighbor's noisy rooster, dances and songs and schoolyard chatter to be evoked...
...Those numbers, shrewdly arranged by Tim Weil, vary in quality and substance...
...and as Mimi, Daphne Rubin-Vega has a couple of numbers that bring down the house, most notably the howling, vixenish "Out Tonight...
...No wonder August Wilson is the envy of almost every playwright in the Western world...
...For the most part, however, the show Larson called "a rock opera" is neither rock nor opera, only a mainstream entertainment disguised as avant garde art, made palatable by the energy of its young stars and, more significantly, by the irony and poignance of its author's biography...
...Mimi refuses to perish after all: She is miraculously restored to the living, like Jimmy Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life, a movie that celebrates the middle class and therefore stands for everything Rent ostentatiously puts down...
...In a '90s restatement of La Bo-heme, the stories of the doomed youth and his drug-hooked girlfriend, a drag queen and his cyberwhiz lover, a performance artist and her lesbian lover, and an eccentric landlord as well as other white, black and Hispanic East Village perso-nae, unfold under the lens of an aspiring video cameraman...
...As it happens, 199596 was one of Broadway's most stimulating recent periods...
...It has suddenly become a disc jockey favorite, and now a big company wants to sign him up...
...Yet the denouement is a long time coming...
...alas, it is not...
...but you get the idea...
...On the other hand, I doubt if there is another author who has been so indulged by his director and producers...
...if this is the moment before the march to civil rights, it is also the period before drugs and guns overtook the cities...
...As Angel, Wilson Jermaine Heredia is a terrific looking drag queen...
...It began with Ter-rence McNally's Master Class, and it ends with August Wilson's Seven Guitars...
...But hindsight is a mug's game...
...Louise (Michele Shay), a philosophical Mother Earth type ("I woke up this morning at a quarter to four...
...PLOT B: Afflicted with aids, a young musician tries to compose one great song before he goes...
...When Seven Guitars was first exposed to the public at a reading in Wa-terford, Connecticut, it ran more than four hours...
...actually, there are six other players, and no one is more important than the others...
...The people we see onstage are total fictions, yet they seem wholly convincing in their conversations and arguments —in the very way they walk or strut or wearily climb the stairs to bed...
...Without rancor or political agenda, the playwright set out to show us black history...
...Indeed, Rent has become a "crossover show" (one for which folks pay $50 to watch actors play outcasts) because society has become tolerant of—and often sympathetic to— Alphabet Citizens on the margins of society...
...The third difficulty is the house itself...
...Floyd goes through the expected egomaniacal solos, but this time he has a valid reason for bragging...
...He writes a musical and takes it to producer after producer, hoping for a showcase somewhere, anywhere...
...On its way to the Walter Kerr Theater it played in Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, sometimes changing performers, constantly altering its length and contours...
...There is no question that Larson possessed talent...
...Some time ago, he cut a record in Chicago...
...The trouble is, what worked for Puccini 's neglected bohemians seems ludicrous in an age of grants, aids lobbyists and advocates for the homeless...
...Not since 1984, when director Gower Champion died on the opening night of 42nd Street, has there been such a theatrical tragedy in every sense of the words...
...After many disappointments he finally attracts the attention of a director and a vigorous little theater group...
...And one or two melodies will rise from the original cast album to have a life of their own...
...Thus the tensions for melodrama are put in place...
...en route he has not only managed to do that, he has become a part of it...
...Rent...
...The show becomes a posthumous triumph: Critics and the public are so enthusiastic that new investors clamber aboard and move it to Broadway, where it carries on with even greater audience response...
...The only way to be heard is to shout, or to be so profoundly amplified that words become a cascade of indistinguishable sounds...
...Floyd "Schoolboy" Barton (Keith David) has just been released from prison...
...Emergency room physicians assure him that it's just a case of food poisoning and send him home...
...In addition to the couple, there are five neighbors: Canewell (Ruben Santiago-Hudson), a volatile harmonica player...
...These people eke out lives of noisy desperation, unsure of next month's payment on apartments in 'Alphabet City," the neighborhood of Avenues A, B, C, and D. Advisers persuaded Larson to superimpose the plot of La Boheme on the songs and characters...
...Had he survived, perhaps he might some day have created musicals of enduring value...
...Ruby (Rosalyn Coleman), Louise's steamy niece...
...Actors are chosen, rehearsals begin, new lines and songs are added underpressure...
...and Hedley (Roger Robinson), a cracked old man who sees ghosts—especially the spirit of Buddy Bolden, a legendary New Orleans jazzman who died in a madhouse...
...The cast members not only move uncertainly but chant into their body mikes with unbalanced ardor, as if the smallest love song and the harshest ensemble piece were of similar value...
...They get him a production at a 150-seat Off-Broadway house...
...Red Carter (Tommy Hollis), a professional drummer and amateur collector of folk wisdom...
...The scene of Seven Guitars is the Hill District of Pittsburgh...
...Nothing is hurried...
...Better simply to state that no other playwright has so skillfully portrayed the heritage and experience of an ethnic group in 20th-century America...
...Rent, for all its Hashes of promise, is the most overpraised production of the '90s: modish, attitudinizing, full of unripe social criticism—Hair redux...
...One of the show's central problems is its form...
...Another difficulty is the characters...
...August Wilson...
...Wary, she takes him in without being taken in herself...
...If the invalid is still bedridden, it also remains fabulous...
...He has the ear of a recording angel, and every line of leisurely discourse is a mix of music and documentary...
...As unlikely as it sounds, .4 is the true story of Jonathan Larson (1960-1995), who died just before the curtain rose on B, his creation...
...That group, of course, is African Americans, and this time out we are in the postwar epoch, c. 1948...
...By now praise seems beside the point...
...An extended flashback begins...
...Even so, he is far less irritating than Maureen (Idina Menzel), a "performance artist" who stops the show in the wrong way, giving a moribund imitation of those yammering standup comediennes who have no idea what a joke is, let alone how to tell it...
...he has a small but true voice, having sharpened it with his own heavy metal band before going legit...
...Occasionally lyrics remain in the mind— "You are what you own" seems a fair summary of '90s avarice...
...But after he does the "letting out the more female side of me that every male has if they're willing to let go," he becomes something of a bore...
...Michael Greif's cumbrous restaging and Marlies Yearby's ungainly choreography are of little help in this uptown cavern...
...In the role of Roger, Adam Pascal does somewhat better...
...Back he drifts, to the arms of his lady love Vera (Viola Davis...
...AUGUST WILSON has already won every trophy the theater has to offer, from the Pulitzer Prize (Fences, The Piano Lesson) to the New York Drama Critics Circle Award (Ma Rainey s Black Bottom, Fences, Joe Turner's Come and Gone...
...The result is a procrustean affair, with Mimi transformed into a dancer under the shadow of heroin, Rudolfo into Roger, an HIV-positive guitarist, and...
...Even without all these indulgences, though, the man would be sui generis...
...It is at these moments that Wilson's skills are most apparent...
...A local musician has been murdered, and a handful of people gather at his wake...
...Larson originally conceived as a romantic confederation of East Village types—saintly addicts, saintly homosexuals, saintly misfits, radicals, homeless...
...For this latest episode the author is fortunate in his first-rate cast, his canny director, Lloyd Richards, who guided and shaped five previous Wilson plays, and his costume designer Constanza Romero, who just happens to be Mrs...
...During rehearsals the writer complains of chest pain...
...Moreover, Rent does not even have the guts of its predecessor...
...Hedley gets it in his head that he must father a child—a new Messiah...
...Still, she and the male leads are part of an ensemble, and their big moments are followed by undistinguished chorus work, or by performers less gifted and songs less diverting...
...I wish it were possible to give A and B equal value...
...Granted, there were a lot of duds in between, but any season that has those plays as its brackets has nothing to be ashamed of...
...I doubt if there is another author in America, or for that matter Europe, who has so faithfully reproduced the speech patterns and attitudes of a people...
...If I got to feel bad, the least thing I can do is wake at 10 o'clock...
...The Nederlander Theater is a place where Showboat might dock, or The King and I might waltz...
...Around him are other sufferers—of poverty, disease, neglect, prejudice...
...Less than 24 hours before the first preview he is struck by a fatal aortic aneurysm...
...As the curtain rings down on this season, the usual malign or discouraging reports go out about the decline of major theater in New York...
Vol. 79 • June 1996 • No. 3
