The Vagaries of Affection
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage THE VAGARIES OF AFFECTION By Stefan Kanfer Robert Ripley, creator of the widely syndicated feature "Believe It Or Not," liked certain subjects more than others. Men with many wives...
...In fact, he probably would have gone out of business without accidents of nature...
...Heidi Ettinger's green and gold sets are all right if you like Styrofoam, and Catherine Zuber's costumes have style and a quiet sense of the antic...
...At a time when producers prefer to invest in safe, presold classics like Les Misérables and the upcoming Scarlet Pimpernel, the last thing one would expect from a Broadway musical is the unhappy history of the Hiltons, set to melody and recreated on stage...
...NUANCE is the first word that comes to mind in reference to the plays of Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, an 18th-century man of letters whose works concentrated on the vagaries of affection...
...The Hiltons, Daisy (Emily Skinner) and Violet (Alice Ripley), are sweet, naive adolescents, totally under the sway of a tyrannical boss/barker (Ken Jennings...
...By definition the girls are never alone, but paparazzi give new meaning to the term "invasion of privacy," watching their every move, demanding to know how Siamese twins eat, sleep and copulate...
...I wish I could say the same for Chamberlin, who looks like Fatty Arbuckle and acts as if he were auditioning for silent two-reelers...
...But he cannot prevent him from paying starvation wages and treating his employees like chattel...
...Side Show's message becomes clear as these "normal" people don their costumes, metamorphosing into the Bearded Lady, the Snake Girl, the Reptile Man, the Geek and, yes, the Siamese twins of the side show...
...Side Show is far from perfect...
...In the process of assuming their roles, the cast members relate a true and melancholy tale...
...That it was produced is remarkable...
...But if the ear is occasionally disappointed, the eye is continually beguiled...
...Into their lives comes the family's deadliest enemy, Princess Leonide (Susan Egan), and her maidservant Corine (Nancy Opel), both disguised as men...
...Every joke is telegraphed and reinforced with triple takes...
...In the end it is the Hiltons who seem straight, and the press, promoters and onlookers who become the sideshow of manic freaks...
...and Sieber, a man whose baritone cannot disguise a lack of comic timing...
...Sondheim, however, has made no secret of his loathing for grand opera, where claques follow each aria with ovations...
...No sooner has the last note sounded than sustained applause begins, invited by the staging and the singer...
...The effect is more suggestive of video than of Marivaux...
...The rest of their lives did not work out so well: Their separate marriages failed, managers bilked them of more than $100,000, and none of their business ventures panned out...
...A pity, because a great deal of intelligence went into the production— most of it misapplied...
...Buddy, moved almost as much by pity as by publicity, actually proposes to Violet...
...For this is the Depression era, when miscegenation is the most freakish and threatening behavior of all...
...Susan Birkenhead's lyrics are well crafted, and Jeffrey Stock's music is serviceable, if not inspired...
...With his customary humor, Twain was amplifying a current rumor—that the Siamese twins were physically inseparable, but emotionally incompatible...
...In Triumph such a moment occurs in Act One, when Betty Buckley gets her big number...
...Nuance is the last label that comes to mind during the unraveling of Triumph of Love...
...They made many an appearance in his column, with close and prurient attention paid to the 19th-century celebrities Chang and Eng...
...The most gifted are Skimmer and Ripley, separate souls who move as one person but are unconnected by garments or props...
...Best known for outstanding work in Sunset Boulevard and Cats, Buckley makes a literal showstopper out of "Emotions.' And therein lies the trouble...
...A dream sequence, which separates Daisy from her sister so that she can waltz with Terry, is too self-conscious by half...
...They each took prisoners at Seven Oaks...
...Thus the lecherous Dimas must romance Corine by telling her that "it's been a long time since I used my fertilizer," and when young ladies are appraised and addressed, there are incessant winking, nudging references to melons, peaches, etc...
...The musical halts in its tracks, and never regains what little momentum it had...
...The cast members who surround them play their parts with brio and sophistication—indeed, a chorister in a very minor part, Phillip Officer, is one of New York's premier cabaret singers...
...as they become more complex personalities, their numbers become increasingly atonal—yet never quite depart from the Tin Pan Alley spirit of the '30s...
...At the beginning, at least, Egan's perkiness is reminiscent of the young Carol Burnett...
...Granted, but try recalling the last Broadway musical that moved you to think of anything deeper than a bass drum...
...One was said to be omnivorous, fond of the bottle and women, while his brother was a vegetarian, a teetotaler and a misogynist...
...Ripley could hardly be blamed for his fixation...
...Bertholt Brecht once wrote that "A theater that can't be laughed in is a Theater to be laughed at...
...Daisy and Violet's progress is well documented...
...Catastrophe waits in the wings...
...Both fought "gallantly" in the combat, "Eng on the Union side, Chang on the Confederate...
...Buddy (Hugh Panaro) is an ambitious young voice coach who knows how to tap the mother lode...
...Each is a human being just like us, saddled with afflictions or anomalies that make them The Other...
...Their only protector is Jake, the Cannibal King (Norm Lewis), whose crush on Violet must remain unexpressed...
...These Siamese twins (blonde Texans, actually) were attractive enough to tour vaudeville as top-salaried entertainers...
...There are a few points of light...
...The pair so intrigued Mark Twain that he used them in a farcical essay, purporting to recall the twins' adventures during the Civil War...
...The musical, based on Marivaux's comedy, uses every trick of the Vegas compère except rim shots...
...Two other characters complete the minuscule cast: Dimas the gardener (Kevin Chamberlin) and Harlequin the valet (Roger Bart), who become heavily involved in a chaos of songs, plot twists, mistaken identities, and misbegotten amours...
...Speculation and smirks continued long after their deaths in 1874...
...and when she succumbs to the clown's entreaties, she announces, "Guess it's time for a Harlequin romance...
...One evening two men stop by...
...Similar gossip recirculated in the 20thcentury with the appearance of the Hilton sisters (1909-69...
...Lewis displays great presence in an underwritten part, and Jennings' hard, glittering eyes and grating tones make him the most unforgettably grotesque emcee since the days of Joel Grey in Cabaret...
...They receive vigorous support from McCarthy and Panaro, who bring a measure of humanity to predatory roles...
...The former headliners were last employed at the checkout counter in a North Carolina supermarket—"one bagging, no doubt, as the other rang up the bill on the cash register," muses Leslie Fiedler, who recalls them in his characteristically odd and compelling study, Freaks...
...And Henry Krieger's music tends to wander—in this collaboration, Bill Russell's cascading lyrics and sprechgesang dialogue obviously came first...
...Yet here is Side Show, currently playing to sellout crowds at the Richard Rodgers Theater...
...It is the last category that annihilates any chance of success...
...so did Ubangis with distended lips, birthmarks in the shape of continents, and sheep with six legs...
...Much has been made of Stephen Sondheim's influence on the composers and playwright—the Master also likes outré sources for his musicals, and he, too, disdains chorus lines...
...Terry (Jeff McCarthy) is a handsome, plausible publicity agent who knows a gold mine when he sees it...
...When we examine such people, wrote Fiedler, "the distinction between audience and exhibit, we and them, normal and Freak, is revealed as an illusion, desperately, perhaps even necessarily, defended, but untenable in the end...
...Unfortunately, the mirth engendered at the Royale is of the latter kind...
...Very little rubbed off on the production...
...A bit overheated and academic...
...Terry, half-intrigued, half-repulsed by the idea of making love to a Siamese twin, eventually fries to discourage the romance...
...The King manages to keep the boss from physically abusing the girls...
...The band strikes up, and the group rises to sing "Look at the Freaks...
...A group of 22 men and women sit in what appear to be the bleachers of some obscure stadium, staring out at the audience...
...that it displays talent and virtuosity is close to miraculous...
...Murray Abraham) and his sister Hesione (Betty Buckley...
...Trouble is, the plot requires her to be unmasked as a woman, and thereafter she mimics Marilyn Monroe's breathy diction, an idea that has been done, redone and overdone for the last 30 years...
...For as they learn to warble and execute a few routines, Daisy falls for Terry, and Violet is smitten with Buddy...
...The plot concerns Prince Agis (Christopher Sieber), who has been brought up by two bloodless intellectuals, Hermocrates (F...
...The adapter, James Magruder, shuttles disastrously between the sly ( 10 per cent), the obvious (70 per cent) and the anachronistic (20 per cent...
...It seems clear, though, that director Michael Mayer did not trust the material to speak for itself, or the performers to understate—or even to state—their lines with straight faces...
...Making one of her frequent exits, for example, Corine shouts, "I'm outta here...
...Action begins on a virtually bare stage...
...These naturalized Americans, we were informed, had been joined at the hip since birth—yet the socalled Siamese twins married two very different Caucasians, with whom they fathered 22 children...
...Triumph of Love has sheaves of blue material, all of it underlined as if the audience were composed entirely of junior high school students...
...Bart, who approaches his role with the verve— and subtlety—of the junior high class clown...
...A dozen double entendres usually suffices for any venue, save for burlesque or stag dinners...
...This calls for them to execute complex close-order maneuvers as they walk, belt out numbers and even dance...
...Robin Wagner's scenic designs are marvels of minimalism, Gregg Barnes' costumes are smart as well as charming, and Brian MacDevitt's lighting provides a series of imaginative interiors and landscapes...
...Manifestly, this is a show with talent in overplus...
...The men are not complete cads...
...As usual, F. Murray Abraham turns in a highly polished performance, and his singing voice has surprising range...
...Men with many wives beguiled him (and his readers...
...Although the departure frees the twins from a degraded existence, it soon furnishes them with another kind of misery...
...To make this conceit work, director and choreographer Robert Longbottom never allows a moment of bathos or camp...
...Above all, there floats the poignant story of those twins...
...Together they persuade the girls to leave the down-at-the-heels circus and go on their own, as entertainers...
Vol. 80 • November 1997 • No. 17
