Nostalgia Ain't What it used to Be
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage NOSTALGIA AIN'T WHAT IT USED TO BE By Stefan Kanfer ?n Broadway, Neil Simon's name is synonymous with Midas. Over the past 40 years the playwright has been responsible for...
...after that, it's all downhill...
...While most of the personnel do their best with this inadequate material, there are several mistakes in assignment...
...Jacqueline Bouvier begins life as an ordinary upper-class girl forced into extraordinary circumstances...
...He also excelled in those periods...
...The narrator of this two-act flashback is the ghost of Clemma Diggins (L...
...The poor imbecille Eye-talian means gladi-ators, get it...
...and Annie Robbins (Kelly Bishop), Burt's ex, who has flown in from Paris to stir up old feelings and complicate matters...
...A sponge and a bottle of Windex found under Jackie's sink are bid up to $250,000 before the crowd of gawkers wanders off, baa-ing like sheep...
...The actual scene was a combination of avarice and delirium, and the sendup is on the money...
...But a life told in this manner is meant for a different kind of venue...
...Ray Dolenz (Matt Letscher) retains a schoolboy crush on his Pocono neighbor, even though he is currently seeing another girl...
...Finneran does not remotely suggest the mannequin she is supposed to be...
...That's fine...
...Her mother, Janet (Lisa Emery), is a snob, her father, "Black Jack" (Derek Smith), anotorious womanizer who prefers sty le over substance...
...Completing this picture are Ray's new girlfriend Sammii (Katie Finneran), a fashion model who stops by between assignments...
...Auchincloss is quite literally a stuffed shirt...
...Da one at da Broadhurst Theaduh just ain't it...
...Much has been made about the playwright's age—70—as if this had anything to do with the ineptitude of Proposals...
...Vinnie, for example, faces the audience with his palms out à la Tony Danza in a TV sitcom...
...If his son John is going to contend for the Presidency, he needs a classy deb at his side ("I'm going to sell this girl like soap flakes...
...With all his years of experience, there is no reason to believe Neil Simon won't come up with yet another work of charm and wit...
...he stumbled in his 40s, 50s and 60s...
...Jackie boasts a cast of 10, doubling and quadrupling like amoebas until more than 100 characters are eventually represented onstage, caparisoned in 180 costumes and 86 wigs...
...With a wave of her hand, Clemma erases 20 years, crickets chirp, the sun breaks through, she is flesh and blood again, and we are back in the last summer before the house was sold...
...All 10 are skilled impressionists rather than impersonators...
...She turns to the audience and asks plaintively, "What do you want from me...
...Burt and Josie sit entwined in a swing, touching each other chastely, informing us that father and daughter are close but not incestuous...
...It is bright, busy and not quite ready for prime time...
...Vinnie, for example, is presented as a well-traveled vulgarian with a couple of years of community college behind him...
...The sensitive and comely Josie has caught the attention of three young men...
...Yet here she is, resurrected in order to articulate a few sassy lines and push the plot along...
...Paper towels are turned into typewriters, birds fly on sticks, major celebrities do their shticks and withdraw, like waiters at a cocktail party...
...When he's not onstage, Burt conveniently overhears everything from an upstairs window, eliminating the need for exposition...
...But these are the only bright spots in an evening of essentially tuneless duets...
...It needs pushing, as well as some shoving and kicking...
...The trio of male admirers soon settles into a bland rivalry, interrupted by some of the most dishonest writing the author has ever produced...
...This is to be his last August on earth, spent in the company of Clemma, who does the cooking and kvetching, and his twentysomething daughter Josie (Suzanne Cryer...
...And laughter...
...serious plays like the 1991 Pulitzer Prize-winning Lost in Yonkers...
...Yet he talks like a Damon Runyon character out of the '20s, complete with dentalized Ts and a fondness for polysyllabic words: "Da tuna was of superiuh qualidy...
...Lewis Barnett (Mel Winkler), Clemma's remorseful husband, who abandoned her some seven years ago but who now wants back into the marriage...
...Given this golden strand, it is easy to forget that Simon also produced a number of leaden pieces along the way...
...Indeed, the biggest puppet of the evening turns out to be the title character, principally because as Hoppe acknowledges, he never knew the lady: "There's no 'new dirt' or new information uncovered...
...This is hardly the fault of a first-rate cast, or of the outrageous puppets by The Big Nazo Studio, or David Gallo's quick-change scenery, or Susan Santoian's risible costumes...
...And as Burt's ex, Robbins acts and looks like Greer Garson left out in the rain—not exactly the sort of woman who would have been attracted to Burt, or vice versa...
...The curtain rises on John Lee Beatty's impressionistic set: a summer house and surrounding woods in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania...
...Simon, however, is content to explore a mere handful, none of them compelling...
...Ken Norman (Reg Rogers) is a whiz in law school, but a klutz around females...
...I took the existing information about her and sort of shot it through a prism...
...And answers, "You're like children with a bedtime story they can't get enough of...
...First came Seymour M. Hersh's The Dark Side of Camelot, exposing the political flaws and moral peccadilloes of the 35th president...
...Scott Caldwell...
...Hoppe, who also directed the show, mixes fact and rumor, live performance and puppetry, popular culture and classic themes...
...Then the lads go at it, two by two...
...A moment later the stage expands and Jackie (Margaret Colin) comes to life, vibrant and chic once more...
...Nonsense...
...Perhaps the most egregious of them was The Good Doctor, a misbegotten imitation of Chekhov produced in the 1970s...
...The Bouviers split when their child faces puberty...
...As a cabaret act, it would be audacious...
...Hardly a soul is left out of this very crammed life: Look quickly and you can see all the Kennedys behaving like kids trapped in permanent adolescence, Frank Sinatra (Derek Smith), Marilyn Monroe (Kristine Nielsen), Christina Onassis (Gretchen Egolf), photographer Ron Gallela (Sam Catlin), a Secret Service representative (Linda Marie Larson), as well as Richard Nixon, Oleg Cassini, Aristotle Onassis, and others too humorous to mention...
...What it lacks is a center...
...Throughout its two riotous acts Jackie displays panache, along with glints of wit and heart...
...Now comes Gip Hoppe's Jackie, a slam-bang satire with music, centered on JFK's widow...
...First the older white couple go through their manipulative nostalgia-and-remorse number, then it's the black folks' turn to do the same thing in their own shamelessly heart-tugging manner...
...Josie coldly informs him, "exaggeration...
...Subsequently she studies in Paris, returns to the U.S., comes out in society as Debutante of the Year, then joins the staff of a newspaper...
...His prism, naturally, distorts what it pictures...
...When the starry-eyed Ray burbles about a blonde, "What's the word between divine and perfection...
...they change costumes and faces with the speed of light comedy...
...As Off-Broadway fare, it would loom large...
...His obsession with business cost him a marriage...
...The malapropisms he utters were never spoken by anyone—except a character in a Neil Simon scene starved for a few cheap laughs...
...The owner is Burt Hines (Dick Latessa) an ailing executive who once headed a chain of eight appliance stores...
...Neither work is indulgent, but Jackie, at least, has some lightness of touch and an occasional glimmer of sympathy...
...This has not been a banner year for the Kennedys...
...On the stage of the sizable Belasco Theater, Jackie seems a bit too frenzied, as if it were compensating for a lack of substance...
...Having made this valid point, she then becomes the star of a show-and-tell autobiography...
...Clemma sashays around, playing the back-talking, all-knowing factotum à la Lillian Randolph in It's A Wonderful Life...
...Jane Greenwood's costumes are sometimes so inappropriate, they hinder those who wear them...
...Mama remarries, this time to the excruciatingly proper Hugh Auchincloss (Bill Camp), and her daughter is sent away to Miss Porter's toney school...
...Vinnie Bavasi (Peter Rini) is a junior Mafioso who ran into Josie in Florida the previous winter...
...It also cost Burt his health...
...The show opens with the auction of Jacqueline "Jackie" Kennedy Onassis' effects two years after her death in 1994...
...All this is handled with an odd crudeness—odd because Simon's strength has always been the ability to introduce, dismiss and reprise people with the assurance of a traffic cop...
...In other eras she would have been billed as "the colored maid," a device so worn that even George S. Kaufman abandoned it in the 1940s...
...Inhisnewplay, Praposals, Simonretums to the Russian's nostalgic themes, with much the same results...
...plus books for such major musicals as Promises, Promises and Sweet Charity...
...That is not to say the playwright has entirely misplaced his gift for the effective riposte...
...The dialogue does not help: Although the principals are supposed to be Jewish, not a word or prop indicates this...
...Recalling a confrontation between Josie's suitors, Vinnie says: "It was like a fight between two gladiolas...
...There she learns manners and becomes something of a rebel, preferring Baudelaire to dating preppies...
...Then each has a turn with Josie, and she has a couple of big moments with her dying Dad...
...In the line of duty she attracts the attention of John Fitzgerald Kennedy (Victor Slezak), a young and ambitious senatorial candidate from Massachusetts...
...He has already suffered a massive coronary and will not survive the next big one...
...The funniest scenes are staged like editorial cartoons: Joseph Kennedy (voiced by Thomas Derrah) appears as a sphinx-sized figure, booming his approval of Jackie...
...Nor has S imon been aided by Joe Mantello's retrograde direction, which overemphasizes every speech at every turn and defines various members of the cast with gross gestures...
...For all the jumping around, all the inventive crowd scenes and individual caricatures, there is no there there...
...Jackie, like all public figures, is fair game...
...Over the past 40 years the playwright has been responsible for laugh-producers ranging from Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple to Plaza Suite...
...With these nine characters in place, the number of permutations could run into the thousands...
...When her narcissistic mother wonders what to do about incipient crows' feet, Josie answers, "You can buy little slippers for them...
...No, the shortcomings reside in the show...
...The rest is history...
...It takes several minutes to fully apprehend the wealth of hue and detail...
Vol. 80 • December 1997 • No. 18
