Step by Step
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage STEP BY STEP By Stefan Kanfer Traditionalists regard Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake as the greatest interspecies love story since Leda's. In essence, a young sovereign, played by...
...Bourne's overpraised production amounts to far less than the sum of its arts: 25 per cent dance, 25 per cent melodrama, 25 per cent intentional farce, 25 per cent unintentional farce, and 100 per cent cult...
...Playwright/director Hickey isn't blind to the faults of his protagonist...
...Murrow is not, and one fateful evening he goes after the Senator in an hour-long special...
...Public relations guys recommend "humanizing" the newsman...
...He stays before the microphone, building the network's news staff into the best in the business and, when television comes in, using the camera to heighten the immediacy of news broadcasting...
...He and the regal youth are united in death...
...In this period U.S...
...This all-too-accurate account provides the substance of A Question of Loyalty, Michael Hickey's docudrama about the man who hired and trained the most skilled news crew in the world (including New Leader Washington columnist Daniel Schorr), and lived to see it decimated by the demands of show business...
...True, very few ballets present a solid "through line" that makes narrative sense throughout the evening...
...For those qualities, we have to look to plays about the tube...
...At the Neil Simon Theater males play males, and females play females...
...Murrow is allowed to tear up his contract, and he begins his own deterioration, aided by neglect, depression and the thousands of cigarettes he has consumed on and off the air...
...Theatergoers now have a third interpretation, with the avian and the prince as a very different pair of lovers...
...The "stud" play (see Tennessee Williams' Orpheus Descending, William Inge's Picnic, N. Richard Nash's The Rainmaker, etc...
...By the time Murrow finishes, McCarthy is revealed as a bombinating con artist, and the Senator begins his slalom to censure and oblivion...
...It is harder to understand why...
...In the second category...
...A male Swan (Will Kemp) sidles by, they dance provocatively and then go off to their separate nests...
...Cinéastes recall the score somewhat differently: as the ominous background music of Dracula...
...Quite...
...All three statements are bogus...
...Petersburg when a different choreographer took over...
...Before the two hours are over, he manages to suggest the tragedies of AIDS, gay bashing, Oedipal conflict, and medical malpractice...
...After VE Day, William Paley (Michael Barry Greer), owner of the Columbia Broadcasting System, brings his new star to New York...
...The man who once followed the arc of Winston Churchill now squirms uncomfortably in his chair, chain smoking as he chats with the likes of Marilyn Monroe (Melinda Lane...
...A total naïf, he succumbs to the wiles of a blonde bimbo (Emily Piercy...
...Shortly afterward, he ventures out on his own, carouses with prostitutes and, in quick succession, gets high, drunk and mugged...
...He is a man with sand under his skin, forever dissatisfied with something —his health, his marriage, his career...
...The atmosphere becomes overcharged, arguments break out, a gun is drawn, a young woman is accidentally slain...
...Television, goes the jape, is called amedium because it is neither rare nor well done...
...The buzz-cut swans, dressed in feathers from the waist down and nothing from the waist up, truly look and act like large, muscular and dangerous birds...
...For all its gaggle of followers, Swan Lake belongs to that tacky, exhausted genre...
...listeners prefer comedy and music to the depressing bulletins from Europe...
...In each one, a frustrated woman or nerdy young man is electrified when a strutting hunk walks in, wows the town, alters everyone's life, and then clears out or dies gloriously...
...Step by step they will destroy not only the newsman and his department, but eventually CBS itself...
...a star is reborn...
...The stars and corps de ballet could not be bettered, they can only be matched (three different leads dance on alternate days: Scott Ambler as the Prince, Adam Cooper as the Swan, Fiona Chadwick as the Queen...
...In 1952 Senator Joseph McCarthy (Don Creech) is riding high as America's number one Red-hunter...
...Holding blank papers in his hand, "Tail Gunner" Joe accuses the Truman Administration of harboring more than 200 Communists in the State Department...
...David Frame's orchestrations of the flowing score are bright and lyric...
...At that event, seven marriageable Princesses audition for the royal family...
...In the first category it must be recognized as vigorous and inventive...
...Her outraged Majesty banishes the intruder and orders shock treatments for her son...
...The classic Swan Lake duo of our era was Margot Fonteyn, the aging star in her last great role, and Rudolph Nureyev, who suggested Nijinsky reborn...
...The dry authoritative voice belongs to Edward R. Murrow (Joseph Lustig), broadcasting from the bomb-torn capital just before World War II...
...In essence, a young sovereign, played by a male dancer of great skill and sensitivity, is beguiled by a beautiful female bird, impersonated by a prima ballerina...
...The boss forces every CBS employee to sign a loyalty oath...
...The classic version remained in place until it was Bourne again, and became an international phenomenon...
...Every sequence reminds the audience that these are not merely well-trained performers, they are athletes capable of extraordinary vaults and pirouettes...
...Murrow could be a ham onscreen and off, and he had a strong self-destructive streak...
...There is no question, though, that his virtues far outweighed his liabilities, and that there is no one remotely like him today...
...has been with us since the '50s...
...Curtain...
...In a surprisingly large and versatile cast Greer is outstanding as Paley...
...It is not difficult to see how...
...He also kids bell-bottomed Swinging London and bad regional ballet companies in a twittering Moth-and-Butterfly-Maiden sequence that is as obvious as it is fall-down funny: Exquisite skill is needed to dance that execrably...
...and the humans are individuals, not merely supporting players in tutus and tights, a common error of many Swan Lake companies...
...Beginning in wartime England, the play at the Producers' Club II Theater shifts to Manhattan where another vicious conflict takes place—the Battle of the Ratings...
...enters the fray, news becomes a vital part of the broadcasting day and Murrow suddenly metamorphoses into a world-class radio celebrity...
...But this Swan Lake did not make its New York debut in the customary dance venues of Lincoln Center and City Center...
...Even so, the High Murrow will not be stilled...
...She orders her Private Secretary (Barry Atkinson) to arrange a formal ball...
...This is one of them...
...Nor could there be in an epoch of focus groups and Nielsen families...
...Murrow begins well, but soon becomes eclipsed by programs like The $64,000 Question...
...Lez Brotherston's set is majestic, and his costumes are a vital part of the presentation...
...It came directly to Broadway, to be judged not only as choreography but as drama...
...Late at night he wanders into a London park and stares sadly at a darkened lake...
...Yet so is the original ballet, featuring a Good Swan named Odette and a Bad Swan called Odile, and an absurdly happy ending...
...THIS...
...Her livid Majesty promptly banishes the tart, rebukes the lad for his appalling taste in women, and engages him in an erotic dance...
...There are poignant moments, but they end in self-parody...
...Some 18 years later it proved to be a smash in St...
...Ridiculous...
...But the program also puts Murrow on a downhill course...
...All of the participants, however, are involved in a drama of such transcendent balderdash that one can only wonder at Bourne's sleight of foot...
...Since then the 3 8-year-old choreographer/director has brought his production to various cities, publicizing it with innuendo and misleading promotion...
...If the broadcaster's tough specials about tenant farmers and Beltway corruption represent the High Murrow, Person to Person reveals the Low Murrow...
...Concerned about the moony, postSwan Prince, Her conniving Majesty decides to put things straight, as it were...
...and Brandner and Mason provide solid backup to Lustig's embodiment of the old line, "Nobody's brow furrows like Edward R. Murrow's...
...Sponsors grow fearful...
...However, his ratings rise, and Paley beams...
...In its 1877 Moscow debut, Swan Lake was a deserved flop...
...Kemp recalls the seething carnality of the young Brando, and Atkinson presides over the palace intrigues with just the right mix of suavity and malevolence...
...But by then the termites of communications—market researchers and ratings experts—have begun to burrow into network operations...
...Mortimer is not only a first-rate dancer, she can also act with great subtlety, making an elaborate language out of bodily gestures and facial expressions...
...CBS never recoups its reputation...
...These homoerotic and entirely artificial tales are built on an identical foundation...
...What he does not do is present a coherent story...
...Matthew Bourne's new version took London by storm two years ago...
...the Prince cannot be cured of his longings, and the Swan does not fly away...
...After all, movement is the only language permitted onstage...
...Murrow isn't having any...
...The buzz says that this is "an all-male rendition," that it is "deeply moving" and that it is "not a gay Swan Lake...
...But once the U.S...
...The most devastating moment of the evening occurs at the end, as a montage of current TV programs unreels: commercials for the Psychic Network, yammering political analysts, shows about sexual deviance, imbecilic sitcoms, news as entertainment...
...Bourne has merely refurbished a cliché older than he is...
...His magnetism attracts everyone, males and females, Prince, Queen and commoners...
...These procedures fail...
...They suspect their friend Ed is about to arouse more controversy than he planned...
...Along with a publication called Red Channels, a blacklist of "Left-wing" performers and directors, the Senator completely intimidates Paley...
...Only two people share his confidences: a onetime mistress, Kay Katwell (Susan Brandner), who has been with him since London, and Fred Friendly (Robert Mason), a CBS colleague...
...As for the ballet's sexual orientation, a brief plot summary should suffice: A Prince (Ben Wright) with a comely and domineering Queen for a mother (Isabel Mortimer) dreams of breaking the silver cord...
...He sends up the House of Windsor, with particular attention paid to Prince Charles, Fergie, QEII, and her favorite purebred Corgi...
...It accompanied Bela Lugosi as the vampire worked his will on toothsome victims...
...is London...
...He dangles the promise of a corner office and a vice presidency...
...You have seen what we were, implies A Question of Loyalty, this is what we have become...
...Wright is wholly credible as a man of confused sexual orientation...
...Privately, Paley confesses that the whole thing is a farce, but he is unwilling to say so in public...
...the public prefers him in the role of bland TV host, and Paley has little confidence in a man whose ratings have fallen back below see level...
...suppose he were to be the host of an interview show...
...An uninvited guest crashes the party—Kemp again, this time playing a swaggering human counterpart of the Swan...
Vol. 81 • November 1998 • No. 12
