Rearview Mirrors
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage REARVIEW MIRRORS By Stefan Kanfer New York, New York, a helluva town, the Bronx is up and the Batten's down, the people ride in a hole in the ground. New York, New York, it's a...
...He and his wife remained on the edge of their chairs for 95 and three-quarter hours...
...The production is badly in need of a context...
...It was a smart move on both parts...
...For lagniappe, she sings while standing on her head...
...Still, no amount of misdirection can obscure Adiianne Lobel's skyscraping sets, or Paul Tazewell's comic costumes...
...Each of them is memorialized with an anecdote...
...As Miss Turnstiles, avidly pursued by Gabey, Tai Jimenez is gymnastic and winsome...
...She knew just how many would be presented, because she had thoughtfully purchased them...
...As directed by Wolfe, Gabey (Perry Laylon Ojeda), Chip (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) and Ozzie (Robert Montano) are as alike as Ken dolls, except that one of the dolls (Ferguson) has red hair...
...The last star he would hire would be Jerry Lewis, an entertainer whose egomaniacal shenanigans caused the Cohen version to close out of town...
...The H stands for horseshit...
...How can you dislike a man—even a con man —whose costumes are by Mr...
...S. Uperman, Waldo Figment, Rajah Bimmy, etc...
...Armed with knowledge and that indispensable quality of all great producers, chutzpah, Cohen went forth to do battle with the Shuberts and the critics...
...This great-grandfather has been at the same old stand for more than five decades, steadily producing musicals, straight plays and one-man shows on and off Broadway...
...Cohen gamely leased the theater for the extra fortnight, and lost a great deal of money...
...The trio of leading men ought to be separate and distinct individuals...
...Comden and Green are tyros compared to Alexander H. Cohen...
...The kudos end there...
...Months later, Chevalier sent his producer a note, asking him to drop in next time he visited France...
...For reasons known only to himself, Wolfe decided to jettison the original choreography...
...When the speaker appears, he continues in that spirit: "I am Alexander H. Cohen...
...From there, he recalls, "I worked my way to the bottom," producing several bombs that left him poorer but no wiser, until producer Herman Levin (My Fair Lady) took him in tow and let him see the way the pros did it...
...Now he is passing on what he knows to an enchanted public, some of it serious and analytical (the reason Broadway is littered with revivals is because the theater owners refuse to share any risk, and therefore producers are constantly looking for the Sure Thing), some of it purely frivolous...
...Even before the lights go on in Star Billing, a loudspeaker warns that any quotes from the production must cite the source—and the place from which it was stolen...
...Richard Burton's Hamlet turned out to be remarkable mainly because of the quantities of booze he downed on the way to self-destruction...
...Cohen's Closet, whose lighting is by Con Edison, whose Marketing is by Gristede's, and whose standby is listed as Brad Pitt...
...My mother died...
...Film fans moved the merchandise off the shelves as fast as it was manufactured...
...That entertainer spent much of her rehearsal time instructing usherettes on how to carry bouquets of congratulatory roses...
...But no...
...He taught me a lot about the theater," Cohen acknowledges, "larceny, chicanery...
...And no meager chorus line can diminish the fervent and jaunty melodies of Bernstein, who was just beginning to experiment in the musical theater...
...He then proceeds to demonstrate truth in advertising...
...Cohen could not have made it on his own, as he is the first to acknowledge...
...it receives none...
...That talent Comden and Green have had in overplus...
...This cedes all of the personality to the supporting players...
...And who would not be carried away by "Carried Away...
...If Lewis is Cohen's Least Favorite Performer, he wrested the title from another worldclass celebrity, Marlene Dietrich ("The Singing Hun...
...As Cohen rambles on, he scatters old show business stories with the prodigality of a man throwing coins from his pockets...
...When Louis Calhern was about to debut in King Lear, a taxicab driver informed him that he had seen the play done in Moscow, and later by Maurice Schwartz' Yiddish Art Theater on 2nd Avenue in Manhattan...
...Happily, several are up to the task...
...Last summer George C. Wolfe brought it to Central Park, then retooled the production for the Gershwin Theater this fall, firing and hiring as he went along...
...When I go to see a motion picture show And sit and watch the actors in a scene I start to think what's happening is really so ne girl, I must protect her The villain don I respect her I leap to her defense and knock a hole right through the screen...
...one must also have a talent for luck...
...Enclosed was a check for $30,000...
...Such was vanity in those days...
...The most memorable concerns an actor up for a big role in the era when producers had the right to cancel a contract after four days of rehearsal...
...The Frenchman wanted to run for eight weeks, even though only six of them were sold out...
...As the anthropologist Claire DeLoone, who pants after Ozzie, Sarah Knowlton reminded me of the late and much-lamented Alexis Smith...
...He began producing in his early 20s and, by marrying into the company, convinced Bulova executives that he should be their official publicist...
...IN December 1944 musical theater received a jolt...
...This confluence of young talents was guided by veteran director George Abbott, who fashioned a commercial success from disparate songs and dances and a barely coherent plot...
...In addition to Herman Levin, he was given lessons in theatrical finance by a rival producer, David Merrick...
...that is not Wolfe's way...
...If he had it to do all over again, Cohen goes on, the last comedy he would produce would be a revival of Hellzapoppin...
...Now belting like Ethel Merman, now scatsinging in the best Ella Fitzgerald mode, she is a minidynamo with the power to amuse while she assaults the eardrums...
...But the over-the-top billing must go to Lea DeLaria as Hildy Esterhazy, a female cabdriver in vigorous pursuit of Chip...
...It was directed by the truly gifted Stanley Donen, starred a couple of guys named Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra, and featured the likes of Vera-Ellen, Betty Garrett and Ann Miller...
...The rest of the company bob like amusement park automata, living up—and down—to their comic book names: Mr...
...Then there are the onstage personnel...
...Personally, I hold with Hector Berlioz, who concluded that "The luck of having talent is not enough...
...New York, New York, it's a helluva town...
...You can make your own luck: Rent the video for $3 and save $70 by skipping Wolfe's overpriced and overpraised rendition...
...Not all of Cohen's memories are negative...
...Dietrich, however, was also responsible for the best put-down of Elizabeth Taylor: "She knows only three words of French —Van, Cleef and Arpels...
...He hired Eliot Feld to create new dances, and when these failed to please the public, replaced him with Keith Young, a dance master whose specialty is pop videos...
...A Western Union messenger stood there with a telegram...
...It concerned the adventures of three out-of-town sailors on a 24-hour pass in Manhattan, a city they regarded as the eastern branch of Oz...
...It has been said by their detractors that Comden and Green are the luckiest people in show business—that through their long collaboration they have had the good fortune to bask in the light of such popular composers as Bernstein, Jule Styne (Bells Are Ringing) and Nacio Herb Brown (Singin' in the Rain...
...From out of nowhere —or, to be more precise, from out of the worlds of the nightclub and the concert hall—came a group of creative talents whose boundless exuberance beguiled Broadway...
...The work of such unknowns as Adolph Green, Betty Comden and Leonard Bernstein was energized by Jerome Robbins' high-voltage choreography...
...Most of the others are, at best, misguided...
...Cohen got a handsome salary, but he generated far more revenue than he received...
...How much simpler it would have been to retain Robbins' highly original dance steps...
...From the start, Cohen lets us know, he has been a master of hype...
...In peacetime (pace Saddam) the sight of a tar in whites does not automatically entice a young woman or, for that matter, a Broadway audience...
...The show originally opened to a warexhausted public...
...In his long run of hits, he produced Maurice Chevalier's one-man show...
...En route he made a number of choices...
...The opening number, "New York, New York," is infinitely preferable to the monotonous Fred Ebb and John Kander song of the same name that purls after every Yankee game...
...The cabbie liked what he had seen, but now he was worried: "How do you think it'll go in English...
...The actor ripped open the envelope and let out a longsigh of relief: "Thank God...
...They were seldom luckier than in the film adaptation of On the Town...
...As Variety later acknowledged, On the Town was not only a smasheroo, it had legs, running for 463 performances...
...Underlying their search for a hot time was the unspoken knowledge that they were shipping out to a battle zone the next morning...
...The musical went on to become a hit film in 1952, and a favorite of regional theaters ever since...
...For the PR man talked the watchmakers into leasing property for the Motion Picture Academy, and in return persuaded the Academy to make Bulova the official timepiece of the Oscars...
...On the Town was built in wag-the-dog fashion: The Robbins ballet came first, and the songs and story were constructed around it...
...Now he has decided play a game of show and tell at the Douglas Fairbanks Theater—reminiscing, retailing scurrilous and amusing stories, and putting down a variety of celebrities, including himself...
...In the smaller part of Claire's neglected fiancé, Pitkin W Bridgework, Jonathan Freeman is pathetically convincing as the man who meets every crisis with the song "I Understand...
...One, placing the orchestra above the action on a mock George Washington Bridge, is inspired...
...As Miss Turnstiles' singing teacher, Madame Maude P. Dilly, Mary Testa's role is exaggerated enough in the writing...
...I found every word of it engaging...
...Despite Cohen's reputation for flamboyance, his name became synonymous with intellectually respectable plays, including some of the outstanding NewYork Shakespeare productions of our time...
...Her own hambone elaborations are strictly sitcom, and not prime time sitcom at that...
...The soaring ballads, "Lucky to Be Me" and "Some Other Time," are imperishable...
...Finally, at 11:45 P.M., came a fateful knock on the door...
...It is common knowledge that Young had to be given aid by the uncredited Joey McKneely...
...He is still skirmishing, but these days spends most of his time looking in the rearview mirror and giving us the benefit of his 20/20 hindsight...
Vol. 81 • December 1998 • No. 14
