Amateur 'Noche'
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage AMATEUR 'NOCHE' By Stefan Kanfer There is no such thing as a tragedy if no one cares. Remember our children. Seven victims will be murdered while you watch this play. THOSE ARE...
...With all their marijuana, They won't give me apuff...
...New York Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller convened a special meeting to discuss the new emergency injuvenile crime...
...Neither parent could control the angry kid, who soon spent his waking—and sometimes sleeping—hours in the streets...
...After all, Leonard Bernstein had made beautiful songs out of street fights and Puerto Rican aspirations in West Side Story...
...Now the good news: After this misbegotten project, the team that created Capeman is unlikely to return to Broadway...
...He thought of himself as a comic book character and insisted on being called The Capeman...
...This one cost $ 11 million, and promises to be the most expensive flop ever...
...It was not an easy journey from the page to the stage...
...A Latino musical without dancing seems worse than perverse...
...the collaborators, particularly Derek, made it stay afloat when I was ready to abandon it on more than one occasion...
...Worse still, he and his collaborators have chosen to musicalize the wrong moments...
...No matter that pop superstar Paul Simon had composed the score...
...But he, too, appears to inhabit a different Agrón from the actual murderer...
...Previews displeased all but themost uncritical teenagers, word of mouth was catastrophic, and wholesale revisions began...
...There is nothing inherently humorous in the situation...
...By the age of five the boy was threatening others with a razor blade...
...A gang member mockingly pleads his case: Dear kindly Judge, your Honor, My parents treat me rough...
...The Capeman case made headlines in 1959 when 17-year-old Salvador Agrón, a member of a Manhattan street gang called the Vampires, stabbed two boys to death...
...By then he was suffering from diabetes and other complications, and he retreated quietly to the Bronx...
...She had married again, this time to a storefront Pentecostal preacher...
...During a confrontation on 45th Street and Ninth Avenue, Agrón flashed a silver knife and buried it in the bodies of two unarmed white 16-year-olds who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time...
...She and her son eventually fled to an asylum for the poor, where they were separated...
...But it was not until that fateful summer evening almost 40 years ago that their strutting turned lethal...
...Seven years after his arrival in the United States he became the most notorious adolescent of the Eisenhower era...
...For years afterward he pondered the idea of putting it in theatrical and musical form, using the Doo-Wop and Hispanic music of the period...
...Neither Simon nor Walcott were schooled in the ways of mainstream theater, and their first choice for director, Mark Morris, was a choreographer with no Broadway experience...
...As the adolescent Sal, Marc Anthony, another salsa star, moves well, sings skillfully and makes an appealing manchild...
...In that show, lyricist Stephen Sondheim satirized the notion that criminals are marionettes operated by circumstances beyond their control...
...it seems downright self-destructive...
...Simon was only a year older than Agrón and the case transfixed him...
...The moment is played as comedy and the audience snickers obediently...
...Capeman is performed with undeserved skill by some 30 performers who will soon be auditioning for other roles...
...Eventually Simon's idea attracted the attention of Walcott, and several years ago they began working on the musical...
...His best friend, another delinquent named Tony Hernandez, carried a sharp-pointed bumbershoot and styled himself as The Umbrellaman...
...My sister wears a mustache, My brother wears a dress...
...Yet The Capeman attempts to give him that sort of baggage, and adds charges of gringo racism that shaped his tragedy...
...In need of new threads the Vampires vandalize a black-owned store, brazenly stuffing shirts and trousers into their pants, sassing the saleslady as they steal...
...Salvador loathed him...
...The older women in the show, Ednita Nazario as Salvador's mother, and Luba Mason and Cass Morgan as the mothers of the dead boys, lend a certain authority to their melancholy roles...
...Far too many of Simon's Capeman songs are weighed down with banal metaphors...
...The number is the moral equivalent of Jesus painted on velvet: vulgar, crass, and unworthy of the subject and the object...
...If anything was doomed from birth it was the musical Capeman rather than the real one...
...At the age of 10 hejoined his mother in New York...
...By opening night far too many cooks had been called in to stir the broth, among them Mike Nichols and Jerry Zaks, the final (and uncredited) show doctor, who was quoted as saying that he did the best he could with what he was handed...
...As the older Salvador, the protean Ruben Blades (a salsa composer/performer, Harvard-trained lawyer andPanamanian politician) radiates an intelligence bearing little relation to the character he was given to play...
...He is still alive...
...Even at his best, however, Simon was always a bright but lazy lyricist (compare, for instance, his amusing laundry list of buzzwords in "Graceland" with Ira Gershwin's "The Babbit and the Bromide," which also offers a string of cliches but gives them metric sense and poetic balance...
...This kind of no-fault rationale for criminal behavior ran its course long before 1959...
...should have taken a closer look at West Side Story, whose commercial success they so obviously hoped to emulate...
...Supervisors measured his IQ at 68...
...Eight years later he died of a heart attack...
...Perhaps so, butitwas not good enough...
...songs were cut, choreographers replaced, directors fired...
...So there is good news and bad news...
...They didn't wanna have me...
...A judge sentenced Salvador to die in the electric chair, just as the cops had predicted...
...A model prisoner, Agrón was released in 1979, full of contrition—or so he said...
...THOSE ARE HARDLY the sort of signs ticket holders expected to see outside the home of a new Broadway musical...
...There are more than two dozen songs in the show, and quite a few of them employ the easy, undemanding sounds of '50s street comer harmonizing, the brassy, infectious intonations of Hispanic pop, and the blend of African rhythms and Catholic rites called Santeria...
...Natasha Katz' lighting, Peter J. Fitzgerald's sound design and Oscar Hernandez' musical directions are worthy of a better opus...
...no matter that Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott had written the book...
...The rest of the company, a mixture of Doo-Wop and Hispanic performers, enthusiastically fleshes out some very thin material...
...Another deadly number, "The Santero," attempts to portray an exotic quasi-religious rite in Puerto Rico, with a seer (Nestor Sanchez) predicting a horrific future for little Salvi (Evan Jay Newman...
...Time is an ocean of endless tears"), open-ended monologues, and such ungainly entry-level rhymes as "wicked" and "predicted...
...Then there is The Capeman himself...
...Every afternoon he could be seen posturing in a blue cape lined with crimson satin...
...Not that the composer has entirely lost his gift for writing agreeable melodies...
...Captured a few days later, The Umbrellaman was silent and terrified...
...Just before the show opened, Simon recalled, "I didn't know if it would pan out...
...He was 43...
...But protesters argued that the murderer was severely disturbed, not a hardened criminal, that he was a victim of a dysfunctional family, discrimination and poverty...
...Speaking of thin material, Bob Crowley's costumes offer authenticity without wit, and color without complexity...
...The Umbrellaman, who was also given a long jail sentence, was released about 15 years ago...
...My mother could watch me...
...Leapin 'lizards, that's why I'm so bad...
...Police had no trouble running him to earth...
...By contrast, The Capeman was wholly unremorseful...
...they were not surprised when Salvador told them voices in his head were ordering him around...
...in his Spanish Harlem neighborhood Agrón had become notorious...
...The show was based on an actual murder case, it focused on a slayer rather than on the slain, and Victims' Rights groups were having none of it...
...Simon, Walcott & Co...
...First the bad news: After this misbegotten project, the team that created Capeman is unlikely to return to Broadway...
...But somehow I was had...
...He redeems himself with one spectacular set design: angular tenement buildings rising into the sky and making the stage into a claustrophobic courtyard...
...Numbers are unmotivated, the dialogue is flatter than a taco, and whatever Morris contributed in the way of choreography has been excised...
...The trio's inexperience became apparent several weeks into rehearsal...
...Shoplifting is the reason why so many uptown stores have expensive security guards at the door, and why Harlem merchants pay such high insurance rates— if, indeed, they can get insurance at all...
...When policemen told him he faced electrocution he snarled, "I don't care if I bum...
...He was not a leader, not a good guy gone wrong or a talent suffocated by the ghetto...
...My father is a bastard, My ma s an S. O. B., My grandpa s always plastered, My grandma pushes tea...
...Eleanor Roosevelt joined their group, and one week before the scheduled execution Rockefeller commuted the sentence...
...Salvador was born in Puerto Rico of an impoverished, illiterate mother and a street cleaner who battered her almost every day...
...As things turned out, they were right—but for the wrong reasons...
...All the evidence indicates that, his pathetic background aside, Salvador Agrón was a suggestible and unsavory individual, hardly the type to inspire compelling drama or rueful speculation...
...Goodness, gracious, that s why I'm a mess...
...That chilling statement was splashed across the tabloids and condemned in editorials from New York to California...
...Why should the tale of The Capeman be off limits...
...Rear-screen projections of newsreel footage, some of it faked, some of it authentic, have been aptly staged by Wendall K. Harrington...
...Yet there were pickets with hand-lettered placards ringing the Marquis Theater when The Capeman made its debut...
...The show's low point is a number entitled, "Shopliftin' Clothes...
...Reporters and lawyers dug through Agrón's background and compiled a disturbing biography...
...Together these two and their cohort terrorized passersby, preyed on homosexuals and generally made a stench in the civic nostril...
...Simon should have given them a deaf ear, a handy thing to have if you're in the audience of The Capeman...
Vol. 81 • February 1998 • No. 2
