Bourgeois Dreamers and Schemers
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage BOURGEOIS DREAMERS AND SCHEMERS By Stefan Kanfer My father would not let me take up the piano; otherwise I should not doubt have turned into a formidable pianist in company with...
...With good reason...
...This hardly comes as a surprise...
...Dykstra: (Blushing) Mr...
...You caress her, you stroke her, and you make the most beautiful music together...
...A smaller handful will master the keyboard and, envisioning a Carnegie Hall debut, apply to conservatories...
...Greenblatt: (Mentally introducing himself to a coed camper) Hi there, I come from Montreal...
...The simplest exercises can seem insurmountable for weeks, months and even years, depending on the teacher...
...Dykstra: There's going to be chicks...
...Summarizing a plot by this nonpareil farceur would be like squeezing the foie gras back into the goose...
...Théodor, the piano is like a woman...
...the aggressive Olympia Battalion (Alice Playten...
...In 2 Pianos, 4 Hands, a couple of flawed Canadian pianists present their autobiographies and, in the process, make failure into a heartening theatrical event...
...You going to the music camp this summer...
...They are to live for the hours of practice leading to competence and eventually, command...
...Greenblatt: Some of the best kids and teachers from around the world...
...Two Aomme-dingers are central to the narrative, Victor Chandebise, a self-satisfied businessman, and his lookalike, a bellhop appropriately named Dodo...
...These two gentleman never appear at the same time...
...Irwin is the most proficient mime in the country, but as the director/star of last year's Scapino demonstrated, he knows more about silence than about speech, and more about male action than female reaction...
...To some degree, hélas, this must be said of the play itself...
...Playing all parts—parents, students, men, women, children—the actors/musicians wittily portray themselves in adolescence, switching fluently from pianist to pedagogue and back again: Greenblatt (as the instructor): Mr...
...And a still smaller group will grab the brass rings of recording contracts and national tours...
...the narcissistic Spaniard, Carlos Homenides de Histingua (Mark McKinney), and a variety of supporting personae including the scheming wives, Lucie Homenides de Histingua (Angie Phillips) and Constance Chandebise (Kali Rocha...
...Dykstra: Yes...
...Play, Théodor, play the arpeggios with both hands...
...With a diamond ring and a poodle and a TV show...
...The Roundabout Theater Company production at the Criterion Center Laura Pels Theater is swift enough, but ought to be more polished and more risible...
...They like the real man...
...Greenblatt: And who is he...
...with luck and application, Richard can redeem the dreams of the past...
...Although the characters hail from different backgrounds they suffer parallel miseries...
...Greenblatt: Italian...
...Both boys pay high prices for their facile hands and musical aptitudes...
...On these pianos, Richard Greenblatt and Ted Dykstra narrate the downhill process of their careers in music...
...That's O.K., isn't it...
...Dykstra: Ricky, Ricky, what do you do...
...What of those who go almost all the way, who can run through scales and arpeggios with the flair of Rubinstein or Van Cliburn, but lack the gift of interpretation or the charisma of the great keyboard artists...
...Greenblatt: Théodor, you do not...
...The lighthearted oeuvre, he announced with great concern, was crowding out the classic productions of Racine, Hugo, Giraudoux, and Anouilh...
...Greenblatt: Oh, yes...
...In France, Georges Feydeau has achieved legendary stature...
...Where does it say in the music, "Hey, use two hands here, it's easier," eh...
...The stage of the Promenade Theater is bare except for two instruments of torture, otherwise known as Yamahas...
...All that is missing is the odor of mothballs...
...I just thought it would be easier...
...And the chicks, you think they like the guy with the crossover, foo-foo Liberace hand...
...Still, it would have helped to have better accoutrements...
...Under his direction the boy plays the role of surrogate...
...Greenblatt: What do you mean, Mr...
...Gloria Muzio would be a brilliant choice...
...You make love to her with your eyes, you make love to her with your lips, you make love to her with your fingertips of both hands...
...Migraine (Richard B. Shull...
...They like the man who play the arpeggio with one hand...
...Surrounding the pair are such unlikely folks as Victor's relative, Camille (Shaun Powell), who cannot pronounce consonants—leading, of course, to more complications...
...Prosperous as he is, he remains haunted by what might have been...
...A few—a very few—hardy youths stay the course...
...There a second— but equally talented—company will be tickling the ivories and the audience...
...Dykstra: No, it is not O.K...
...Then come the agonies of Bach's Partitas and Haydn's sonatas...
...Did you notice that I play my arpeggios with one hand...
...Dykstra (as a 15-year old): Well, my old teacher told me expressly to play them that way...
...Dykstra: I don't know...
...Scarlatti...
...Only a remnant of that remnant will graduate to become professional performers...
...Then you listen to Mr...
...No one has told their story—until now...
...The last two numbers are used to illustrate the depressing jobs open to the also-rans...
...Hector Berlioz There are only 88 keys on the piano, but to a music student the ivories seem numberless...
...At his best he can be as funny as Neil Simon, and as outrageous as the Marx Brothers...
...There are to be no afternoons squandered on such time-wasting pursuits as hockey or dating...
...No, they like the man, eh...
...A Flea In Her Ear represents the playwright at his most typical...
...the lascivious Englishman, Rugby (Wally Dunn...
...I'm a man...
...Greenblatt: Wow...
...I'm a real man...
...It wouldn't hurt to have a set and costume designer with the flair of Steve Lucas...
...What of the near misses...
...Greenblatt: I don't know...
...The other tries to study jazz, only to be told that there are 13-year-old kids from the projects who play with greater verve and more soul...
...A splendid one if he possesses a few prime requisites...
...By the time you read this, 2 Pianos, 4 Hands will have run past its theatrical booking at the Promenade and gone downtown to the Variety Arts Theater...
...Under the direction of Bill Irwin, the men are far more adroit than the women...
...Dykstra: Why you play these arpeggios with two hands...
...The translation by Jean-Marie Besset and Mark O'Donnell is terse without being interesting, Douglas Stein's set is functional without being funny, and Bill Kellard's costumes have the aura of clothes taken down from an attic...
...He must have stage presence, some training in the theatrical arts (Dykstra studied at the National Theater School in Montreal...
...Frank...
...What career, then, is open to a soloist who is congenial, dextrous, but not quite top drawer...
...Greenblatt: Well, I don't get out much...
...Dykstra: (Awed at the prospect of the piano as a woman) Oh...
...Greenblatt: And when you make love to a woman, do you use only one hand...
...Resistant at first, they gradually ease into their roles as apprentice artists, ceding authority to their instructors...
...In an era when the nightly news has become more farcical than anything a Frenchman could concoct, perhaps that is impossible...
...You say, "Hey, I'm no sissy boy...
...Greenblatt studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London), honesty about himself and his shortcomings, and a congenial partner with a similar history and inclinations...
...Indeed, his farces were so successful in postwar Paris that André Malraux, De Gaulle's Minister of Culture, put out a directive against them...
...You like the women, no...
...Actually, the playwright lived well into this century (1862-1921), owed as much to vaudeville as to Molière, and was not above borrowing a gag or two from silent film comedies...
...In any Feydeau contretemps, a set with many doors is a prime requisite: Before the evening is over, errant lovers will be zipping (and unzipping) in and out of those apertures, missing each other by nanoseconds...
...he, too, lives out his extinguished hopes through his son's achievement...
...yeah...
...In time, they will turn into competent accompanists for local dance classes, or instructors of indifferent children and of housewives with afternoons to kill...
...Apparently there is no shortage of us...
...Scarlatti...
...otherwise I should not doubt have turned into a formidable pianist in company with forty thousand others...
...Both are vigorously played by Mark Linn-Baker...
...Dykstra: But you like the chicks...
...Ah, oui, Théodor, I can see you do...
...Théodor, why are you playing those arpeggios with one hand...
...If the student has not dropped out by now, there are the infinite complications of Mozart and Beethoven, the agonizing subtleties of Chopin, the fingerbending gymnastics of Liszt...
...Dykstra: You want to have a good time this summer...
...With luck he will attract a director capable of moving pieces around with a chess master's canniness...
...The performers abruptly reverse places...
...Dykstra: Mr...
...You know who's going to be there...
...Feydeau's works have never enjoyed a similar popularity in the U. S., largely because they take place in an unfamiliar world of haute bourgeois schemers and hysterical servants, plush drawing rooms and grand hotels...
...Only a fraction of these hopefuls will be good enough to enter...
...Dykstra's old man is also a former musician turned businessman...
...Best of all would be ticket holders who appreciate those who did not turn out to be Vladimir Horowitz (a CD of the superstar's "Mephisto Waltzes" is played for purposes of comparison), but who provide this season's subtlest and most civilized entertainment...
...Dykstra: That's a good boy...
...Scarlatti, eh...
...the painfully dull Dr...
...When the principals are not acting, they are playing, and they play with astonishing skill, fluently moving from a Beethoven Sonatina and a Schubert Impromptu to Billy Joel's "Piano Man" and Rodgers and Hart's "My Funny Valentine...
...Now Dykstra is the teacher and Greenblatt the student...
...One ekes out an income as a lounge musician, playing pop songs to a drunken crowd and a surly night club owner...
...Greenblatt's father has forsaken music to make a living...
...Hey, you like the chicks...
...Greenblatt: Cochon...
...Suffice to say that the action takes place during the Third Republic (circa 1870), and ranges from a Parisian drawing room to the Hotel Pussycat...
Vol. 81 • March 1998 • No. 4
