Brandy of the Damned
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage BRANDY OF THE DAMNED By Stefan Kanfer Clifford Brown's biography is one of the shortest, saddest entries in the annals of American music. He was still a teenaged brass player when...
...You can't deny that there is such a thing as chemical action, chemical affinity, chemical combination...
...Along with the cast, they give fresh meaning to George Bernard Shaw's stark definition of music as "the brandy of the damned...
...Sella skillfully evokes his parched childhood, and the music that was to become his sibling rival...
...Known simply as Waiter (Charles Keating), he is a servant whose remarks could just as well have come from the pen of Oscar Wilde...
...Beyond a few brand names, today's side men resemble the troubadours of yore...
...In his early 20s he bolstered his reputation with some landmark recordings...
...Clandon (Helen Carey), did something unprecedented in Victorian times...
...To tell this tale, playwright Warren Leight uses a narrator who provides character analysis and propels the plot, flashing back in time, shifting people around like chess pieces...
...With each appearance this young actor grows more skilled...
...Everyone is allowed a star turn and, en route, British manners are neatly skewered...
...He helps to restore some order when Crampton allows that Gloria is beyond hope, but that under his administration the twins can still be brought up properly...
...Yet this kind of ignorance is harmless and, at times, charming...
...and another trumpet player, Al (Joseph Lyle Taylor), who never met a bimbo he couldn't seduce...
...Like him, they are side men with no real interest in anything but syncopation...
...Her twin, Philip (Saxon Palmer), takes no guff from anyone, a characteristic that soon adds to his own discomfort...
...Some scenes illustrate Gene's dereliction and Terry's encroaching alcoholism and lunacy...
...Of Gloria's two siblings, Dolly (Catherine Kellner) proves to be a fountain of questions embarrassing to everyone, including herself...
...1953-85) when live jazz could be heard in hundreds of night clubs around the country...
...But never mind...
...At 25, he seemed ready to stand with Dizzy Gillespie and Roy Eldridge as a jazz trumpet superstar...
...The group includes Jonesy (Kevin Geer), a small-time horn player and full-time substance abuser...
...Others bring on the side men, playing joyfully on their long march to oblivion...
...Director Nicholas Martin knows the importance of pace and timing in a 100year-old play, and he makes the movement of these men and women as modern as a contemporary ballet, without missing any of the original nuances...
...Complications begin with a visit to an impoverished dentist, Valentine (Robert Sean Leonard), who is immediately smitten with Gloria and she with him...
...These include emotional indifference, financial irresponsibility, and an inability to plan anything more complicated than his next club date...
...he originates from Blighty, and so does the Dickensian curmudgeon he plays with such flair...
...Both groups were rendered obsolete by a combination of technology and lowered public taste...
...Valentine: No, no, no, no, no...
...Electronically amplified Rock, Heavy Metal, Fusion, etc., have all but destroyed the jazz player's profession...
...Michael Krass' costumes are as cheerful as the dialogue, and Allen Moyer's set suggests not only the nearby ocean, but the approaching century...
...Part of this is due to Michael Mayer's otherwise admirable direction...
...Only Makkena fails to deliver a rounded performance...
...Another of Valentine's clients is his landlord Crampton (Simon Jones), a harrumphing gentleman of the old school who prefers pain to anesthesia ("Most things that are good for me are nasty...
...Ziggy (Michael Mastro), a faceless nebbish, except when he solos on his brass instrument...
...While others around him succumbed to the effects of drugs and alcohol, he stayed healthy and surprisingly free of temptations...
...Jones' British intonations are legitimate...
...Here the presiding figure is Patsy (Angelica Torn), a tough-talking waitress...
...Into this tight-knit quartet comes Terry (Wendy Makkena), a naïve kid from the sticks...
...The playwright placed this work under the rubric, "Plays Pleasant," and the production at the Laura Pels Theater agrees with his sunny assessment...
...Late in the play a lawyer, Bohun (Jere Shea), makes an appearance...
...There she supported the family by writing books advocating a change in British mores, in order to give women more of a voice...
...Chemically...
...Bohun puts more strain on the long arm of coincidence: He is the waiter's offspring...
...Which is just well, because "he never had a hand for real work," and thus there was no hope of following in his father's footsteps: "You can't learn being a waiter, sir...
...The lad is now a barrister...
...Will the young couple find a way to unite...
...the most irresistible of natural forces...
...Grilled about his past, he confesses he has a son he put through Cambridge and law school...
...In the intervening time the eldest child, Gloria (Katie Finneran), has become an outspoken beauty, but as she is about to discover, the advanced notions she learned at her mother's knee are no protection against the appeal of the opposite sex...
...She knows that these guys may be diverting jokesters and fun in bed, but that every last one of them is as reliable as a hock shop cornet...
...Much of the action takes place along the seashore, site of salt air and Shavian coincidences...
...The twenty something Clifford (Robert Sella), named for the late, great musician, is Gene and Terry's only child...
...Despite their protests to the contrary, he learns he was an accident that never got aborted, even though Gene urged his wife to have the procedure...
...The cast of You Never Can Tell is mostly American, and there is scarcely a flat A or hard R in the entire delight-filled evening...
...So does Keating, whose waiter exerts influence even as he tugs his forelock...
...Patsy and Clifford provide the welcome voices of sanity and realism in Side Man...
...The most effective of these set pieces take place in the Rainbow Lounge...
...her lengthy mad scenes are ludicrous where they should be pathetic, and overwound where they should be muted...
...In a first-rate cast, Leonard is a standout as the five-shilling dentist, alternately shy and forthright, bumbling and authoritative...
...Brown is the unseen presence in Side Man, a compelling recollection of the bygone epoch (c...
...He uses all of the Roundabout Theater Company's Criterion Center Stage Right, helped along by Neil Patel's canny set design and Kenneth Posner's moody lighting...
...Gloria: Nonsense...
...Clifford speaks to us about years of couch time at the therapist's, and conjures up the old days to show us how he got his scars...
...As the main side man...
...we know better than that...
...Let's call it chemistry...
...Catastrophe takes root in the first years of their marriage...
...Alternately numb and discerning, he is the embodiment of an individual who "could sense everything while he was blowing, and almost nothing when he wasn't...
...Wood gives one of those transcendent performances that will be recalled long after the curtain has gone down for the last time...
...he even manages an English accent easily...
...Not love...
...Eighteen years before, the now middle-aging suffragette, Mrs...
...The hidden asset in this production is Tim Monich, who has more than earned his wages as the play's dialect coach...
...Next door to the Criterion, Shaw is having his own say about life and love in You Never Can Tell...
...Will their elders reconcile...
...You have to be born to it...
...Shaw has no interest in realism here...
...As it happens, Crampton separated from his own spouse 18 years ago and—surprise of surprises—he discovers that the Clandons are indeed his long-lost family...
...Her defenses go up, and, in a classic Shavian maneuver, the dentist tries to dance to her tune: Gloria: I hope you are not going to be so foolish—so vulgar—as to say love...
...She whisked her three children away from their brutal father and went off to Madeira...
...The skinny girl wonders about the musicians' "funny-tasting" cigarettes, and cannot understand the white men who sit in worshipful silence, listening to the tape the black Clifford Brown made a fewhours before he was killed...
...That was the last time instrumentalists—the "side men" of bands and combos— could do what they loved, and earn enough to get by...
...Finneran makes her earnest young feminist less strident than sympathetic, and Kellner finds laughs that even Shaw might have missed...
...The uneasy relationship comes to reflect the state of jazz itself, declining from a brief, sunny period to excesses of abuse and, ultimately, to poverty and despair...
...He was still a teenaged brass player when he was invited to solo alongside the legendary jazz saxophonist, Charlie Parker...
...Unwanted neglected, poor in material goods and parental support, he somehow survives—but at a price...
...Then, on June 26,1956, four months before his 26th birthday, he went out for a drive, failed to avoid an oncoming car, and was killed instantly...
...Now she has returned with her brood...
...Mastro, Geer and Taylor lend a vitality and gallows humor to the proceedings, and Torn does well enough with a bromidic part: the flinty demimonde with the 24 karat heart...
...What proves corrosive is her starry-eyed regard for Gene, whose shortcomings she refuses to recognize...
...Because this is Shaw, social comment runs through both acts...
...But the lyricism comes from Gene and his pals, artists who try to perfect their work even though they know it is as doomed as Clifford Brown himself...
...Well, you're attracting me irresistibly...
...On those thin hangers Shaw drapes a brightly-colored farce...
...When we first encounter Gene (Frank Wood), he is thirty something and profitably occupied with his music and his colleagues...
...His most successful character is neither lover nor hater...
...He is out to entertain and instruct, and though his sociopolitical critiques have long been absorbed by every playgoer in the world, his ability to make the risible visible is as vigorous as ever...
...He concludes his memoir with a brilliant and bitter valedictory, saluting the obsessives who will end as "a 50-year blip on the screen...
Vol. 81 • August 1998 • No. 9
