On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage TIME IN REVERSE By Stefan Kanfer Last month all eyes focused on the 1940s, as attention was paid to the blockbuster revival of Death of a Salesman. But in the time machine that is...
...Back in 1937 it made a smashing movie, starring Robert Montgomery and Dame May Whitty...
...The Comedian Harmonists offered a blend of jazz, show tunes, folk songs, opera arias, harmony, and remarkable imitations of musical instruments...
...We have been here all too often...
...One concerns the poor wretches condemned to live out their days in the charnel house...
...It would have been interesting to see how these men handled spoken material...
...Fifty years ago James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, John Garfield and scores of others starred in "Big House" movies in which the warden strutted and the lackeys tugged their forelocks, men banged their plates in the mess hall and shouted "We won't eat this swill!," guards beat inmates, and a brotherhood of convicts tried to overcome the soul-destroying barbarity of life behind bars...
...And a short-lived Broadway show, Band in Berlin, followed in its wake...
...Still, Parfitt is near perfect, Kilgarriff is hilarious, and McRobbie is Scotland Yard to the last thread of his trench coat...
...Jim (Finbar Lynch), the trustee he sadistically humiliates...
...the men who impersonated the Harmonists comprise an actual chorus, Hudson Shad...
...He was Welsh by birth and made much of this in The Corn is Green, his most famous drama...
...We saw and heard Robert Biberti, bass (Wilbur Pauley), tenors Ari Leshnikoff and Erich Collin (Mark Bleeke and Timothy Leigh Evans), lyric baritone Harry Frommermann (Hugo Munday), Roman Cycowksi, baritone (Peter Becker), and pianist Erwin Bootz (Robert Wolrnsky) as they perfected their style in 20 superbly rendered songs...
...abrash cook, Mrs...
...The three Germans stayed on in Deutschland, formed a new assemblage, and failed to win a following...
...She dusted them off and arranged a revival...
...Everything is drained of color...
...Such touches are superfluous...
...If contemporary audiences were through with them, history was not...
...In the absence of any convincing dialogue, playwright (I use the term loosely) Susan Feldman concocted some pseudodocumentary footage, with Herbert Rubens as the elder Cycowksi relating the Harmonists' tale...
...If these Americans were as adept at mimicking the English as the English were at doing Americans, the situations might be credible...
...No doubt...
...Theirpresentations made them the toast of the Continent...
...On the credit side, the 18-member cast is beyond reproach...
...And B: At its best, the play is the work of a man who had yet to find his voice...
...It opens with nudity, is shot through with special effects, and closes with a curse that would not have been uttered in the '30s...
...Smith-Cameron...
...The other focuses on the isosceles triangle of "Boss" Whalen (Corin Redgrave), the power-mad warden...
...There the refugees were protected from harm, but were unable to ignite any interest in their music...
...On and up they went, six very different men with only their music in common, feeding on laughter, applause and box office receipts until the rise of the Nazi Party...
...This is a risky move, and only partly successful...
...The theater piece mimicked the group's arrangements to the last quarter note...
...I wish I could say the same for the players...
...They had fine voices and mobile faces and their leader, Pauley, exhibited a terrific stage presence...
...A German film about their life and art has just been produced...
...Is this production of the highest possible quality...
...To achieve his goal he must negotiate a difficult obstacle course, including the old lady's neurotic niece, Olivia (J...
...Richard Hoover's inspired set and Chris Parry's lighting design make brilliant use of a restrictive theater in the round...
...Night Must Fall contained all the requisites for what Graham Green labeled "a pretty little murder play": the isolated country house, the rich, disabled old lady, the retinue of gossiping servants, the guileful killer...
...Its members thought he showed a glimmer of promise, but a production of this ungainly work was out of the question...
...Another Redgrave got involved—her brother, Corin—and a British production mesmerized London last year...
...But the playwright/ actor's first hit was a modest, well-made British thriller starring himself as a young con man who comes to charm and stays to slay...
...What he does not communicate is any sense of animal magnetism, a vital ingredient in Night Must Fall, particularly in his relationship with the wheelchair-bound Mrs...
...Dan affects to care for her, but he has his eyes on the main chance: Mrs...
...The surprise hit has now been transferred to the stage of the Circle in the Square with only a few cast changes...
...Dora is pregnant by the interloper, and Olivia becomes so enthralled that she covers for him when Inspector Belsize finds an incriminating clue, an event leading to a horrific denouement...
...We never learned who they were as individuals, or what they were like in their offstage lives...
...This was worse than cheap irony, it was Holocaust kitsch...
...They roasted to death...
...Essentially, the play tells two stories...
...But in the time machine that is now Broadway the calendar not only doesn't stand still, it goes in reverse...
...Within weeks a melodrama poured out of him...
...At 97 he was the oldest American cantor...
...These minor compensations are almost undone by attempts to modernize the play...
...The horror stories struck a vital chord in the 27-year-old writer, who considered himself something of a prisoner in his beleaguered family and his as yet undeclared homosexuality...
...To hear the real thing, try EMI's new release of five old Comedian Harmonist albums...
...Or had it...
...Bramson (Parfitt...
...Director John Tillinger keeps the suspense as taut as the A strings on the violins that render David Van Tieghem's background music, James Noone's set is properly lugubrious, and Jess Goldstein's costumes also put the black-andwhite theme to good use...
...However, too many of the folks in Night Must Fall have great difficulties with Britishisms like "I say, this is a bit thick," and as the frustrated love interest, Smith-Cameron gives little sense of a woman intrigued by evil, j ust as Broderick does not quite come off as a captivating villain...
...As times got harder for them, all we saw were rear screen projections of Hitler, of so-called Degenerate Art of the period (George Grosz, Emil Nolde), and footage of jackbooted SS troops tyrannizing Jews while the quintet sang "Happy Days Are Here Again...
...The Harmonists, now playing in art houses across the country...
...Lee, with her '30s hairdo and long dresses, is wholly convincing as a torn observer, repulsed by the inhuman use of human beings, but terrified that she might lose her job for speaking out...
...The prisoners, from the ringleader Butch ?'Fallon (James Black) to the ur-victim Sailor Jack (Matthew Floyd Miller), have the faces and bodies of men hardened to a life without hope or mercy...
...In 1938 Thomas Lanier Williams, an aspiring dramatist, read about a prison riot in Pennsylvania...
...The trio of Jews worked their way to the U.S...
...Then, two years ago, Vanessa Redgrave came upon Williams' text and handwritten notes in a vast file of documents at the University of Texas at Austin...
...No way...
...Newspapers printed a catalogue of unimaginable brutalities...
...a dithering maid, Dora (Seana Kofoed...
...On the debit side, almost every confrontation is an echo...
...Shocked at the turndown, Williams abandoned Not About Nightingales and forsook the naturalistic mode without a backward glance...
...These CDs prove that art is indestructible...
...During one hunger strike, for example, the ringleaders were locked in a room with the radiators running full blast...
...Olivia's lumpish suitor, Hubert (Michael Countryman...
...And now here it is again, at the Lyceum Theater, with Matthew Broderick and Judy Parfitt leading a cast of nine...
...As it was, they only offered a concert masking as a big-league musical...
...Bramson's safe full of cash...
...Naive and full of ambition, he submitted it to the Group Theater, using the name Tennessee Williams for the first time...
...What happened to the Comedian Harmonists remains a sad show business tale, not a tragedy...
...For three of the sextet were Jews, and the performers were informed by the Third Reich that their harmony was too close...
...the others had to go...
...Terence (Patricia Kilgarriff), and Inspector Belsize (Peter McRobbie), who hasjust unearthed the body of Dan's ex-girlfriend, buried nearby...
...It was as arch as Patricia Birch's tableaux and Douglas W. Schmidt's garish set...
...His Irish accent is passable, and he conveys the sense of a charming psychotic with roving eyes...
...At roughly the same time that the Williamses were getting started, a group of five German singers and their piano-playing accompanist created a beguiling new sound...
...No matter how powerful the direction, no matter how earnest the performances, nothing can hide two salient facts...
...Karyl Newman's costumes cannily evoke the past...
...Impressionism, not naturalism, is the way Tennessee Williams made his worldwide reputation...
...A SECOND Williams, this one called Emlyn, and no relation to Tennessee, created his own stage work in the '30s...
...After an emotional last concert in Munich they parted, never to sing together again...
...Only Aryans could perform in Germany after 1935...
...The men hold Dan at harm's length, but all the ladies are snagged by his charisma...
...Redgrave leads it, playing a provincial lout without the faintest trace of an English accent...
...All of the men survived, and some of them prospered...
...What we did not see and hear at the Helen Hayes Theater was a context...
...Lynch (an Irishman with perfect pitch) conveys every nuance of a man on a tightrope, attempting to mollify the Boss, interceding for thankless prisoners who hold him in contempt because they believe, incorrectly, that he is Whalen's stool pigeon...
...The moment for the Comedian Harmonists had passed...
...A: Not About Nightingales has been superseded by better works on the same subject...
...To learn more about the originals, see the movie...
...even the American flag is black and white...
...Would the revival have happened if the writer's name was, say, Thomas Lanier Jones...
...An antique is not made more appealing by spraying it with a coat of Day-Glo...
...A pity...
...Currently the emphasis is on the 1930s, with three productions rooted in the period between the Depression and World War II...
...andEva(Sherri Parker Lee), the terrified young secretary to whom both men are attracted...
...Aware that Not About Nightingales concerns the receding past, director Trevor Nunn has deliberately staged it in the style of an old movie...
...After Williams' death in 1983, scholars overlooked the play when they rummaged through his papers...
...As young Dan, the factotum with the killer smile, Broderick is to be commended for breaking away from the type-casting that has frozen him in place as a wide-eyed juvenile for the last 10 years...
...He may well have been embarrassed by his initial effort, although the manuscript was never destroyed...
...Cycowksi died in California only last year...
...Surrounded by people she regards as disloyal, the self-pitying old lady takes a shine to her scullery maid's boyfriend, flirting grotesquely with him and soon hiring him as her companion...
...Williams' tongue-and-groove construction holds up...
Vol. 82 • April 1999 • No. 4
