On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage Defining Broadway Down By Stefan Kanfer Applied to the stage, "Broadway" has but one definition: A specific group of large theaters in midtown Manhattan offering big productions...
...Can the German be exculpated because he was only attempting to produce atomic energy, rather than a lethal weapon...
...plus a tragedy about prisoners on death row...
...Dirty Blonde, the biographical drama about Mae West (1892-1980), enjoyed a good run at the New York Theater Workshop and is now at the Helen Hayes Theater on Broadway...
...Within the confines of the Ensemble Studio Theater, Chris Smith directs an eight member cast with verve...
...This may not have been the wisest move...
...Only one thing is certain about Off-Broadway: The tickets are far cheaper than on Broadway...
...Robert Lebret (Peter Jacobson) is a wired, scheming professional...
...After graduation, he returns home to greet his sister (Amy Love), and more significantly, her piano teacher, Arline (Tracy Sallows...
...During a long marriage to the ur-WASP Theo (Frances Conroy), he finds delight in the company of a much younger and earthier woman, Leah (Katy Selverstone...
...Margrethe is an amateur, and all abstruse concepts (quantum physics, the Uncertainty Principle, etc...
...the magic does not begin until the lights go up...
...But as Mae West observed, "It's better to be looked over than overlooked...
...David Esbjornson's direction is college caliber, especially in a lurid, ludicrous, Walpurgisnacht sequence that features crows' heads and human entrails...
...During one visit to the New York City mausoleum he runs into another Westie, Jo (also played by Shear...
...In Death of a Salesman, a character says of Willie Loman: "No one dast blame this man...
...On occasion, an Off-Broadway production is taken uptown...
...the general titter from the audience is exactly like that in a Neil Simon play: the middle class laughing mildly at a safe, middle class jape...
...Moving Bodies focuses on a different world...
...Each hopes to win a competition that will make his reputation: the design of France's first structure on the moon...
...Indeed, when Lyman protests, "Why does anyone stay together when they realize who they're with...
...The effort of all three to keep stiff upper lips is often comically painful, and sometimes excruciatingly funny...
...In Mt...
...Outside of a Brooklyn College grammar course, I doubt if "dast" was ever articulated in that borough...
...He has benefited enormously from Peter J. Davison's stark, elegant set, Charlotte Bird's period clothing, and the intense lighting design by Mark Henderson and Michael Lincoln...
...James Noone's set is accurate down to a distant view of the Alps...
...Staging the play as if it took place in a lecture room filled with onlookers, Michael Blakemore has helped create something fresh: a melodrama of ideas...
...Burkett is required to do nothing but cry every 30 seconds...
...But he would much prefer them to be bitchy rivals, as they once were, rather than a pair of attractive crutches...
...His Teutonic wife, Hilde (Mills), feels neither trepidation nor jealousy...
...As a teenager he even journeyed 3,000 miles to meet his idol...
...A famous author, Sir Hugo Latymer (Whitehead), paces nervously, unsettled because of the imminent arrival of a former lover, film actress Carlotta Gray (Ivey...
...physically she's not in the same belle park...
...In the film The Misfits, a character describes the human condition in one of the most absurd sentences ever uttered with a straight face: "We're all blind bombardiers...
...thereafter the comedy/drama depicts various episodes in their lonely lives, contrasting them with the high points of West's flamboyant career...
...Sex and science don't mix," warns the old man, stating the play's subtext...
...But not quite...
...Klara Zieglerova's elegant set and Amela Baksic's costumes also earn star billing...
...2, sharing time with both women...
...Neither has an inkling of the truth until their mutual husband totals his car and himself on a snowy night in upstate New York...
...For, as it turns out, Pericles is staying at the apartment of the bisexual zillionaire Neil Abbot (Daniel Gerroll), and when Nathalie stops by to lobby for her husband's work, the guest persuades her to stay for an adventure in the percales...
...Christopher Ashley's graceful direction attempts to give similar weight to each performer, but the imperious, hilarious Abbot is clearly the first among equals...
...The high points of this vita are true...
...During the next two hours, Richard examines the puzzles of moving bodies in particle physics—and the gyrations of the women out of reach for a poor boy pursuing a PhD at MIT...
...His parents (William Wise and Polly Adams) are proud of their son, but bewildered by his nonstop monologues about science, energy and women, triggered by a glimpse of the fan dancer Sally Rand (Julie Leedes...
...Feynman, hit the bestseller list in 1986...
...On Stage Defining Broadway Down By Stefan Kanfer Applied to the stage, "Broadway" has but one definition: A specific group of large theaters in midtown Manhattan offering big productions at high prices...
...Bosco makes Bohr a tower of dignity—with a soupçon of self-doubt that gives his character dimension and credibility...
...He knows why these enemies have met after some seven years, and whom they are talking about...
...The centennial celebration of Noël Coward's birth is well under way...
...Although there are a few lapses in Hal J. Witt's otherwise fluent translation, in general he sees to it that the twin themes of professional and sexual chicanery come through unscathed...
...A freshman class...
...Some productions are revivals in name only...
...To the dismay of his parents, Richard insists on marrying her anyway...
...As the Bohrs both indicate, he still chose to work for a genocidal regime...
...Since West's death he has made an annual pilgrimage to her final resting place...
...The real illumination, though, comes from Frayn's text and the three people who articulate it with such grace...
...He was a singer who got his throat slashed by mobsters, and then became a colorful comedian to survive in show business...
...dramas centering on Nietzsche, James Baldwin and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy...
...It is my reason to run up the aisle and get to OffBroadway, where American playwrights are produced because of what they have written, not because of their overblown reputations...
...Dirty Blonde was a big show for a small theater...
...Scott Cunningham), once a schoolmate of Phillipe and still attracted to him...
...During an average week this spring too, the little venues scattered around the city presented audiences with a cornucopia...
...Richard Feynman (1918-1988) was famous among physicists yet practically unknown otherwise until his biography, Surely You're Joking, Mr...
...After that she vanished into profitable self-parody on stage and screen...
...According to Moving Bodies, Richard retreats to virtually monkish isolation, teaching at Cal Tech and appearing before the general public only twice—when he becomes a Nobel Laureate in 1965, and when he testifies in 1986 at an inquiry into the Challenger disaster that exposed NASA's slipshod processes...
...and a musical comedy about raising money to put on a musical comedy...
...Hilgay is topic A because he's afflicted by melanoma and has been given nine months to live...
...Yet Cumpsty presents the German's case with a passion that cannot be dismissed...
...These are punctuated by a series of flashbacks, fever dreams, and palaver with his daughter Bessie (Shannon Burkett), his upright lawyer (John C. Vennema) and various hospital staffers and fantasy figures...
...En route, she discovered Cary Grant ("If he talks," West proclaimed at an audition, "I want him...
...AS A COUNTERWEIGHT to this achievement, Broadway is also presenting The Ride Down Mt...
...There is little that Selverstone can accomplish with a part that is 50 per cent bimbo and 50 per cent rage...
...He has carried on an affair with one of the jurors, Louise Erkanter (Pamela PaytonWright), whose resemblance to the black widow spider is more than superficial...
...The young couple journeys to Nevada after he is recruited by a tyrannical Robert Oppenheimer (Robert Boardman) to work at Los Alamos...
...Perhaps, but, as Heisenberg points out, Bohr then went to the U. S., j oining the team of physicists responsible for the A-bomb that killed thousands of unarmed civilians...
...Pericles is the grain of sand in the machinery, unsettling the crafty Lebret and discomfiting the married Phillipe—as well as his wife, Nathalie (Kathryn Meisle...
...Moreover, playwright Shear is not above some alteration of fact: Joe Frisco, for instance, was not the nebbish depicted here...
...The third party is an inspired coup de théâtre...
...Phillipe Derrien (Stephen Caffrey) radiates pessimism...
...The 60-year-old half-Jewish Bohr (Philip Bosco) was a citizen of German-occupied Denmark...
...Under John Tillinger's direction the company proves as crisp and witty as Sir Noël...
...Frank Sinatra impersonated Frisco in the 1956 movie, The Joker Is Wild, and there was not a subdued moment from credits to fadeout...
...The New York Theater Workshop on East Fourth Street has an unprepossessing façade...
...and David Loveless' costumes further enliven the proceedings...
...On Broadway, the lightheaded Waiting in the Wings continues a long run...
...She has kept Sir Hugo's love letters, and now wants to publish them in her autobiography...
...We first meet Richard (Chris Ceraso) when he visits the Chicago World's Fair en famille in 1933...
...Essentially, Dirty Blonde is a tripartite biography of two dependent losers...
...Her penultimate feature was her worst: the 1967 version of Gore VidaPs odious Myra Breckenridge...
...Morgan the playwright surpasses himself...
...What begins in cool politesse soon rises to a fierce moral debate: Is the Dane more righteous because he was persecuted, barely escaping from Europe with his life...
...The two plays that compose Suite take place in the same Swiss hotel, in...
...The fortyish Heisenberg (Michael Cumpsty) was a professor at Leipzig, then working on harnessing atomic energy for the Third Reich...
...Off-Broadway, at the Lucille Lortel Theater in Greenwich Village, Suite in 2 Keys shows a darker, long-hidden side of Sir Noel...
...The opposite could be true at the Helen Hayes...
...Using double entendre as her trademark, West pushed the envelope in vaudeville until it ripped, then moved on to Hollywood...
...Shortly before the Japanese surrender, she dies...
...But if you only went by the information it imparts, you would never know Feynman did not live alone with his thoughts...
...Or will he adopt the policy of "Publish and be damned...
...The aging writer is not really a surrogate for the playwright...
...Moving Bodies is best when it concentrates on how a misfit became a master...
...Oddly enough, nuclear physics is the concern of another work, Copenhagen, one of this season's few distinguished straight plays on Broadway...
...1, he acquires wife No...
...Backing up the pair is Robert Stillman, a virtuoso who plays West's first husband, her personal assistant, and an aging admirer, comedian Joe Frisco...
...To my mind Heisenberg cannot be absolved: The brilliant physicist could easily have gotten tenure at a dozen British or American universities, but he wanted to stay in the Fatherland...
...In the '30s she made risqué comedies (She Done Him Wrong, I'm No Angel) that helped put Paramount in the black...
...They find each other through their worship of a cult figure who never needed anybody but herself...
...Upon his refusal, she reveals her trump card: She also possesses the writer's love letters to his former secretary—his male secretary...
...In 1942, an unexplained meeting took place between two physicists, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg...
...Lady Latymer is so cool, in fact, that she departs to let Hugo and Carlotta meet alone...
...Their 50-odd productions included a hip-hop version of Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors...
...Then, on a fairsized stage, two tall and imposing doors tell us we are in the vicinity of a major official...
...It can mean a single performer on a bare stage on the Lower East Side, or a cast of 25 working in an elaborate setting on West 42nd Street...
...The adventurous ticket buyer could also see a little-publicized English version of Jean-Marie Besset's enigmatic farce, What You Get and What You Expect...
...From there it is downhill in every sense...
...Nevertheless, it is the playwright's sole acknowledgment of the gay life, and it remains both a curio and a theater piece filled with typically astringent dialogue...
...The central character, Lyman (Patrick Stewart), recalls the unhappiness of his first marriage: "Boredom had become my Nazi...
...He falls instantly in love, although Arline is fatally ill...
...These questions inform the one-acter with an atypical grimness and suspense...
...Still, director James Lapine moves his trio con brio, mixing sentiment and comedy so adroitly that a lack of substance is only rarely discernible...
...Euripedes' Medea...
...This one truly resurrects a playwright and a period...
...Carlotta sweeps in with more than nostalgia on her mind...
...What follows is their explosions, and Lyman's frantic attemptsto rationalize hisbehavior...
...She can do a passable imitation of West's comehither voice...
...At the Royale Theater Michael Frayn (better known for farces like Noises Off) addresses the question by imagining the two after death...
...Sir Hugo, it develops, has been in the closet all these years, aided by women "beards" who kept the world from knowing his secret...
...Only Conroy carries off her role with distinction...
...Actually, he had a successful second marriage, became the father of a son and daughter, practiced the art of teaching and, according to his own words, spent countless delightful evenings sitting in with bands at West Coast nightclubs...
...Miller once stated that he wrote this work in reaction to the selfishness of the Reagan years, but it seems hard to imagine a Reaganite bothered by anything except the decibel level of this noisy, toothless evening...
...It told the story of Feynman's humble beginnings in Queens, New York, his ability to solve abstruse mathematical problems as a child, his winning of the Nobel Prize for Particle Physics, his early tragic marriage, and his lifelong fascination with such nonacademic pursuits as lock picking and playing bongo drums...
...Lyman is a failed poet turned affluent insurance executive...
...Without divorcing wife No...
...Morgan at the Ambassador Theater...
...Sir Hugo's German wife is more reminiscent of Max Beerbohm's, and the cloaked homosexuality is truer of Somerset Maugham than of Coward, who never married and dared to write such flaunting songs as "Mad About the Boy...
...Brown is, as always, a generous performer and proves an ideal foil for both men...
...The second one-acter, A Song at Twilight, is similarly a pencil sketch rather than a full-length portrait...
...Congreve's The Way of the World...
...Her attempt to talk dirty when Lyman challenges her is almost worth the price of admission...
...Playwright Arthur Giron attempts to solve this problem by excising whole sections of Feynman's life, and adding a series of dream sequences...
...It can signify a converted warehouse with hard benches, or a spacious and comfortable auditorium...
...She uses it in the three-person play, wisely ceding her supporting actors some of the best moments...
...Through the decades West could be amusingly vulgar, but she was never as poignant as Dirty Blonde would have us believe...
...In limbo, they discuss past motives in the company of Bohr's wife, Margrethe (Blair Brown...
...In the central role Patrick Stewart is valiant but miscast as a lifelong seducer...
...Why, at this juncture in World War II, did the German pay a call on his old colleague...
...Shaw's Arms and the Man...
...These biographical details are sufficient for a dozen dramas, but too unwieldy for a single one...
...Arthur Miller is responsible for some of the most powerful moments in modern American drama, but when he attempts to be poetic he is in a class by himself...
...Will he trade his heterosexual love letters for his homosexual ones...
...To assure that he will win, Lebret has gone the extra mile...
...Charlie and the actress wannabe hit it off...
...While straight, he nourishes a secret urge to cross-dress as Mae West...
...Shear's strength is her brash humor...
...are clarified for her benefit—and for the audience...
...The women have declared a truce to help him face the ordeal...
...Outside of that unseen gentleman's office two young architects await an audience...
...Charlie (Kevin Chamberlin) is a puffy, pathetic film librarian...
...Boredom is not my Nazi...
...Into this unstable mix comes another juror, Pericles Feyder (T...
...Although Giron's play is light on coherence and heavy on fantasy, individual scenes have an irresistible force, accented by Ceraso's incendiary performance...
...As the play begins, the two spouses are called to Lyman's hospital bedside and apprised of the situation...
...In contrast, the term "Off-Broadway" is elastic...
...Shadows of the Evening, a prominent publisher, George Hilgay (Paxton Whitehead), returns home to find his ex-wife, Anne (Hayley Mills), and current mistress, Linda (Judith Ivey), in rapt discussion...
...Playwright Claudia Shear, who took the title role, is an accomplished comedienne but not a wide-ranging actress...
...Yet it is as close as Coward ever came to a true discussion of his predilections...
Vol. 83 • May 2000 • No. 2
