On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage Sound and Unsound Judgments By Stefan Kanfer WHEN THE FILM Judgment at Nuremberg opened in 1961,14 years had passed since the highly publicized trial of Nazi war criminals. By...
...A) They will raise $2 million from rich old ladies anxious to back a Broadway show...
...locales such as Kosovo and Rwanda have displaced Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz in the collective consciousness...
...Grizzard gives one of the canniest performances on Broadway this season, investing the back-country magistrate with a warmth and candorreminiscent of Harry Truman...
...Young Self: "Any novelists since Balzac...
...Better a fallen rocket," he declares pointedly, "than never a burst of light...
...Tom Stoppard's career offers a prime example of winning through intimidation...
...The answer: The day the real producers decided to open their Producers in April, 2001, after a lackluster Broadway season full of creaky revivals and tepid British imports...
...At this, silence is the only answer...
...So it is not surprising to find Brooks, now in his 75th year, nostalgic for the film he made more than three decades ago—which is still a popular rental item...
...Director John Tillinger moves his large cast with more grace than Kramer ever had, aided by Jess Goldstein's period costumes and James Noone's stark set, illuminated by photographs of victims and persecutors...
...As the goose-stepping sour Kraut Franz Liebkind, for example, Brad Oscar's movements are so exaggerated that he would fail to offend either Jean-Marie Le Pen or the ADL...
...What followed was a series of genre satires, parasitical films dependent on the strength of their host...
...In a faultless 19-member ensemble, Easton and Leonard are first among equals...
...After a lengthy dispute the pair settle on a script, Springtime for Hitler, written by a lunatic and talent-free neo-Nazi...
...Those that are only uncommon men are perverts and sowers of pestilence...
...Schell, who was Oscar Rolfe in the film version, here takes the role played by Burt Lancaster and runs away with it...
...Despite outlandishrave notices, obscenely high prices for seats (predominantly $ 100 per ticket), and absurdly long lines of ticket-buyers (the show is already sold out until fall), this production is not the My Fair Lady de nos jours...
...Not until Act Two does Haywood begin to break through the excuses and rationales...
...There are other reasons to attend the musical at the St...
...Housman can find no comfort in the diatribes of Jowett, who warns all Oxford that "The canker that brought low the glory that was Greece shall not prevail over Balliol...
...For the most part, though, the anatomy of evil and the parsing of responsibility remains as gripping as it was four decades ago—and better performed without the marquee names that got in the way of the story...
...And so it was—back in the early 1920s when Max Beerbohm drew a series of satirical literary caricatures...
...In it, a group of superannuated females stumble about in their aluminum walkers...
...It shuttles between the terminals of A(lfred) E(dward) Housman's career—his time as a bewildered and poetic Oxford undergraduate, and his old age as a firmly entrenched classics scholar...
...I return them...
...In fact, a hoop, a trochos, was a favorite gift given by a Greek man to a boy he, you know, to his favorite boy...
...Perhaps if it were limped by real little old ladies the scene might be edgy...
...to disobey them would have been to sign their own death warrants...
...Bob Crowley's sets and costumes do much to sustain the illusion of vanished Victoriana, as does Brian MacDevitt's otherworldly lighting...
...Though the truth about Nazi Germany is hard to come by in the courtroom, it is even more difficultto discern when Haywoodleaves his chambers...
...D) It will bomb...
...Even more stilted are expository lines that Hollywood scenarists referto as the "There-goes-that-troublemaker-Trotsky" speech: "Wilde is reckoned the wittiest man at Oxford...
...Much has been made of "Little Old Lady Land," a song-and-dance number at the end of Act One...
...It is only the second coming of Mel Brooks' fondly remembered 1968 movie...
...In fact, it was Brooks' last truly original work...
...Using the past-and-present encounter as his framework, Stoppard organizes a parade of 19th-century literary and academic celebrities...
...Young Self: "And have there been any painters since Manet...
...Each is an instance of Chesterton's insight that "The Victorians were lame giants...
...For it is then that Janning finally opens his mouth, loudly protesting that the entire trial is a farce...
...To a Roman, to call something Greek meant —very often—sissylike, or effeminate...
...Foxworth and Hayden strike the appropriate sparks...
...Occasionally the script betrays its cinematic origins...
...Frank Harris (Rayner, doubling), the mendacious and grandly heterosexual editor...
...having a character move front and center to deliver a speech is no substitute for a camera closeup...
...Yet even these deft professionals cannot long sustain another illusion—that Tom Stoppard has created anything more than a disquisition posing as a play...
...Despite its lofty title, Invention is rather short on invention in the writing, which never rises to the dramatic or the diverting...
...Among the Oxford notables to appear onstage: Moses John Jackson (David Harbour), a heterosexual athlete for whom Housman nursed a lifelong crush...
...Old Self: "None...
...But between these mots are tedious, preening exchanges that do nothing but remind us that Stoppard has spent a lot of time in the library...
...Young Self: "Have there been any composers since Wagner...
...Visually, Director Jack O'Brien has caught the spirit of the age by recalling the tempo and lunacies of Alice in Wonderland, written by that eminent Oxford don and Housman contemporary, Lewis Carroll...
...These, along with the spirited company, add as much to the mix as Mel Brooks' own contributions...
...My favorite is Max's portrait of the conceited novelist George Moore...
...Although most of the features were commercial successes, they became increasingly juvenile...
...The major demons— Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess, Julius Streicher, Albert Speer, etc.—have already been sentenced to death or to long prison terms...
...Walter Pater (Martin Ray ner), the pallid don who urged others to burn with "a hard, gemlike flame...
...When catastrophe hits in Act II, Bialystock sings, "Where did we go right...
...So once again it is time to recall the 1930s and '40s, when Nazi Germany redefined inhumanity and paved the way for the barbaric behavior of other nations inEurope, Africa and Asia...
...But somehow the great Victorian man was more and less than this...
...The same could be said about the word "television," but never mind...
...For the flip SIDE of the Third Reich, see The Producers...
...Before the War he was recognized as an eminent jurist not only in Germany but throughout Europe and America...
...To further insure failure, a spectacularly untalented drag queen is hired to direct and cast the show...
...Who are the Allies to sit in judgment, and why should he be labeled complicit in a regime he never made...
...Once again he insisted on directing, in effect, with capital letters: THIRD REICH AMORAL, ALLIES DETERMINED, COURT PROCEEDINGS MOMENTOUS...
...E) They will write off seven figures of unused cash, pocket the loot and scram to Rio...
...Old Self: "One...
...Those rhymes never escape the obvious: "The best champagnes would fill my glass/ My lap was filled with gorgeous ass...
...and old pro Joseph Wiseman and newcomer Michael Mastro are outstanding as bedeviled witnesses for the prosecution...
...Stoppard posits two very debatable theories...
...For The Producers is being hyped as a musical comedy to offend everyone, a resolutely non-PC show out to thumb its nose at all groups, regardless of age, race, creed, or gender...
...In them the Old Self confronts the Young Self...
...All other roles are subordinate to a bigger con game than the one hatched by Max and Leopold...
...But from step one it is apparent that the palsied figures are twentysomething chorus girls (and boys) in geriatric dress, assuring us that the whole thing is harmless make-believe...
...If the trials had become distant back in 1961, today they seem as remote as the Pleistocene Epoch...
...The office blonde Ulla (Cady Huffman) is so limber and statuesque she gives an odd dignity to what was meant to be a caricature Swedish bimbo...
...meet in what seems a daring innovation...
...These give an indication of the humor to come (The Breaking Wind, The Kidney Stone and its sequel, This Too Shall Pass...
...Keller, the German who cannot confront the truth, is roughly 10 times more skillful and memorable than Dietrich was in the same role...
...Next stop: jail...
...Together the pair hatch an ingenious five-part scheme...
...The modest, plain-speaking Haywood is to hear the arguments of the prosecutor, Colonel Parker (Robert Foxworth), and the defense attorney, Oscar Rolfe (Michael Hayden), as they dissect the lives and crimes of several German judges in the dock...
...We're always living in someone's Golden Age...
...Love will not be deflected from its mischief by being called comradeship...
...But the producers are undone by their own connivances...
...Other crimes against humanity have obscured the past...
...he hugs a security blanket and bleats his songs on key and off center...
...Benjamin Jowett (Byron Jennings), the celibate Master of Balliol College...
...His rooms in Magdalen are said to be completely bare except for a lily in a blue vase...
...Onstage at the Longacre Theater we are transported back to 1947, the year the last of the Nazi War criminals were being brought to justice...
...Rarely do those awed seat holders dare to state that the emperor, while not exactly nude, wears a secondhand wardrobe...
...Enter Judge Haywood (George Grizzard), a North Carolina appointee who knows damn well that greater men have turned down the job he is about to assume...
...It has never gone out of print...
...The two selves (Robert Sean Leonard as the youthful Alfred and Richard Easton as the senior A.E...
...B) They will find the worst possible script, director and cast...
...The passion for truth is the faintest of all human passions...
...Happily, that is not true of the play's casting or direction...
...C) The show will cost only a few hundred thousand to mount...
...He was at once a giant and a dwarf...
...These extraordinarily gifted and foolish men are recalled by the ghost of Housman, as the boatman Charon (Jeff Weiss) poles him across the river Styx...
...Now the court has to consider the lesser malefactors of the Third Reich: judges, middle managers, factotums...
...The aristocratic Mme...
...As these men pass in review on the Lyceum Theater stage, they reveal the contradictions of Oxford's greatest underachiever...
...But this is too violent a position for the recessive Housman, who recoils not only from open homosexual practice but from the word itself: "It's half Greek and half Latin...
...Matthew Broderick's Bloom is tamer than Wilder's...
...James theater—energetic actors, glamorous chorines, snappy arrangements and fast-paced comedy...
...By then the phrase "crimes against humanity" had begun to lose its force...
...But it is nothing of the kind...
...A part-time poet, he was so modest that he ignored his royalty statements: "The Americans send me cheques...
...As soon as an insult is hurled, Brooks' dialogue rushes in to wink at the audience, implying that he has just been kidding...
...In the musical, Nathan Lane takes the part of Bialystock, plotting in an office festooned with posters of bygone bombs...
...En route to his final destination, the elderly scholar speaks with the green lower-classman, summoning up the influences of his early years...
...Second, that Housman's unrequited love for Jackson drew him inward, but also gave him the impetus to make a lifelong examination of the ancient Greeks for whom homoeroticism was a part of everyday life...
...Sid Caesar's former gagwriter received an Oscar for his scenario, and many mistook that Academy Award for the arrival of a fresh Hollywood talent...
...It stars Zero Mostel as Max Bialystock, a crooked producer, and Gene Wilder as Leopold Bloom, an ambitious accountant with larceny in his heart...
...He not only wrote the unidimensional book, with the help of Thomas Meehan, he is totally responsible for the music and lyrics...
...Where Mostel portrayed the con man as grotesque, Lane plays him as cute: mugging in the frantic, funny but unsubtle style of Lou Costello...
...Even Adolf, Liebkind's favorite pigeon, gives the Hitler salute with one wing...
...The SRO signs go up, the Feds move in, and Bialystock and Bloom are stopped cold in their tracks...
...The Invention of Love, Stoppard's latestplay, is typical...
...the strongest of them walked on one leg a little shorter than the other...
...Should he have abandoned it because some political lout had taken it in the wrong direction...
...and the indispensable Oscar Wilde (Daniel Davis), Oxford's most flamboyant undergraduate...
...Roger's "common-law assistant," Carmen Ghia (Roger Bart) is, if possible, swishier...
...John Ruskin (Paul Hecht), the suppressed, cuckolded imperialist...
...Bertholt (Marthe Keller) collars him, outraged that her husband was hanged by the Allies, rather than being allowed an officer's death by firing squad...
...Besides, she argues, the Bertholts, like most Germans, knew nothing about atrocities, death camps, medical experiments...
...I remember it well, not only for its excellent performances but for Kramer's heavy hand...
...With his white hair and horn-rimmed glasses...
...As the prosecution presses for a guilty verdict, the defense takes a now familiar line: These men were merely following orders...
...He winked at Westerns (Blazing Saddles), horror movies (Young Frankenstein), sci-fi (Spaceballs), Alfred Hitchcock (High Anxiety), etc...
...A. E. Housman failed his final examinations at that university, yet went on to become a highly regarded expert in Greek literature...
...Then, roused by Max' romancing, they begin to clatter in rhythm...
...In the valley of the bland, the one-eyed Mel is King...
...Chief among them is the disdainful Ernst Janning (Maximilian Schell), who objects strongly to the proceedings—so strongly that he remains silent through Act One, refusing to testify in his own behalf...
...Because no publicity will attend these proceedings, not a single first-rank American jurist is willing to volunteer for service...
...fare for 14-year-old mall rats big on toilet humor and gross-out slapstick...
...Old Self: "None...
...Brimming with superstars—Burt Lancaster, Spencer Tracy, Montgomery Clift, Judy Garland, Marlene Dietrich, Maximilian Schell—the movie became a box office hit and won the Academy Award for Best Picture...
...Other less exalted herrenvolk also try to convince Haywood that there was another, better Germany, that to think of their country as an outpost of Hell is to ignore the mass of innocent citizens trapped by the Fiihrer's terror apparatus...
...He chose to stay in Germany to help the country restore its sense of worth after the humiliating defeat and reparations of World War I. He had no admiration for Hitler...
...If the music is hummable, it is because you have heard every note before, by other composers—although they didn't have the benefit of Glen Kelly's canny arrangements...
...Yet after more famous contemporaries were forgotten, Housman's little book of verse, A Shropshire Lad, continued to sell...
...That the trials can be suspenseful and relevant is a great tribute to the players who make the evening come alive...
...Similarly, as the gay director Roger De Bris, Gary Beach is tricked out in a spangled dress, lisping and swirling in a manner Oscar Wilde would find harmlessly over the top...
...Nevertheless the Fatherland was, and is, the Fatherland...
...Springtime is so ghastly it becomes an overnight camp classic...
...However, Susan Stroman has directed with razzie and choreographed with dazzle, abetted by Robin Wagner's admirably retro scenery and William Ivey Long's flagrantly comic costumes...
...Haywood answers him with the inarguable line: "You were guilty the first time you sentenced a man you knew was innocent...
...In other hands The Producers might well have been a mildly diverting, instantly forgettable project...
...Some of the exchanges between Oxonians are witty...
...All the same, caveat emptor...
...Scenarist Abby Mann and Producer-Director Stanley Kramer thought it was high time to give the world a refresher course in history...
...Is he to be condemned for staying on, for showing that not all judges in the Third Reich were goose-stepping boors...
...First, that the notion of romantic affection was invented by Propertius, who wrote the earliest important love elegies...
...From Rosencranz and Guildenstern Are Dead through Jumpers, Travesties, Arcadia and beyond, borrowing techniques, dropping names and playing abstruse word games, the British playwright has shot over the heads of his critical and popular audiences...
...Wilde, on the other hand, believes that the more outrageous a man's dress, conversation and behavior, the greater chance he has at entering the pantheon of art...
Vol. 84 • May 2001 • No. 3
