On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage Politics and Parody By Stefan Kanfer Last year a modest little tragicomedy opened in London's West End. Its scenery was composed of two items: a large blow-up of film...
...The notion of a play withpolitical content is usually enough to make producers approach the property with an 11 foot pole...
...Now that 42nd street has been cleaned up, the show remarks, sex has been brought onto the Broadway stage in such productions as The Rocky Horror Show...
...It was utter flapdoodle, and clearly the basis of Jones' derisive view of commerce, art and life...
...This season Alessandrini's ambitions did not stop with the parodies and pastiches that made his name...
...Throughout his life—and he lived to the age of 102—he refused to allow anyone to reproduce his lyrics or music without the payment of high royalties...
...Caroline likes to "go ethnic" when she's on location, and as she works her wiles on Jake she keeps a tape recorder running to capture his intonations...
...It will no doubt make an interesting film, perhaps even a good one...
...There is a brief revolt...
...That was probably Alessandrini's greatest mistake...
...Over the course of two hours Hill and Campion impersonate some 15 characters, ranging from a dour priest to a supercilious female production assistant to a drug-addicted teenager to a beautiful American movie actress to the last surviving Irish extra from John Ford's 1952 movie, The Quiet Man...
...Jake Quinn (Campion) is a tight-lipped roustabout who lives with his Mum and has no visible means of support...
...As they go through their routines as extras, smiling here, trudging there, shuffling here, shoveling there, they encounter the various people who make up the townsfolk and the invading company...
...This interaction was overseen by Irving Berlin (Jono Mainelli), who commented from the sidelines—and, incidentally, played a mean piano accompaniment...
...Alessandrini hardly had to change a word of "Be Careful, It's My Heart," when Brainy suffered yet another cardiological incident...
...For one thing, Charley has confected his own screenplay and he keeps trying to present it to the director or one of the actors...
...Extras are expressly forbidden to attend the funeral...
...Former President Will Fenton (Michael West) and his wife Chillary (Whitney Allen) are replaced by George Shrub Jr...
...Charley and Jake do manage to attend services at the local church, decorated with flowers from the film company (but only because the blossoms, intended for the final scene, turn out to be useless: The star is allergic to them...
...Nevertheless, it was worth a try, and Alessandrini is too canny an observer to walk away from the reconstruction of other forgotten shows...
...The very idea of revising a Berlin number was revolutionary...
...The protagonists are two £40-a-day extras, hired for the duration of the film and delighted to get the work...
...What began as a promising savagery ended as tame commentary, and abbreviated the run of Mr...
...The cast consisted of two obscure Irish players...
...The playwright, a sometime actress, was a bit better known but hardly a household name...
...The suicide devastates the Irish, but to the Americans (director, cast, assistants, all of course played by Campion and Hill) Sean's death is merely a pebble in the shoe...
...She went off and the store went bust...
...BACK in 1982 a young composer/lyricist decided to lampoon big-league musicals in a show he called Forbidden Broadway...
...He also attempted something unique in show business history—a rewrite and redirection of Irving Berlin's songs in a separate show intended to alternate with Forbidden Broadway every other night...
...Charley ConIon (Hill) is a motormoufh who once ran a video store and had a girlfriend...
...He had Berlin quote a song from the original show, slightly doctored, demonstrating that the evening was all in fun: Politics can be quite unnen'ing With dangling chads and overactive glands, As Hany Truman once told me, "living, Both parties pass the buck to guilty hands.' But in spite ofthat the nation understands: This is a great country Let's shout it clear and loud Take a lookIn your history book A ndyou 11 see why we should be proud...
...The sendup does something more: It comments on midtown Manhattan itself...
...And no one could alter a word or a note...
...And director Ian McElhinney keeps Campion and Hill so busy with lightning changes of posture and tone that the subtext is sometimes obscured...
...Some parodies were obvious...
...Berlin died in 1989 and, as it developed, his heirs and assigns were big fans of Forbidden Broadway...
...Before long the Douglas Fairbanks will undoubtedly reverberate with his new presentations...
...Recovering, they hatch an idea: What if they were to collaborate on a screenplay...
...Others were more inventive...
...These individuals spring to life when a U.S...
...So the version "conceived, rewritten and politically corrected" by Alessandrini was less a deconstruction of a classic than a modest revamp of a Broadway bomb...
...The Journal-American called it "'quite simply an old-fashioned dud...
...They have a film to finish, and the days grow short...
...Meantime there are the delights of Forbidden Broadway 2001...
...Whether Campion or Hill will be in it has not been announced...
...These guys are Conleth Hill and Seán Campion, and the play is Stones In His Pockets, recently imported to the Golden Theater on Broadway...
...Everybody is talking about them...
...She has written for Charabanc, the feminist theater collective, and founded Ireland's DubBelJoint Theater, a group that played every possible venue in the North and South of her country (the name is a melding of Dublin and Belfast, to force the two cities to recognize each other...
...The Odyssey continues, as strong—or stronger—than the stuff it sends up with such enthusiasm and élan...
...This time out Forbidden Broadway, 2001, A Spoof Odyssey takes on all the expected targets: Music Man, The Full Monty, The Phantom of the Opera, Annie Get Your Gun, Beauty and the Beast, and most memorably, the Lion King, chanted in animal furs: African baloney But we won a lotta Tony The song is so bizarrey It's Hamlet on safari...
...G Mick (Campion), a bent arthritic figure, burbles on about working with John Wayne, whom he refused to call "Duke" the way everybody else did, addressing him as Mr...
...Just keep your head down and go where they put you...
...President...
...Another irony: In 1992 Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman made a bomb of a film, now happily forgotten— except by me...
...Harmless though he may be, she has her thicknecked bodyguard (Hill) toss the lad out on his ear...
...President, they granted it...
...company invades rural Eire to make an absurdly plotted 19th-century blockbuster about Maeve, an aristocratic colleen, who falls in love with Rory, a peasant from the back country...
...The New York Times asked, "Has there ever been as dull a President as the man occupying the White House in Mr...
...Then it is right back to business...
...The heavy-breathing actress is out to seduce him—not because of his body but because of his accent...
...Berlin was like that to everyone...
...When Alessandrini asked permission to play around with Irving Berlin's' work—particularly his numbers for the 1962 musical, Mr...
...Hardly any of them will deign to read, much less mount, a production concerned with cultural imperialism and political exploitation...
...Having finished on schedule the filmmakers promptly move off, leaving things considerably worse than when they started...
...The program for Stones lists only the duo, but this is a deception...
...Hats off to America, The home of the free and the brave...
...All this is delivered in high style and tongue-in-cheekiness by the skilled quartet of Carter Calvert, Robert Gallagher, Joel Carlton and Kristine Zbornik...
...Its scenery was composed of two items: a large blow-up of film stock showing the Irish countryside, and a row of men's and women's shoes and boots...
...What theater can do is take the topical and make it classical, biting where TV shows tend to gum...
...Now it is not London that is talking about them, but tout New York...
...And the standard Berlin theme practically wrote itself: God help A merica Land that I love Stand beside her And guide her Through the night With a lightfrom above Through elections And defections And the speeches white with foam...
...For another, Jake is a strapping fellow who has caught the eye of the film's glamorous lodestar, Caroline Giovanni (Hill...
...Moreover, Disney has turned its animated cats, monkeys and fairy tale-monsters and heroines into three-dimensional creatures and moved them from Hollywood to New York...
...Kevin Spacey spoke for his colleagues when he arrived in town and told reporters, "I've got to see these guys...
...To the tune of "Only for Americans," the GOP members sang: They're only for Republicans: The famlly van that guzzles gas Can'r transport any underclass Those SUVees Are built to please Republicans from the USA We ?? never let in wacko groups Unless they back tobacco groups But we enlist each lobbyist Republican from the U.S.A...
...He has taken a step up, though, removing his rag-tag show from a night club to the small yet elegant Douglas Fairbanks Theater Off-Broadway...
...Wayne in order to "give the man his due...
...Then there is the problem of Jake's cousin Sean (Campion), the starstruck druggie who tries desperately to give himself some significance by striking up conversations with various performers...
...The ultimate irony is that Stones In His Pockets has been bought by a Hollywood producer...
...It proves too much for Sean to bear...
...Probably not...
...He has just returned from a lengthy stay in Manhattan, where he hadanumberoftemporaryjobs, got nowhere and, he says, suffered acute homesickness...
...In consequence, all the examples illustrating specific musical analyses have had to be deleted from the text...
...Clif Thorn) and his wife Flora (Amanda Naughton...
...He makes the mistake one evening of accosting Caroline at a pub...
...There is some suggestion, however, that Jake may have had a few dustups with the law before buying a oneway ticket home...
...All summer long the television night was filled with political comedy, from Politically Incorrect to the late, lamented That's My Bush—to say nothing of the monologues delivered five times a week by Jay Leno and David Letterman...
...Much back-and-forthing occurs, with many references to stolen elections, augmented with appearances by Coalhouse Power (read Colin Powell, played by Eric Jordan Young), the new Vice President Dick Brainy and George's mother Barbara Shrub (both played by Stuart Zagnit...
...Mick dispenses free advice about how to survive as an extra till the end of the filming: "Don't start gettin' yourself noticed...
...There were no exceptions...
...This sage counsel is regularly ignored by Charley and Jake...
...Each can sing, dance, tell jokes, and imitate celebrities with the ease of someone spilling change from his (or her) pockets...
...Berlin has not granted the author permission to use any musical excerpts from his songs...
...Six months later a procession of Hollywood's biggest stars went backstage to pay homage to the actors...
...That show was one of the great songwriter's few failures...
...What if they were to write about the effect of an American film company on a small town in rural Ireland...
...Entitled Far and Away, it concerned an Irish tenant farmer (Cruise) and the beautiful daughter of a wealthy landowner (Kidman...
...The whole town watches this public humiliation...
...Some 30 years ago songwriter Alec Wilderwrote abook enritled American Popular Song, still the shrewdest analyses of Tin Pan Alley's greatest composers...
...Irving Berlin headed his list, and yet Wilder had to regretfully tell his readers: "Mr...
...This was not a personal snub of Wilder...
...First came Tom Hanks, thenDustin Hoffman, Calista Flockhart, Tracey Ullman, Roger Moore, Mel Brooks, and Anne Bancroft...
...Unfortunately, the 15 principals are certain to be played by 15 different actors, and the whole idea of tour-de-force will vanish like the film company after the shooting is over...
...Almost two decades later, Gerard Alessandrini is still working the same side of the street, kidding the tights off whatever productions decorate or desecrate the Rialto...
...I see Robert De Niro as the director, and how about Julia Roberts as Caroline...
...If this flag waving, flag waving Do you know of a better flag to wave...
...The seducee comes to realize how he is being used but, afraid to go against a big movie star, takes his hostility out on Charley, maligning the man's scenario and ridiculing his ambition...
...Granted, Jones has soft-pedaled her message in Stones In His Pockets, filling the evening with witty and poignant banter...
...After savaging both Clintons, two generations of Bushes, plus Dick Cheney and Colin Powell, Alessandrini went for a happy ending...
...Yet Jones' work is filled with such themes...
...But not if you have an eye for scorn and an ear for nuance...
...The plot was as elemental as Bradley Kaye's set design and as loony as Al vin Colt's outrageous costumes...
...The extras resume their work, pretending to plow the fields ("Look dispossessed," orders the director) and subsequently to be joyous as Maeve and Rory fall into each other's arms, granting the peasants title to their estate...
...The last thing a New York audience wants to hear is "just kidding" when such large objects as the Presidents, their families and advisers have been used for target practice...
...an hour of wasted daylight could mean millions of dollars down the drain...
...Among the many ironies of this brilliant production is the embrace that Broadway's smart money is giving to the newest work of playwright Marie Jones...
...President...
...That night he fills his pockets with heavy stones, wades into the sea and drowns—hence the title...
...Charley and Jake are at a momentary loss, dazed by what has happened...
...An equal opportunity satirist, Alessandrini then had the Dems respond: The chairmanship or Federal post Is for the man who gives the most And only for New Democrats The human rights the Chinese bash Can be ignored for Chinese cash We're born to rule 'Cause we're so cool The Democrats run the U.S.A...
Vol. 84 • September 2001 • No. 5
