On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage Antiques Roadshow By Stefan Kanfer As the season winds down, Broadway has come to resemble the PBS program Antiques Roadshow, with its wild mix of baubles, treasures and fakes...
...For the prurient out-of-towners, this may be the only legal nudity they can find near their hotels...
...But 42nd Street has been cleaned up...
...IV leave you never Love you forever All our past sorrow redeeming...
...How was it...
...and the rest are supplied by Scanlan and composer Jeanine Tesori...
...Paddy Cunneen's new incidental music sustains the devil-may-care mood, but cannot compete with Coward's original creations...
...The musical derives from a film of the same name released in 1967...
...In point of fact they are equally pitiless and sybaritic...
...Their lovemaking soon descends to jealousy, recriminations and a drunken brawl...
...There is nothing else worth watching in this misbegotten production...
...Millie has come to New York for three express purposes: to wear bobbed hair and flapper clothes, to visit a speakeasy and, most significantly, to marry a rich man...
...The theatrical Benjamin (Jason Biggs) is a stick figure whose miseries amount to self-indulgent twaddle...
...Still, there is something more to this relationship than mere hostility...
...After a few telling exchanges Elyot realizes that he is not really attracted to his naive new bride Sibyl (Emma Fielding...
...As Elyot, Rickman can go from sweet talk to surliness in the drop of a diphthong...
...The theatrical version (Kathleen Turner) is a road company Tallulah Bankhead, posing and croaking from bedroom to living room and back again...
...After all, as Proust observed, people don't part on the best of terms, because if they were on the best of terms they wouldn't part...
...Some songs go backte Sir Arthur Sullivan (with new words supplied by Dick Scanlan...
...Unsurprisingly, when she and her mother have a post-booze scene toward the close of Act One, it provides acting students with a demonstration of how not to play a confrontation...
...Laura Linney is luminous as Elizabeth Proctor, John's grieving wife...
...In the treasure category, I can testify to the lasting value of Private Lives...
...The theatrical producers play the part of the hopeful visitors...
...Reason had nothing to do with the stage version, however: like Benjamin's parents (Murphy Guyer and Kate Skinner), it was all about money...
...There are many such instructive moments at the Plymouth Theater...
...Rob Howell's inventive sets and Hugh Vanstone's bright lighting exhibit the largest waste of intelligence outside of an advertising agency...
...The plot, like most of the Coward oeuvre, is sheerest gossamer...
...the public and the critics fill the roles of the assayers...
...Just so...
...Looking back on his play some decades later, Sir Noël offered a cool assessment: "It is a reasonably well-constructed duologue for two experienced performers, with a couple of extra puppets thrown in to assist the plot and provide contrast...
...The evidence is there for all to hear on the CD Noël Coward/Gertrude Lawrence (Pearl 9715...
...It, too, won adherents and an Oscar (for director Mike Nichols...
...A couple of films like Diehard, in which he raised the standard for movie villainy, some big Shakespeare or Shaw roles, and a few more comic triumphs like this and he will be kneeling for his knighthood...
...The movie Benjamin conveyed a sense of his generation'spremonitory unease—an unease that would erupt on campuses for the next five years...
...Even in the tiny part of a French maid, Alex Belcourt does a pratfall that would do credit to Buster Keaton...
...For her part, Amanda is quirky, temperamental, fickle...
...That said, the production at the Virginia Theater benefits from tight construction and the enormous central role of the righteous, ruined Proctor...
...Nichols directed with such panache that it was not until many years later that the film, as a whole, could be seen as a glittering and empty vessel...
...The bauble is Thoroughly Modern Millie...
...It's an awfully bad reflection on our characters...
...Terry Johnson wrote the adaptation and directed it in London, where its nude star created the kind of stir producers dream of...
...a soundtrack by Simon and Garfunkel, and some classic lines, most of them from Charles Webb's 1963 novel: Mrs...
...Nevertheless, this Graduate is shaping up to be as successful in New York as it was in London, and for precisely the same reasons...
...The story concerns Millie Dillmount (Sutton Foster), a brighteyed, toothsome girl from the sticks...
...the American one, released in 1996, starred Daniel Day Lewis and Winona Ryder...
...In Act Two they have set up in Amanda's capacious Paris flat...
...But she is abetted by two authentic Chinese, Ching and Bun (Ken Leung and Francis Jue...
...A steno who can take shorthand at biplane speed, Millie gets ajob straightaway as secretary to Trevor Graydon III (Marc Kudisch), the young CEO of the Sincere Trust Insurance Company...
...the bravura performance of Anne Bancroft as his alcoholic seductress...
...Amanda: It's nice, isn't it...
...But both are capable of delivering more self-punishment than any court could dispense...
...Moonlight behind you...
...When she yammers of her enthusiasms —civil rights and environmentalism— they seem a frivolous pastime, something thejunior league does between cotillions...
...Elyot: Very small...
...I have no tongue for it...
...These brothers will do anything for cash—the money to be used to bring their beloved Mama from Shanghai to New York...
...It was easy to see parallels in the witchhunting of the 1600s and the blacklisting of "subversives" in the 1950s...
...As for Amanda, truth be told, she finds her new husband Victor (Adam Godley) too stuffy for words...
...There were two subsequent film adaptations...
...For all her faults, the movie Mrs...
...The analogy, as the playwright later acknowledged, "seems to falter" because although there were no witches there certainly were Communists, and quite a few of them were up to no good...
...At the peak of this pique, in walk the abandoned spouses...
...He steadfastly refuses to denounce anyone else, and thereby seals his doom...
...The subject of plastics was actually old news in the '50s, as were most of Benjamin's japes...
...Jenny Beavan's costumes are perfect to the last elegant thread, and Tim Hatley's scenic designs, coupled with Peter Mumford's lighting, bring back the '30s in grand style at the Richard Rodgers Theater...
...Even its most famous joke had a tired air about it: "I have one word to say to you, Benjamin," confides Mrs...
...Filling it is precisely the right man—Liam Neeson, an actor of stature in every sense of the word...
...That year Mary Tyler Moore and Julie Andrews were fresh personalities, and they made more of an impression than the movie did—although in a lean musical season it received seven Academy Award nominations (and won one for best score...
...What might have been chaotic is, under the firm hand of director Michael Mayer at the Marquis Theater, unbridled hilarity from curtain to curtain...
...What to do...
...The director's self-justifying movie concerns a heroic longshoreman who testifies against former friends involved in a murder...
...Robinson was an original and oddly sympathetic figure...
...Will the judgment be harsh or benign...
...Robinson, you are the most attractive of all my parents' friends...
...In Brooklyn, yet...
...Elyot: Oh, highly enjoyable...
...A melody drifts through the air (a Noël Coward song, of course) and Elyot serenades his first wife: Someday I'll find you...
...some are reprises from the movie, composed by James Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn...
...This is a Private Lives for the new century, contemporary in feeling but wisely allowing the lines to speak for themselves...
...The cast displays more talent than that of The Producers...
...Now the piece has arrived on our shores, and we can see the full frontal lady for ourselves...
...Meers, as it turns out, is only pretending to be Asian...
...Speaking of numbers, Thoroughly Modern Millie offers a thoroughly mellow mélange of the antiquated and the original...
...Heading the bill is Foster, a leggy singer/dancer/actress of extraordinary energy and high style...
...In his view, "women should be struck regularly, like gongs...
...Then again, nothing ever could...
...We ought to be absolutely tortured with conscience...
...Will the entrants be richer for having made the effort...
...True to the dream lam dreaming As I draw near vou You ?? smile a little smile...
...Stepping out on their balconies, they suddenly meet again...
...Miller made it even easier to confer nobility on the accused who would not name names in order to save himself...
...The direction, by Richard Eyre, jumps from understated to overwrought, and his conclusion—a clattering of large metal plates to indicate a moral cataclysm— rips off Jonathan Kent's conclusion of Medea, presented here five years ago...
...Beguile me not...
...It also echoes the horrors of 9/11...
...A stolid farmer, John Proctor, is denounced as a Devil worshiper by a gaggle of hysterical adolescents, led by one he seduced...
...Amanda: Yes...
...Elyot: Strangely peaceful...
...This Noël Coward comedy was originally presented on London's West End in 1930, and performed with impeccable grace and timing by Coward and his favorite stage partner...
...both are on the first night of their second honeymoons...
...As a complete play it leaves a lot to be desired, principally owing to my dastardly and conscienceless behavior toward the secondary characters...
...Elia Kazan did offer the names of his former fellow travelers to Federal investigators...
...Clearly, there was no reason to adapt this period piece to another medium 25 years later...
...Playing the wicked Mrs...
...As she explains, Some people think it's criminal What women'll do They forget it's 1922...
...Both have just remarried...
...As she begins to vamp the unsuspecting executive, her plans go awry...
...For the pseudo early American dialogue of The Crucible, the playwright invents a harsh, declamatory style that is neither English nor American: "I speak my own sins...
...Yet as soon as she evinces a corresponding interest, Jimmy gets involved with Millie's roommate, Dorothy Brown (Angela Christian), a rich, clueless orphan...
...The teenagers, led by Angela Bettis, are unfortunately loud rather than libidinous, and the rest of the cast is barely adequate—except for three standouts...
...For that, Broadway now has The Graduate, a play also based on a 1967 film...
...How about running away this very night, without saying a word to their new spouses...
...But it's clear that they have begun to fall in love all over again...
...Tom Al dredge makes a convincing old New Englander...
...Or have they invested time and money in a bootless pilgrimage...
...And this only begins the complications, plots and subplots...
...Despite their calculated indifference, the couple's mutual loathing is palpable...
...NATURALLY, no Antiques Roadshow would be complete without its fake...
...Benjamin's movie girlfriend was lovely and vulnerable, the stage Elaine (Alicia Silverstone) is a smug little twerp...
...Meers (Harriet Harris), an Oriental dragon lady who supplies white slavers...
...Christian, the second female lead, has a light-operatic voice and a rare comic ability...
...Elyot (Alan Rickman) and Amanda (Lindsay Duncan) have been divorced for five years...
...Robinson: Benjamin, do you find me attractive...
...The exchange is famous: Elyot: I went around the world you know after— Amanda: Yes, yes, I know...
...She prefers girls with no families to investigate their sudden disappearance, and Dorothy is her kind of woman...
...Elyot is, au fond, an argumentative cad with a short fuse...
...Elyot: The world...
...Butif those two performers are experienced enough, Private Lives can be a rare treat indeed...
...David Gallo's set and Martin Pakledinaz' costumes complete the surprise hit of the spring...
...Duncan, who played opposite him inLiaisons Dangereuses several years ago, is an ideal Coward woman, brittle, beautiful and funny...
...Turner...
...Amanda: And Japan...
...The movie had many assets: dazzling camerawork, the debut of Dustin Hoffman as the rebellious possessor of a Bachelor of Arts degree, and Katharine Ross as his giddy girlfriend...
...The second antique, somewhat battered but still of value, is The Crucible, initially presented onBroadwayin 1953...
...Amanda: China must be very interesting...
...The last noun is key: The girls are living in a hotel run by one Mrs...
...If that's your idea of a good time, go to it...
...And Patrice Johnson as Tituba, a God-haunted Caribbean woman, makes a small role indelible...
...Benjamin: Yes, Mrs...
...For a little while We shall stand Hand in hand...
...both have chosen the same hotel, and, unbeknownst to each other, adjoining suites...
...Proctor is ordered to name others who might be Satanists...
...Falsifying history where it suited him, Arthur Miller dramatized the 17th-century witch hunts of Salem, Massachusetts, informing them with a contemporary social conscience...
...Miller has never displayed an ear for natural speech—"No one dast blame this man," says Willie Loman's wife in Death of a Salesman...
...Result: an explosive denouement that brought Sir Noël as close as he ever came to pure knockabout farce...
...Elyot: You're even more ruthless than lam...
...I cannot judge another...
...In the roles of the two "extra puppets," Fielding and Godley are a lot better than they need to be, thanks to the crisp, energetic direction of Howard Davies, who rightly believes that every role is a principal one...
...Miller is quite portentous enough without these audiovisual aids...
...For an equally shaky analogy, see the film On the Waterfront, a kind of rebuttal to Miller...
...To save his property and his life...
...Seventy dollars a seat seems excessive for a 30-second, discreetly lit view of the undraped Ms...
...Robinson's pompous husband, "Plastics...
...The French version, made in 1954, starred Yves Montana and Simone Signoret...
...Almost every one is a show-stopper, thanks to Rob Ashford's up-tempo choreography and Michael Rafter's clever arrangements...
...The theater has never known another collaboration like theirs, and the current Broadway revival makes no attempt to outshine or even imitate them...
...Opposite him, in the role of grand inquisitor Deputy Governor Danforth, is Brian Murray, whose plummy, booming presence makes for a memorable duel of wills...
...For one thing, Millie becomes the object of desire for Jimmy Smith (Gavin Creel), a man she literally bumped into her first day in town...
...this versatile actor is obviously being prepared for the top rung...
...On Stage Antiques Roadshow By Stefan Kanfer As the season winds down, Broadway has come to resemble the PBS program Antiques Roadshow, with its wild mix of baubles, treasures and fakes for appraisals...
...Tim Hatley's costumes and sets give The Crucible a sense of time and place, as does Paul Gallo's ominous lighting...
...In addition to the above characters, there are Muzzy Van Hossmere (Sheryl Lee Ralph), a filthy rich widow, numerous secretaries, policemen, dishwashers, and even Dorothy Parker (Julie Connors) and George Gershwin (Noah Racey...
...Meers, Harriet Harris is as risible as she was playing another villainess on the long-running TV sitcom Frasier...
...Amanda: We are, every now and then...
...Amanda tries to make light of it: "Strange, how potent cheap music is...
...As Trevor, Kudisch turns the jut-jawed boss into an oddly sympathetic figure of fun, and Creel's Jimmy makes a juvenile lead grow up before our eyes...
...Elyot: Very big, China...
...In a role obviously based on Josephine Baker, Ralph displays the kind of big-league pipes that need no amplification to put her numbers across...
...Where the film made its way seamlessly from opening credit to final fadeout, the play is a series of brief scenes, depriving the story of continuity...
Vol. 85 • May 2002 • No. 3
