Vegas Camp vs. True Love
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage Vegas Camp vs. True Love By Stefan Kanfer Las Vegas is the essence of glitz. Over the clang of onearmed bandits and the rustle of croupiers raking in the chips, visitors are...
...Here, for example, Frankie breaks through Johnny's manic monologues and his defensive postures: Frankie: Are you keeping some big secret from me...
...If we were going to surprise anybody it would be with wholesomeness...
...Moreover, as Motormouth Maybelle, Mary Bond Davis is required to do one of those overstated "Black and Proud" numbers that have become a cliché of the Broadway musical...
...Camp is the triumph of the epicene style...
...This muscular, headstrong suitor, it develops, is actually a vulnerable and immature figure, a man who would rather talk than think, and ask rather than answer...
...The Tony is the highest award the Broadway theater has to offer, and rare is the playwright who has garnered more than one...
...Morrison makes an excellent Elvis wannabe...
...Frankie: Which one...
...Hairspray's plot was as two-dimensional as its cast of characters, and is loudly echoed in the current Broadway version...
...Frankie: You could have a drug problem or a drinking one...
...And so are the "straight" women in the show...
...If this is mainstream Broadway, can Siegfried and Roy be far behind...
...Much fun is poked at Corny Collins' "Negro Day," for example...
...Hairspray is advertised as a celebration of "coming out"-of sexual roles, racial bias and obsolete attitudes...
...He even calls up an all-night disc jockey, asking him to play the most beautiful melody ever written...
...Hence the title: The DJ plays Debussy's "Clair de Lune" as the couple negotiate in the small hours of the night...
...If it gathered a cult following over the years, that was largely because Hairspray was seen as a genial in-your-face gesture at the establishment, viewing all outsiders (ungainly girls, AfricanAmericans, homosexuals) as fellow victims of the '60s status quo...
...In less than 100 words, none of which has more than three syllables, McNally has A) turned an inquisitor into a confessor, B) given Frankie a backbone she lacked in earlier scenes, and C) made Johnny someone far more complicated and difficult than he first appeared...
...One would be just fine...
...The wholesomeness included Divine (né Glen Milstead), an obese drag queen who acted the part of Lake's mother and died shortly after the feature's debut in 1988...
...It also needs no more than two actors, sending their zingers across the room with the force and timing of Serena Williams and Pete Sampras hitting balls over the net...
...The year is 1962, the place, Baltimore...
...These have been the staples of comedians for the last 20 years, and the musical has nothing new to add...
...He admits, for instance, that despite his fit appearance he is closing in on 50, and scared to death of going on alone...
...Johnny: Booze...
...Not physically-that was easy, and it happened in the first few minutes...
...He has written books for successful musicals (Ragtime, The Full Monty, Kiss of the Spider Woman), opera libretti (The Food of Love, Dead Man Walking), serious plays (Master Class, Love...
...Case in point: Hairspray...
...The shapely Falco is a mainstay of HBO's hottest show, The Sopranos...
...Although Frankie and Johnny are blue-collar people, he never patronizes them, nor does he give them speeches that are overly lyrical or ostentatiously sensitive...
...he has subtly and carefully guided his actors while paying strict attention to the script...
...it is said to be too explicit, not only in calling for full-frontal nudity, but for its X-rated language...
...But unlike Frankie, he is a lover of life, a man who wants to embrace the world...
...To be sure, he's funny-looking, outfitted with acres of rubber padding and pounds of makeup...
...But the fact is that their big number, "Welcome to the '60s," is a commercial, on-the-beat Tin Pan Alley product, as inauthentic as Edna Turnblad's wig...
...The musical is based on a cheeky, not terribly well-made movie...
...This once-amonth feature allows blacks to sing and dance their own numbers...
...Originally, the rather unprepossessing Kathy Bates and F. Murray Abraham played the title roles, and they looked like true underdogs in the great American rat race...
...Frankie (Edie Falco) is a career waitress...
...What they feel are the first faint rumblings of the youthquake that will shortly rock(and roll) the world...
...Compassion...
...That's the trouble...
...Both were miscast in a 1991 film version that made the further mistake of "opening up" the play to include locations other than Frankie's apartment, and additional performers besides the original duet...
...As if these were not enough...
...Johnny: All right, I did...
...Nothing wrong with a little vulgarity, mind you...
...Triumphant facts of nature...
...People don't go around looking at one another like that," she complains...
...Frankie: You could be gay...
...Reynolds is an animated delight...
...David Rockwell's inventive set includes a vertical bed that vaults Tracy onstage, and a trompe l'oeil billboard from which the painted Dynamites spring to life...
...That is not to say that all of Hairspray is as puny as the book by Mark O'Donnell and Thomas Meehan, or as tiresome as the pounding, instantly forgettable score by Marc Shaiman, who contributed the overmiked music, and Scott Wittman, who abetted Shaiman's banal lyrics with those of his own...
...En route she manages to liberate Edna, astonish her fellow high schoolers, entice Link, and show the town that blacks are not equal-they have better songs...
...They also get to judge the talents of other adolescents auditioning for their own 15 minutes of fame...
...Never mind if the show is as tawdry as anything you can find at MGM Grand or Caesar's Palace...
...As Johnny pushes on, though, Frankie does a little psychological judo on him, and he is forced to give away more than he intends...
...This is in sharp contrast to the lines in Hairspray...
...This Falco and Tucci deliver in overplus...
...Not any more...
...The convertibility of 'man' and 'woman.')" Sontag's observations were published in 1964...
...Frankie and Johnny belongs in one shrewdly designed, claustrophobic set, and that is exactly what John Lee Beatty has provided...
...As an exercise in nostalgia the film was harmless enough...
...The city is not quite south enough to be considered Dixie, and not quite north enough to be free of de facto segregation in its schools, private businesses and popular culture...
...All the females are pretty and slim, their cherubic faces smiling under pounds of bouffant hairdos sprayed stiff in homage to Jaqueline Kennedy...
...First presented in 1987, this two-person drama opens on a nude couple en flagrante...
...Then there is Harvey Fierstein...
...Johnny: It's more like I'm keeping several thousand little ones...
...and comedies (Lips Together, Teeth Apart...
...and the supporting players are an exemplary bunch of choristers, stepping to Jerry Mitchell's spirited choreography...
...Last season The Full Monty set the pace with a song called "Big Black Man," and Jackee Harry does a similar rum with "Sing for Your Supper" in the Roundabout Theater's current panache-free revival of Rodgers and Hart's The Boys from Syracuse...
...Johnny: Once...
...The trouble is, Vegas style has crept east and is currently infecting the legitimate theater...
...Valour...
...Johnny: Does this look like a gay face...
...He has had a couple of years of college, loves to quote Shakespeare at every opportunity, and wants to learn everything he can about classical music...
...I would be impressed but I wouldn't know where to put them...
...Johnny: I was...
...In the days when she made sense, Susan Sontag wrote an essay that sharply delineated an emerging sensibility...
...But they are always faithful to the character who articulates them, and they never offend...
...And true, the exchanges are not only frank, they are more than occasionally scatological...
...But the greatest burdens are her discouraging mother Edna (Harvey Fierstein, the Divine de nos jours) and her listless father Wilbur (Dick Latessa...
...With the exception of Tracy, who is an out-and-out cartoon, all the others are caricatures of femininity-gabby, bitchy, venal, or dumb...
...The man is the Eastern distributor of genuine compliments and out-andout flattery...
...Camp," she observed, is "a vision of the world in terms of style-but a particular kind of style...
...In brief, the musical is pure camp, generously cut for the large stage of the Neil Simon Theater...
...Having been disappointed by a slew of men, one of them brutal, she is determined to be a loner from now until old age...
...We'll adopt," he responds cheerfully...
...New Line, distributor of the film, suggested I add a mild four-letter word to get a PG-13 rating...
...Frankie: I'd appreciate a straight answer...
...But I resisted...
...It is the emotional exposure she finds difficult, but Johnny leads her every step of the way...
...It is the love of the exaggerated, the 'off,' of things being what they are not...
...True, the bodies are on display, discreetly illuminated by Brian MacDevitt's lighting...
...She might have been describing Hairspray in 2002...
...Throughout, McNally's dialogue is crisp and wholly credible...
...You could be a mass murderer or an ex-convict...
...Frankte: Well, were you...
...No, he is not really impersonating a female here, he is mocking one...
...On the other hand, in the glamour department neither actor is in the class of Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino...
...I was wrong...
...There are no brakes on this enthusiast, and his nonstop declamations are a turnoff to Frankie...
...But why...
...If I have any quarrel with this latest incarnation of Frankie and Johnny it is, ironically, in the casting of two marvelous actors...
...Answer he does, rather than lose the woman who represents his last chance at love...
...Last time out, Joe Mantello directed an odious version of Design for Living, and I thought he had lost his touch...
...Yet, staying true to character, he manages to elicit all the home truths he needs...
...Nevertheless, he is relentless and gradually, layer by layer, Frankie begins to reveal herself...
...Clearly he is meant to be the centerpiece of Hairspray...
...everything is worth celebrating...
...Actually, Johnny can no more keep his eyes shut than he can keep his mouth closed...
...But the heroine has the resilience of a superball, and after every reversal she bounces back with maximum vigor...
...You don't look, you stare...
...Waters' best known film, Hairspray, featured such proven performers as comedian Jerry Stiller, singers Sonny Bono and Deborah Harry, and Ricki Lake who later starred in her own TV show...
...The bulked-up Tucci has not only appeared in numerous television shows and films, including A Midsummer Night's Dream and Woody Allen's Deconstructing Harry, he also directed two movies, Big Night and Joe Gould's Secret...
...Terrence McNally has four...
...I'd put it up there with the Grand Canyon and a woman nursing her child...
...Tracy's efforts are thwarted every step of the way by a nasty rival, Amber Von Tussle (Laura Bell Bundy), Amber's control freak of a mother (Linda Hart) and a gaggle of gossiping classmates...
...Anything else...
...This overpriced, overpraised production was given a jump-start by reviewers who evidently felt that big-time theater, beleaguered since 9/11, needed to begin the new season with a hit...
...All the males are dreamboats...
...it's not something I feel real comfortable with...
...The onetime star of his own play, Torch Song Trilogy, about the tribulations of a female impersonator, and the author of a new children's book, The Sissy Duckling, Fierstein is a well-known performer of a certain genre...
...By constant interrogations, for example, he learns that a former boyfriend beat her so badly she cannot have children...
...Yet you would never know it from looking at the clamorous and selfcongratulatory adaptation...
...Frankie: Men have other secrets than being married...
...When they stop making love, they begin to speak, and as they do they get acquainted...
...As Ogden Nash put it, "Home is heaven, and orgies are vile./ But I like an orgy once in a while"-provided such garish entertainments remain where they belong, 2,500 miles from New York City...
...Over the clang of onearmed bandits and the rustle of croupiers raking in the chips, visitors are treated to extravaganzas that embody bad taste: spangled lion tamers, yammering pop singers, single-entendre standup comics, and long-stemmed chorines in sequins and feathers...
...Its director/writer was John Waters, a prolific out-of-the-closet filmmaker who did most of his work in his hometown of Baltimore...
...Is that it...
...His foghorn voice is that of a man, however, and his pseudofemmine gestures are so exaggerated they could not fool a blind ticket holder...
...American society has changed greatly in the intervening years, and so has the American musical theater...
...Forgery...
...Still, he remains mysteriously likable...
...Winokur is a font of energy...
...I don't need a million roses...
...Hints of the new music can be heard on their favorite weekly television program, the Corny Collins Show, run by a fatuously buoyant MC (Clarke Thorell...
...There, a group of lucky kids get to dance and sing their favorite numbers...
...Tracy has many liabilities, including an enthusiasm for "race music" in an allwhite neighborhood...
...Despite being squeaky-clean, they contribute to a booming over-the-top vulgarity far more offensive than anything Frankie and Johnny say or do in the confines of their little room...
...The androgyne, she went on, "is certainly one of the great images of camp sensibility...
...As for the white world represented here, little wit can be seen or heard in the lampooning of square parents, narrow ties, bouffant hairdos, and Dayglo colors...
...William Ivey Long's costumes are a clever mixture of the nostalgic and the parodic, and Kenneth Posner's lighting adds sparkle to the proceedings...
...Here it is on exhibit more than ever...
...There can be no better introduction to McNally's blend of wit and empathy than Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune...
...To Johnny there is no trivia...
...Hairspray ridicules whatever it touches (including itself) and this attitude has excused a myriad of excesses and flaws...
...So does she, and in the process of getting to know each other these two possible losers become potential winners-people worth rooting for...
...But in the past shows like Sugar Babies and Jekyll & Hyde were the exception, knocked by the critics but beloved by tourists who didn't know the difference between a show on Broadway and a Broadway show...
...Now I'm locking my eyes shut and throwing away the key...
...Although the local teenagers have been bred to parrot the wardrobes and attitudes of their parents, they sense something different all about them...
...It gives me the creeps...
...Johnny: I am...
...Jack O'Brien has directed with unstoppable vigor...
...In truth, beneath the glitter and hype it is a smirking and mean-spirited little show pretending, like Fierstein, to be what it is not...
...Of course there have always been shoddy musicals, and some of them have run for years...
...It's like if you would send me a million roses...
...I remember when the Motion Picture Association of America came back with a PG rating," said Waters...
...Watching Frankie arrange herself in the mirror, he burbles, "I think a woman brushing and fixing up her hair is one of the supremely great sights of life...
...That script has come in for some complaints recently...
...Johnny (Stanley Tucci) is a short order cook in the same restaurant...
...But that has not stopped Tracy Turnblad (Marissa Jaret Winokur), an overweight fireplug of a girl, from dreaming that she too could be a TV personality and attract the local heartthrob, Link Larkin (Matthew Morrison...
...Johnny: No, I'm not married...
...Frankte: How many times...
...At 63 he has become one of the stalwarts of the American stage, a prolific talent yet to reach its limits...
...Accordingly, Seaweed J. Stubbs (Corey Reynolds) struts his stuff on cue, and the Dynamites (Kamilah Martin, Judine Richard and Shayna Steele) do some high-energy imitations of the Suprêmes...
...I spent two years in the slammer...
Vol. 85 • September 2002 • No. 5
