Voices of the Town
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage Voices of the Town By Stefan Kanfer The Signature Theater Company is now in its 11 th year. Each season this admirable organization has presented the body of work of a living...
...Where else," she asked her sons, "can people who don't know anything make so much money...
...The actors are like members of a string quartet, each dependent on the others for full esthetic and emotional expression...
...Three years later, a sequel, Jolson Sings Again, was almost as successful...
...Is this a prelude to something more than an annealing, shortlived affair...
...Nevertheless, Anna finds something intriguing in this onslaught-and in the fact that Pale is a ringer for her dead colleague...
...To most, it soon became a living like any other...
...Burn This takes place in a single set: the spacious downtown loft once shared by Anna (Catherine Keener) and her gay roommates, Robbie and Larry (Dallas Roberts...
...Actually, none of them can confront feelings head-on...
...For the most part, though, the actor/ mimic is on his own, providing the narrative, telling the jokes, croaking the musical numbers, and evoking the laughter and tears...
...Burton: Oh, good Lord...
...I get eight...
...Jolson was famous for his blackface routines, and resurrecting them would have been a tasteless exercise...
...Grace: My sister had a baby...
...Grief does not come easily to Anna, a choreographer who prefers to express her emotions on the ballet stage...
...Now audiences have a chance to assay the play's subject and dialogue as well as the action...
...They learned their new trade onstage, kicking around the smaller towns and hoping one day to play vaudeville heaven: the Palace Theater in New York City...
...A restaurant manager, he acquired his nickname years ago, because of a fondness for brandy labeled VS.O.P...
...The "Company" ?? Jolson & Company refers to two people...
...I mean, interviews in the Advocate...
...I've seen opera queens, and believe me, I rank no higher than Lady-in-Waiting...
...Playwright Rupert Holmes might have stressed the funnier aspects of the Burns marriage-after all, there was more than 30 years of material to ransack...
...She not only plays all of Jolson's wives, she is the young and the old Mae West, and hilarious both times...
...Most of Pale's ungrammatical fulminations concern New York City, a place that makes him even edgier than usual...
...His formula: "Make it personal, tell the truth and then write Bum This on the bottom...
...But to a handful of Jewish kids in New York it was the road to glory...
...In the second place, ever since A Streetcar Named Desire opened in 1945, Broadway has been host to scores of "stud" plays, in which a family, group or town is transfixed by the sudden appearance of a Natural Man...
...Very Special Old Pale...
...To be sure, there have been times when the effort seemed questionable, as in the case of the vastly overpraised and overindulged Sam Shepard...
...One of 11 children, he went out on his own at the age of 15, changed his name to George Burns, and abandoned the Lower East Side for the world of entertainment...
...Wife number two, actress Ruby Keeler (Nancy Anderson), has just walked out...
...In 1964 Allen, who was not robust, died of heart failure...
...This was not, as the show demonstrates, because he was biased...
...In the old days there was often a female confidante to furnish insights and wisecracks...
...Pale is also marred by bromides and inconsistencies...
...He is always candid, ardent, unburdened by the social restrictions that keep others from telling the truth...
...George: Boy or girl...
...George: Four per cent...
...From then on they never varied from their roles as Ditzy Lady and Pained Partner, traveling from vaude through moving pictures to radio to video, where they reached their greatest celebrity...
...The end, of course, is never in doubt...
...Gorshin is essentially a stand-up impressionist, best known for his imitations of Jack Nicholson, Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster...
...it is about the AIDS epidemic that suddenly claimed so many lives in the mid-1980s...
...The only one to get any response was Gracie, whose delivery was so eccentric that the audience broke up every time she opened her mouth...
...Nancy Anderson impersonates seven women, and each of these portraits is a gem...
...This season is devoted to Lanford Wilson, a writer whose plays are familiar without being famous...
...The pleasure comes in reminiscences of bygone days, and in seeing how many of the old routines still hold up...
...Grace: What interest do you get...
...She palavers a bit with Larry and with her boyfriend Burton (Ty Burrell), a yuppie screenwriter...
...His is a remarkable impression of the man, complete with the wide-eyed stare, the warm, self-loving smile, the voice you could pour on a waffle...
...In the 1990s Wilson's fortunes went into something of a decline...
...Others asked the same question, and tried their damnedest to make the trip from bottom-of-the-bill act to headliner...
...Rarely, however, does he stop spouting long enough to reveal the quick-witted, wounded man beneath...
...Indeed, in the vaudeville venues of impresario B.F...
...Keith, a backstage sign warned entertainers: "Such words as liar, slob, son-of-a-gun, devil, sucker, damn, and all other words unfit for the ears of ladies and children, also any reference to questionable streets, resorts, localities, and barrooms are prohibited under fine or immediate discharge...
...As a began working with his brother Harry, changed his name to Al Jolson, and proceeded to step on many hands, including Harry's, en route to the top...
...Written by Jay Berkow and Stephen Mo Hanan, who assumes the title role, Jolson & Company shows the extraordinary rise of a talent who refused to be denied...
...But it has taken until now to present the real Al onstage...
...Here he has an opportunity to stay within a single character and does so with surprising consistency, under the direction of John Tillinger...
...I missed the original production, but I have never seen that mummer when he was not overheated, preening, mumbling, and so self-concerned that the script was disfigured by the performance...
...Gracie: I keep it in two banks...
...Vaudeville" derives from the French, voix de ville-voices of the town...
...I mean no disparagement of the neighborhood in which you have your domicile, honey," he tells Anna, "but this street's dying of crotch rot...
...Say Goodnight Grade finds Burns (Frank Gorshin) in limbo shortly after expiration...
...George: In the bank...
...Once upon a screen George played Jehovah, but now he is to perform before the real deal, narrating the high points and humiliations of his life...
...From the Yiddish Theater at $ 5 a week I stepped into vaudeville at $ 100 a week...
...But Nathan Birnbaum had a long way to go before he achieved prominence...
...Whatever was thrown in his way-poverty, the loss of his beloved mother early on, the intense rivalry of other singers, the wives who became ex-wives because they wanted a little recognition of their own-Jolson simply ignored it and moved on up...
...They didn't know there was that much money being minted every week...
...Anna: Well, they obviously don't subscribe...
...The following snatches of dialogue are at least 50 years old: Gracie: Where do you keep your money...
...That he was a heel is not in dispute...
...In the new production at the Union Square Theater the central role is played by Edward Norton, a far more balanced and generous actor...
...Still, he has extracted enough for an affectionate salute to an unforgettable couple...
...He is a volatile, scatological, blasphemous coke user, surprisingly well-dressed and, when he is not cursing, well-spoken...
...For beneath the smart chatter and the yearning silences is a very dated and often clichéd structure...
...In fact, Pale is the last adjective one would apply to Jimmy...
...So he chose to sing in the tones of another race, and in this way he could change "Mommy" to "Mammy" and allow sentiment to enter his act-even though he rigorously tried to keep it out of his life...
...You could lose a Toyota some of them...
...They also had a great love story, and that, too, is convincingly portrayed throughout this oneman show...
...The rise of "Jolie" was told, with much use of the soft pedal, in the 1946 film musical, The Jolson Story...
...Perhaps his best known are THE HOTL BALTIMORE, a drama about the raffish residents of a decaying hotel that ran for more than 1,000 performances...
...Larry: They had no idea who he was at all...
...What was intended to be a one-night stand gets complicated...
...But he cannot disguise the mechanical nature of the backchat: "I'm not an opera queen...
...In the first place, Burn This is not really about a boating accident that carried off two young men...
...the Neanderthal movie producer Harry Conn...
...Redwood Curtain attempted to explore the feelings of a young Vietnamese-American pianist searching for her biological father in the forests of Northern California...
...By the end of the century vaudeville had crossed the ocean and settled in the theaters of America, where it acquired a new, less raffish reputation...
...A celebrated singer of the 1920s remembered the day she "ceased to be Bella Becker and became Belle Baker...
...And theater, they might add, is the obit writer...
...Their act opened in Newark, and it bombed...
...The trouble is, their expression provides an excess of surface, and very little substance...
...Knocking about the Keith-Albee circuit with a series of partners, Burns was going nowhere rapidly when he met a colleen named Gracie Allen...
...My parents threw up their hands in horror...
...Right for Anna -he has a private income, good looks and a pleasant manner...
...Other plays, among them The Mound Builders, Serenading Louie, and The Rimers of Eldritch, received Off-Broadway revivals, but these added little luster to a fading reputation...
...The play first opened on Broadway in 1987 with John Malkovich in a starring role...
...Berkow directs with style and verve, aided by Peter Larson's nostalgic musical direction...
...a smash performance will give him a chance to be reunited with Gracie...
...Anna: I was the girlfriend, can you stand it...
...In early 19th-century France these were on display in the music hall, shouted and chanted by bawdy chorines, ballad-singers and clowns...
...The trouble was, he wasn'tvery entertaining...
...These add just the right note of agreeable lunacy to the proceedings...
...His performance, generally described as "explosive," put Malkovich on the map, and thus Wilson has a lot to answer for...
...But most often the reverse is true: Recently it has focused on the neglected works of Edward Albee, Horton Foote and Arthur Miller...
...He died at the age of 100, wisecracking to the end...
...As the singer sits before the mirror and puts on his makeup he becomes the personification of a black man, not only intoning but feeling the blues that Jolson cannot acknowledge in his real skin...
...the strength of his play lies in the complex, highly individual characters he puts onstage...
...Jolson's father...
...he was an early promoter of civil rights and a great enthusiast of black culture...
...There are clips of movies and TV shows, and the offstage voice of Gracie ably mimicked by Didi Conn...
...The cast members clearly relish their jobs, and James Houghton's indulgent direction allows them to display their skills...
...The only thing save this part of the city, they burn it down...
...The versatile Robert Ari plays nine individuals, including radio personality Barry Gray, whose interviews provide the structure of the show...
...Far from it...
...He was the supernova, and until his final years everyone else was a walk-on in the drama of his life...
...And, after all the shouting and tergiversations, that is the venerable plot of Burn This...
...they earned enough to get by, perhaps afford a better flat or a little place in the country when they retired...
...and Talley's Folly, concerning the mixed fortunes of a Southern belle and her German-Jewish lover...
...The most triumphant of them all was a kid named As a Yoelson, a cantor's son...
...The wellmeaning, deeply confused drama folded after a few weeks on Broadway...
...But neither is the fact that AI was the kind of talent that comes along once in a hundred years...
...In truth, Gorshin is not quite alone...
...The first of a trilogy about the Talley family of Lebanon, Missouri, it won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for Drama...
...Wilson provides no answer...
...Of course, living with a woman, what else is it going to be...
...and Jolson's resentful brother Harry...
...RichardNash's TlieRainmaker and dozens of similar dramas, the preponderance of them with homosexual themes or undercurrents...
...Other males look hypocritical and tame by comparison and, after the appropriate plot complications, he gets the girl...
...Anna is half-afraid of her new lover, but comforts him after the battle...
...In theory, Burton is Mr...
...Grace: Ha...
...So it is here, playedadroitly enough-by Roberts...
...The comedian had an idea: He always liked "illogical logic"-phrases like, "nobody goes there, it's too crowded...
...Anna: It hadn't even crossed my mind...
...Failure to amuse guarantees a trip to Purgatory...
...So the Signature Theater is providing an authentic service in its 2002-2003 season, and its choice of Burn This deserves at least two cheers...
...Wisely, the star gets into burnt cork only once, at the end of Act One...
...On a whim she accepts a sudden invitation and sleeps with him...
...Each season this admirable organization has presented the body of work of a living American playwright...
...ANOTHER VAUDEVTLLIAN who entered the scene during Jolson's time is currently being celebrated on Broadway in Say Goodnight Grade...
...each opts for the wry remark and the oblique allusion...
...Essentially, Wilson's achievement in Burn This, as in so many of his works, is the creation of big, demanding roles that actors love...
...Their combined work makes for abrisk and delightful evening...
...He talks about a psychological "protective mechanism," for example, yet he has no idea what a choreographer does for a living...
...Bums went on as a solo for another 22 years, appearing in The Sunshine Boys at the age of 80, and as God in three other films...
...Gracie: I don't know, and I can't wait to find out if I'm an uncle or an aunt...
...Burton: Yeah, but he was hardly living in a closet...
...Christine Jones' hard-edged contemporary set is almost another character in the play, haunted by Pat Collins' atmospheric lighting...
...Pale and Burton fight over her, and Pale gets the worst of it...
...Its policy allows an audience to witness the growth of a writer over the course of a career, and to judge not only individual plays but an entire oeuvre...
...In recent years that part has been taken by the understanding, self-abnegating gay friend...
...Hoary as they are, these and other exchanges still cause explosions of mirth at the Helen Hayes Theater...
...These considerable assets are enough to hide the play's smaller defects...
...Within these confines a new generation of performers rose from the streets of the cities...
...Allen would feed him the straight lines, and he would get the laughs...
...Such examples were not lost on Minnie Marx, mother of the Marx Brothers...
...He has come from New Jersey to collect the belongings of his deceased brother...
...You could lose a Toyota some of these potholes...
...Robbie will not appear tonight or any other night...
...But Jolie was rarely able to articulate sorrow or joy on his own, and he knew it...
...The act clicked...
...Vaudeville is dead, showfolk like to say, and television is the box in which it was buried...
...But there is something missing in their relationship, something that becomes apparent with the entrance of Pale (Norton...
...Hanan has obviously spent a lot of time looking at archival footage...
...Of course, it doesn't hurt to have 16 irresistible songs included in the show, among them "Swanee," "I'm Sitting on Top of the World" and the one that still intrigues me, "Where Did Robinson Crusoe Go with Friday on Saturday Night...
...Not the larger ones, though...
...The prominent dancer has just been killed in a boating accident...
...George: Gracie, how can you get such a return for your money these days...
...Wilson is particularly evocative here, as Anna and Larry describe the funeral and the relatives of the deceased, who refused to recognize that he was homosexual...
...That is the plot of William Inge'sPic«!c,N...
...The 36-yearold's real name is Jimmy...
...Jolson made a career of impersonating African-Americans...
...By the second show, Burns had wisely, switched the roles: He became the straight man and Gracie the comedienne...
...Obviously what George and Gracie had was ageless...
Vol. 85 • November 2002 • No. 6
