On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage Putting History to Music By Stefan Kanfer Only a handful of bigname composers have written both the music and the lyrics for Broadway shows: Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Noel...
...she can snap off a gag or deliver a rueful line, and had she been given better material, she might have displayed star quality...
...This is all too deep...
...Giuseppe Zangara (Jeffrey Kuhn), a bricklayer from Calabria, Italy, was unable to carry out his plan to kill Franklin D.Roosevelt...
...Caroline takes place in the Louisiana of 1963, when the Civil Rights movement is just beginning to alter the Deep South...
...In The Musical of Musicals—the Musical, each of their spoofs has the same plot: a girl runs out of money, a predatory landlord demands his share of her bod and board, and in the end a heroic gentleman rushes in to save her...
...In Jelly's Last Jam, a devil figure worked wonders...
...The creators, unlike the assassins, rarely take a cheap shot...
...The teenager turns on this white interloper, this Northerner who has no idea what life down South is all about, and the explosions detonate...
...Alas, the rest of the company rarely rises to her standard...
...Standing on a wobbly chair, he missed the target and fatally shot Mayor Anton Cermak of Chicago...
...That production was not a success...
...He hijacked a commercial airliner that he intended to crash into Richard M. Nixon's White House, and killed two nonpolitical passengers before he himself was slain...
...The top of that line is the fresh team of Eric Rockwell and Joanne Bogart, whose melodies and lyrics go after seven icons of the musical theater: Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Fred Ebb and John Kander, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Stephen Sondheim, andJerry Herman...
...Kushner the book writer, ironically, rarely wastes a word...
...The nonstop laughter comes with no extra charge...
...Who would argue that Lee Harvey Oswald (Neil Patrick Harris) did not disfigure America and the world...
...To assert her radical credentials, she also tried to shoot Ford...
...And Bogart's lyrics catch the Hammersteinian combination of rural shmaltz and Tin Pan Alley smarts: The cattle plié In a dreamy ballet It's normal as blueberry pie...
...But wary isn't eerie...
...I'm falling asleep...
...The three children who live with Caroline are in need of garments and well rounded meals (the only one guaranteed to be well clothed and fed is the eldest child, off fighting in Vietnam...
...John W. Hinckley Jr...
...Samuel Byck (Mario Cantone), an unemployed car salesman, sent lunatic taped monologues to several public figures, including Jonas Salk and Senator Abraham A. Ribicoff...
...Stuart's father and mother (Alice Playten and Reathel Bean) are wellmeaning but insensitive...
...On the other hand, most of their fellow gun-wielders are linked only by the nature of their act rather than the result...
...Kushner made his reputation as a theatrical visionary...
...The impact on history was exactly nil...
...The cast, on the other hand, is perfection—not a syllable out of place...
...His approach has always been specific—send-ups of Chicago and The Lion King complete with parodie costumes...
...Resentments immediately rise...
...envisages, the way President John F. Kennedy seems to want for all black folk...
...As a period piece, Caroline, or Change has its moments—almost all of them when Pinkins is onstage...
...Sara Jane Moore (Becky Ann Baker), a five-time loser at the game of marriage, dropped out of the middle class and into the counterculture...
...A pity that the musical that stars them, despite its air of profundity, offers so much less than meets the ear...
...It was presented Off-Broadway, in a somewhat different form, back in 1990...
...These ladies are continually yammering about their upbeat philosophy: Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving...
...Sondheim tailors his couplets to the characters...
...Or that John Wilkes Booth (Michael Cerveris) did not cause incalculable and unforeseen misery...
...In an evening when almost all the dialogue is sung, there are strains of Gershwin, gospel, klezmer, classical—everything but Tesori, who did a lot of similar aping in her music for the hit of several seasons ago, Thoroughly Modem Millie...
...With a new cast and director it has finally made it to the Studio 54 Theater...
...In the opening sequence, Rodgers and Hammerstein come in for some affectionate—and very accurately observed—kidding...
...For 20 years Gerard Alessandrini's Forbidden Broadway has lampooned the long-rarining musicals of the Great White Way...
...Here, a large Haitian-style Big Mama figure (Aisha de Haas) plays the Moon, does some loud chanting and cool mugging, and ends by adding decoration rather than substance to the proceedings...
...As the dryer (as well as a bus) Cooper is versatile enough, but he, too, needs more to do...
...Staged as a carnival, complete with barker (Marc Kudisch), Assassins offers closeups of the title figures in songs and story...
...denied a raise, she is forced to pick up the small change in order to support the kids...
...Grandpa Stopnick is an Old Lefty who thinks this is the time for Negroes to stand up for their rights, and starts to lecture Emmie on her role in the New America...
...For more than two decades, the lights of Broadway have advertised revivals of Rodgers and Hammerstein, the Gershwins, Cole Porter et al., coupled with overblown English imports by, or in imitation of, Andrew Lloyd Webber—whose works are themselves a sedulous aping of Giacomo Puccini's operas...
...For those who haven't the time, patience or loot for the originals, these parodies are well worth the York Theater's half-price admission...
...Oh, what beautiful corn...
...Presidents...
...Wilting beneath her crisp white uniform, the single Mom dreams of a day when she and her children can live free and equal, the way Martin Luther King Jr...
...Don't worry if it's scary...
...Are you with me...
...STILL, Assassins is an attempt to push the American musical in a new direction...
...The others are rarely less than competent, yet seldom more than that...
...When his letters went unanswered he decided to impress her by killing Ronald Reagan...
...Musical takes care ofthat attitude in a few well chosen notes, nouns and verbs: Life's full of glamour and sparkle and zest, Take my advice and live...
...Joe Mantello has staged this Petit Guignol with dispassionate style—good to look at, yet cold and unmoving...
...There isn't any...
...Satire is a parasitic art, seldom stronger than the host it stings...
...Both women were apprehended without much difficulty and the Chief Executive went blithely on about his business...
...Though Caroline goes through a daily schedule of unrelieved dreariness and poverty—one cigarette per day, lit by Noah—she has a rich mental life...
...PhD theses, critical analyses and concert revivals of his works are regularly produced...
...As this cascade continues, four actors (Lovette George, Craig Fols, Bogart, and Rockwell) hilariously prance in the choreographical style of an R&H show, with Rockwell manning the piano in addition to his acting and terpsichorean chores...
...there is even The Sondheim Review, a quarterly magazine dedicated to discussions of the Master...
...Start blowing your bugle and don't be depressed, Take my advice and live...
...Charles Guiteau (Denis ?'Hare), a failed evangelist, confronted James A. Garfield one afternoon at a railroad station and volunteered to become his Ambassador to France...
...twinkling imitations of singers like Liza Minnelli and Mandy Patinkin, accurate to the last strained falsetto...
...The sophisticated entertainment is made even sharper by John Carver Sullivan's minimalist costumes and Pamela Hunt's shrewd direction and choreography...
...What emerges, however, is a gallery of grotesques, pathetic but contemptible to the last man and woman...
...Reagan, shot in the abdomen...
...Rose resents this routine and makes an issue of it: How dare Noah be so cavalier about his allowance when a poor black woman sweats downstairs doing the laundry...
...It is well past time to move on...
...They have all done better in their time, and they will all do better in the years to come, when Caroline, or Change will be remembered less for its punning title than for its negative virtues...
...Weidman's book is crisp and true to events...
...When the President turned away, Guiteau shot him down, making just the slightest dent in American politics...
...He gives this chamber opera a fine interior glow, augmented by Riccardo Hernandez' set design, Paul Tazewell's imaginative costumes, and lighting by the ubiquitous Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer...
...Be wary of the weary...
...On Stage Putting History to Music By Stefan Kanfer Only a handful of bigname composers have written both the music and the lyrics for Broadway shows: Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Noel Coward, Jerry Herman, and Stephen Sondheim...
...Carol Charming in Hello Dolly...
...Unlike Susan Hilferty's clever costumes, Robert Brill's set is efficient rather than evocative, as is the lighting design by Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer...
...In part this is the failure of the original conception: Everyone knows what happened in 1963, so Caroline must depend on the score to make any and all points...
...It is Chanukah Eve, and to help serve the various dishes Caroline has brought along her 16year-old daughter Emmie (Anika Noni Rose...
...President Kennedy is fatally shot, increasing the level of despair...
...And yet Rockwell and Bogart seem to do it effortlessly, commenting on the style while thumbing their noses at it: I'm weary...
...A Jewish family has moved from New York to Lake Charles because the head of the house, Stuart Gellman (David Costabile), has a job playing the clarinet with a nearby symphony orchestra...
...Cupboard bare?/ One room, no one there?/ Hey, pal, don't despair/ You wanna shoot a President...
...On occasion they are right...
...Leon Czolgosz (James Barbour), a demented Polish immigrant glassworker, killed William McKinley...
...In order to unite this nonet, Weidman makes time move back and forth, like sand in an hourglass...
...Cox comes closest...
...He is forever leaving nickels, dimes and quarters in his pants pockets...
...This is not arecipe for tranquillity, and events outside and inside the house soon conspire to make things even more difficult...
...Its melodies are, to be charitable, eclectic...
...But Alessandrini has never focused solely on composers and lyricists, and this has left the field wide open to a new kind of parodist...
...The little collections are always gathered up and carefully deposited in a tumbler by the family maid and occasional cook, Caroline Thibodeaux (Tonya Pinkins...
...Of this august group, Sondheim has enjoyed the smallest box office rewards—and the most serious intellectual appraisals...
...Still, Rodgers and Hammerstein have been parodied for decades, and even though Musical's score is a model of tongue-and-groove construction it cannot compare with the next sequence...
...Meantime, Caroline wearily works at her hot and unrewarding job...
...Her one big number comes across because of her talent, not because of Tesori's music or Kushner's lyrics: "I ain't got the heart/1 can't hardly read./ Some folks do all kind of things/ and black folks someday live like kings/ and someday sunshine shine all day./ Oh, sure it true,/ it be that way,/ but not for me,/ not for me...
...Those numbers are prototypical Sondheim: vinegary music and a series of cynical internal rhymes: "No job...
...Alexander Gemignani) the son of an oil executive, developed an obsession with the actress Jodie Foster...
...The composer's latest work, Assassins, was written by John Weidman, a former Sondheim collaborator for the 1976 musical Pacific Overtures...
...Stuart's first wife died a few years back, and he remarried a fellow New Yorker, Rose (Veanne Cox...
...As gifted as he is, however, Sondheim cannot do everything...
...It is not a revival, not an English import, and not a double-entendre show for tourists on the town...
...Their relationship is beginning to suffer because Stuart's 10year-old son Noah (Harrison Chad) resents his stepmother and flouts her authority at every chance...
...Noah believes that his stepmother is being arbitrary and extreme...
...The weapon, a .22 caliber pistol, grievously wounded the White House Press Secretary James Brady...
...Oh, what beautiful corn...
...The wind whispers secrets The field is all ears...
...Her full-length portrait of weariness and dignity is one of this season's great Broadway performances...
...There the "Messiah" Manson would testify on her behalf and preach his message to the world...
...Not exactly Porgy and Bess, but when Pinkins sings them, it doesn't matter...
...The maid listens to "race" music on the radio impersonated by three singers (Tracy Nicole Chapman, Marva Hicks and Ramona Keller) reminiscent of the Suprêmes in their caterwauling period...
...His latest work at the Eugene O'Neill Theater displays some of the same audacity, but very little of the valor that marked his breakthrough play...
...The last part of Act One puts Herman in his place—which is deep in the second rank of Broadway creators...
...Director George C. Wolfe has a thing for symbols...
...9/11 put the kibosh on that...
...Rockwell's music is an appropriate blend of treacle and genuinely hummable themes...
...Rose guiltily decrees that from now on, any money the maid finds will belong to her and her alone...
...All the more reason, then, to applaud the effort that went into Caroline, or Change, with music by Jeanine Tesori and book and lyrics by Tony Kushner...
...Stay with me...
...The results, as usual where Sondheim is concerned, are mixed...
...Thus the 19th-century figures exchange thoughts with the 20th-century ones, egging each other on between songs...
...Without exception, all are deluded, self-aggrandizing nut cases who believe they can alter the course of history...
...Wolfe does have an eye for hues and shadows, however...
...Assassins is hardly a new project...
...audience members at Playwrights Horizons were preoccupied with the first Gulf War...
...He relies on others (many others) for the "books" of his musicals, and therein lies the inconsistency of his oeuvre...
...or Angela Lansbury in Marne...
...Watch mestila, cause I'm in a row I can't sing or dance but I'm the star of the show...
...Surely Ulysses S. Grant was correct when he observed that "the people of the South would have been spared much of the hard feeling" engendered by Abraham Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson...
...Be leery of the wary...
...Matters come to a head during a visit from Noah's grandparents...
...His sensational Angels in America mixed gender roles and featured seraphs, uptight Mormons, AIDS sufferers, and the raucous antigay crusades of the homosexual Red-baiter Roy Cohn...
...She also talks and listens to the washer (Capathia Jenkins) and the dryer (Chuck Cooper) as they comment on various incidents of the day...
...Even though Noah admires Caroline for being "stronger than my father," the bawling out only makes him more careless, more uncaring about the coins...
...The latest and most hostile dispute is triggered by the boy's indifference to money...
...Rose's father (Larry Keith) is far worse...
...A Little Night Music, for example, was written by Hugh Wheeler, Follies by James Goldman, Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods by James Lapine, and Anyone Can Whistle by Arthur Laurents...
...Kushner the poet tends to meander, lax when he should be disciplined, vague when he should be specific...
...The show was scheduled to reopen on Broadway late in 2001...
...Most of the hard-breathing scores feature big parts for aging stars (cf...
...The trouble with the show lies in its depth...
...made a swift recovery and finished out his term in robust health...
...When you have to strain to explain the arcane It if bound to sound profound...
...Act Two is one of the rare exceptions to that rule when Musical brilliantly jeers at the fatuities of Webber, and at Ebb and Kander's scores for the ruthless Cabaret and the pseudo-ruthless Chicago...
...As for the dialogue, it varies from the hyper riffs of Byck to the weirdly comic exchanges between Moore, who puts down Manson, and Fromme, who defends him: Charlie may not be much to look at, but "at least he's the son of God...
...Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme (Mary Catherine Garrison), a one-time high school cheerleader, fell under the druggy spell of Charles Manson and vainly attempted to kill President Gerald R. Ford so that she would be put on trial...
...From the opening notes to the acrimonious finale, it is clear that Assassins is meant as a social comment about the perversion of "can-do" individualism, a revelation of the American soul D. H. Lawrence described as "harsh, isolate, stoic, and a killer...
...They had little interest in a musical that looked backward to another kind of violence: nine men and women, ranging from John Wilkes Booth to John Hinckley Jr., who aimed to kill various U.S...
...Caroline feels demeaned...
...Here the team battens on Sondheim, whose elusive tunes and complex internal rhymes make mockery hard to bring off...
Vol. 87 • May 2004 • No. 3
