Hello, I Must Be Going

...All the more reason to respect his review of Virginia Woolf "Not the least delight of the evening was Alan Schneider's direction, no less imaginative in its variety than impeccable in its detail...

...Composer Jerry Bock and lyricist Sheldon Harnick filled the gap...

...Broadway musicals operated at about $400,000 a week...

...During the dessert course he asked whether I would consider writing regularly for The New Leader...

...The final version, quite deservedly, bombed...

...Unhappily, timid producers and a lagging audience made "straight plays" a rare commodity...

...Calcutta...

...Not that everything was aglow in midtown...

...their Fiddler on the Roof evenhxaHy racked up 3,242 performances...

...The Brecht scholar Eric Bentley, who not only wrote plays but performed in them, served a turn...

...The "jukebox" musical, with tunes by the likes of Billy Joel and Elvis Presley, would also attract attention and revenue from the young, who once regarded the theater as an old folks'home...

...Then came the film adaptation of the musical adaptation of the original movie, also directed by Stroman...

...Economics played a large role: Having a single actor play many parts was cheap and effective—provided the performer was up to the task...

...NEVERTHELESS, a sea change had gotten under way in the American musical...

...Before the 1970s were out, three fresh musicals set a high standard: The free-form Company announced an astonishing new talent, Stephen Sondheim...

...City of the world...

...he described Jerome Robbins' ballyhooed production of Oh, Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feeling So Sad as, "lavish, slick, chi-chi, imaginative, colorful, and all wrong...

...The estimable John Simon, who speaks seven languages fluently, covered virtually every art form in a broad range of publications...

...My stretch lasted well into the next millennium...

...we took our tone from the top, where the only criteria were truth, independence, intelligence, and taste...

...In my view The Producers was one of the most egregious examples in the last category...

...I had no such trepidation...

...Later he did drama criticism in Paris...

...Graffiti disfigured almost every building, pornography shops covered mid-Manhattan, and the phone booths stank of human waste...

...For me, it was an ideal moment to be an aisle-sitter...

...Edward Albee, after years of obscurity and failure, returned to prominence with Three Tall Women...

...As 42nd Street continued its downhill slalom, though, theater attendance fell off...

...So did Alan Schneider, occasionally roaming as far away as Russia, England and Canada to check out new productions...

...It did, however, have a razzle-dazzle director...

...He printed the piece and said he would get back to me for a lunch sometime...

...all the lands of the earth make contributions here...

...Suffocated by indifference and inanition, the locale had been a hangout for drug dealers, prostitutes and their Johns...

...Cats, a plotless musical based on T.S.Eliot's light verse, surprised everyone by outlasting the decade...

...Soon Sondheim's musicals predominated on Broadway, from A Little Night Music to Sweeney Todd to Pacific Overtures...

...From here on the Corporate Musical, à la Disney's Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, would set the standard...

...As always, Mike Kolatch's timing was exquisite...

...It was produced by the British mogul Cameron Mackintosh, who had previously presented the long-running Les Misérables...

...The death of Hammerstein ended Broadway's most successful collaboration...

...her Heidi Chronicles had ticket buyers freely rolling in the aisles...

...Au fond, Rent was merely an updated La Bohème...

...Would I! Deliriously, I signed on and in 1991 took over the drama critic's chair...

...so did Ain't Misbehavin', a biographical take on Fats Waller...

...Indeed, the veteran Broadway producer Emanuel Azenberg estimated that staging a Neil Simon comedy on Broadway would cost $1.6 million, while the same production downtown could be brought in for $400,000...

...In the late 1960s and '70s, a shoddiness afflicted the stage, instanced by productions like the smirky revue Oh...

...Other theater pros holding forth in the NL included Jonathan Miller, the brilliant self-satirist of Beyond the Fringe ("I'm not a Jew, I'm Jewish") who contributed an overview of his fellow thespians...

...Early on, Robert Lewis, a cofounder of the celebrated Actors Studio along with Elia Kazan and Cheryl Crawford, offered evaluations of the New York stage...

...Just as the theater picked up velocity, he invited me to the promised lunch...

...He would go on to create a total of 10 outstanding dramas, each representing a different decade of the black experience in the 20th century...

...The daily critics know all about those yearnings...

...Cops preferred to walk in twos for fear of assaults...

...New York City was in the midst of a theatrical renaissance...

...when Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein III redefined the Broadway musical...

...won him the first of five Tony awards...

...Women playwrights entered the scene...

...Most of his successors have similarly had vast collections of arrows in their quivers...

...Possessing a sharp eye for emerging talents, he wrote in 1962: "Christopher Plummer "s portrayal of Cyrano de Bergerac is not merely admirable, it is a remarkable performance by a young actor whose talent seems to have no limit beyondhis own endurance...

...Still, the Fabulous Invalid managed to survive and, on occasion, to inspire...

...As Ireported, there weren't enough new talents on display, and far too many brand-name revivals, British imports of varying quality, and overblown, overpriced musicals...

...That epochal meal took place at the end of the 1980s...

...Soon the urge to applaud the second-rate becomes irresistible...

...Copies of the magazine were always around...

...Miss Saigon, a London import, put Madame Butterfly in a Vietnam setting...

...Butthe traditional "book" musical started to go out of fashion when the youthquake musicals Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar became megahits...

...Tony Kushner's gender-bending epic Angels in America took New York, and later the whole country, by storm...

...It was a time when Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and William Inge dominated the stage...

...In the first place, the dramatic cleanup of Times Square and environs was making an enormous difference to show business, and to the soul of New York City...

...Like The Producers it featured a banal score, this one pushed hard by Harvey Fierstein in his most outrageous transvestite impersonation...

...Naturally, tourists kept their distance, and even native New Yorkers only went to smash hits—shows that guaranteed full houses and safe streets as the big theaters emptied onto evening sidewalks...

...The Wiz, an all-black interpretation of The Wizard of Oz, won another Tony...

...The New Leader's drama critics were quick to note all that, not least because so many of them were theatrical professionals...

...Albert Bermel presided over the "On Stage" column in much of the 1960s, then took time off to work on his own projects—among them studies of Antonin Artaud's Theater of Cruelty concept and the farces of Molière—before returning to his post in the 1970s...

...It was then that things started to turn around in New York and nationwide...

...Writers for weekly newsmagazines have a little more time to consider their opinions, and a lot less economic stress...

...No wonder such "constructive criticism" often winds up on theater marquees accompanied by outsized exclamation points...

...I was reviewing films and books for Time during this period, cramped, as always, for space, and gazing longingly at the room The New Leader gave its writers...

...As a lifelong student of New York, I knew Manhattan was assailed by a devastating fire in 1778 and came back stronger than before...

...orchestra tickets went for as much as $500 apiece, and Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick vaulted from second leads to superstars...

...Susan Stroman's work convinced some easily seduced opinion makers that Mel Brooks' adaptation of his 1966 film was a laugh a nanosecond...

...Here again he struck it rich, and fellow producers forecast a new invasion from Blighty...

...It had neither memorable melodies nor witty lyrics nor credible human beings...

...when small downtown theaters like Circle in the Square and the Theater de Lys began to house long-running hits like Summer and Smoke and the Threepenny Opera, ushering in the Off-Broadway boom...

...Against all odds, and despite the hostility of Robert Moses, Joe Papp founded the New York Shakespeare Festival and offered free performances in Central Park...

...Audiences finally realized how badly they had been had...

...City of spires...

...It caught on overnight...

...an Off-Broadway musical cost one quarter as much...

...For months attendance plummeted, despite a $2.5 million grant from the city to keep plays running, despite calls from Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to help New York by going out to dinner and a show...

...Walter Goodman, besides writing for a host of newspapers and magazines, from the New York Times to the American Scholar, was the author of such highly regarded books as The Committee (about huac) and The Clowns of Commerce (about the world of advertising...

...The African-American playwright August Wilson won a Pulitzer Prize for Fences...

...Interestingly enough, John Simon entered the NL scene a few months later, announcing belligerently in print that he would truckle to no one, and that indulgences were not his style...

...Schneider's direction of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf...

...I can also testify that, from start to finish, we appraisers at the NL were beholden to no one...

...Henry Popkin taught theater courses in the State University of New York system...

...Alas, solo turns by lesser talents turned out to be lovelorn, druglorn or boozelorn confessionals, or else standup comedy badly disguised as a stage show...

...Simultaneously, Off-Broadway went upscale...

...Walt Whitman, 16 years old at the time, expressed astonishment when the town rose up like the Phoenix emerging from its own ashes...

...My wife and I are no longer in the aisle seats...

...Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart brought a different kind of tear to their eyes...

...The one-man funny machine Neil Simon garnered so much celebrity (and royalties) that the Schuberts renamed the Alvin Theater in his honor...

...As the curtain lowers we both feel confident that the 3,000-year-old art form will persist...

...The New Leader, a bit younger, will also have a life after life, in print, on the net, in libraries, in PhD theses, in fond looks backward by a loyal audience and a dedicated group of contributors...

...Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera, which was less concerned with characters than with the chandelier hovering above them, is still running...

...The musical Raisin, based on Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, won the Tony Award for the Best New Musical...

...On Stage Hello, I Must Be Going By Stefan Kanfer ON Broadway, Off-Broadway, Off-Off Broadway, every actor, director and playwright, every stage, lighting and costume designer, wants arave review...

...A dozen little theaters on 42nd Street between 8th and 9th Avenues, and others in Chelsea and Greenwich Village, offered a cornucopia of outstanding drama (Wit, for example), comedy (All in the Timing) and musicals (I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change...

...He was given the George Jean Nathan Dramatic Criticism Award for the 1973-74 season...

...Drama commanded center stage as the millennium reached its final decade...

...But Schneider was no pushover...

...The streets were even seamier, yet there were hopeful signs...

...Throughout all those changes, the theater in New York was altering as well...

...The spires glisten again, and, as the alphabetical listings in the New York Times testify, the theater booms anew in 2006...

...They mistook the dusk for the dawn...

...So was John Leguizamo: In the tragicomedy Freak he impersonated all five members of a dysfunctional Latino family...

...Once more, dire predictions were made about the future of Broadway and Off-Broadway...

...With all its flaws, Rent's popularity gave me some hope for Broadway's future...

...But having worked in all three categories of journalism (at the New York Times, Time and The New Leader), I can testify that only contributors to "little" magazines completely escape the demands for approbation...

...In 1835 another conflagration nearly wiped out the city...

...In the same period another retelling of a classic opera made its appearance...

...As the doggerel has it: The critic leaves at curtain fall To find in starting to pursue it He scarcely saw the play at all For starting to review it...

...Sondheim won his Pulitzer for Sundays in the Park with George...

...For the civil rights movement was not only transforming politics, it was rocking the stage...

...Luminous...

...Playing the mother of a rebellious teenager, he mugged, camped and croaked until he won audiences over— but not me...

...Deep down in the barrel was Hairspray, another adaptation of a minor and vastly overpraised film...

...And from 1980 until his death in 1988, Sauvage returned to that task at the NL...

...All told, some 20-odd NL reviewers sat on the aisle, beginning with Joseph T. Shipley, who made his first appearance in the issue of March 1,1924, with a poem entitled "Thought...

...Starting in 1962 Leo Sauvage, the New York correspondent of the French daily Le Figaro, wrote in these pages on Cuba and President John F. Kennedy's assassination...

...and 1776tookabright look back at the Founding Fathers one step ahead of the American bicentennial...

...Cabaret offered an acrid, haunting view of Germany in the 1930s...

...His books included an investigation into the Warren Report and the French bestseller Les Américains...

...No wonder our encomiums were so rarely hyped...

...They were taken over by my son Ethan and his wife in 2004.1 don't know of another instance when a theater critic sired another theater critic,but then, this magazine has been a trendsetter in many ways...

...this was the last of the musicalized "Brit hits" to come to Broadway...

...During World War II, he founded an underground theater troupe in Marseilles...

...The events of 9/11 sent the theater, like most New Yorkers, into a racking depression...

...All this changed in the 1990s, when Disney, Condé Nast and nasdaq moved into the area...

...Office buildings rose, streets got patrolled, and two large theaters were luxuriously refurbished—the American Airlines and the Ford...

...Bubbling Brown Sugar, a celebration of Harlem in its golden years, ran for three seasons, and Porgy and Bess was triumphantly revived...

...he proclaimed in Leaves of Grass, his love letter to New York, "For all races were here...

...One afternoon, in a fit of pique, I wrote an attack on Alexander Cockburn's rabid writings in the Nation and sent it to Kolatch...

...An avalanche of laughter...

...Surrounding their notices are effusive feature stories about celebrities, fullpage ads for incoming shows, paid listings of comedies, dramas and musicals...

...Handing over a $ 10,000 tax free check, the award committee cited Bermel's "visual sensitivity, critical taste and trenchant wit...

...Diana Trilling, for example, was not only an enthusiast of live performance...

...Henry Luce was a big fan...

...she was a notable author and literary critic whose scholarship covered subjects as diverse as the works of George Orwell and the murder of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor...

...Two generations of Kanfers consider it an unparalleled honor to have been among them...

...A powerhouse performance...

...clearly there was a new generation of playgoers out there...

...Anne Deavere Smith's examination of the Rodney King incident, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, headed a long list of one-person shows...

...The starving, tubercular artists of Paris were turned into the struggling, unwashed and sometimes diseased denizens of Alphabet City—the Lower East Side neighborhood encompassing Avenues A to D. The score was conventional, but the multiracial cast was not...

...Under Mike Kolatch the culture sections bloomed, with extra pages given over to close considerations of literature and the performing arts...

...Although Miller and Inge and Williams were around (Small Craft Warnings was Williams' first theatrical acknowledgment of his homosexuality), new voices were hard to find...

...In the middle of the Vietnam War, Boris Pokarzhevsky, director of the Moscow Arts Center, visited Actors Equity and observed, "The muses sing when the guns are silent...

...Smith certainly was...

...A respected lexicographer, controversial novelist, and English teacher at Stuyvesant High School, he shortly slipped into the theater slot...

...Lanford Wilson's Lemon Sky and David Mamet's American Buffalo, starring a newcomer named Al Pacino, provided a few encouraging signs...

...Wendy Wasserstein led the way...