Doldrums on Broadway
Funke, Lewis
Doldrums on Broadway by LEWIS FUNKE SELDOM does a theater season on Broadway begin the way this one has. Usually the first production turns out to be a dud, and for reasons beyond my ability to...
...True, it will not be at the Winter Garden for as long as My Fair Lady will be at the Mark Hellinger, but this in no sense dims its luster...
...Now Patricia Moyes has come along with an excellent transcription of Anouilh's Leocadia, or Time Remembered...
...Where the trouble is, as far as I am concerned, is that this leading character in action and deed is a big whining baby...
...The last time Carson Mc-Cullers worked in the theater she offered us a dramatization of her novel, The Member of the Wedding, which was one of the high points of the postwar theater...
...Nowhere is there a suggestion that this angry young man is trying to make a decent peace with himself or with society...
...It is one of the plays of his rosier moods and is in a sense a fairy tale, but its theme and its meaning are clear: There is no room in a lifetime for being chained to the past...
...Nowhere in the play is there a suggestion of light or humanity...
...His earlier plays somehow did not impress the New York reviewers or audiences, although Paris and London had early recognized his talents...
...Eugenie Leontovich, as the erstwhile actress, is superb as she recreates for a moment her past stage glory...
...Her role in Time Remembered is, of course, not from the same cloth, nor is it so dominating...
...Well, there is West Side Story, which happens to be one of the major achievements of the American musical theater...
...Three other scripts from whose authors we had expected more than they had to give were Molly Kazan's The Egghead, Carson McCullers' The Square Root of Wonderful, and Herman Wouk's Nature's Way...
...For Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein, and Arthur Laurents, West Side Story had been an adventure, something that interested them for several years and which they were determined to do for their own satisfaction...
...In returning to the theater Saroyan has provided some fine actors with a chance to shine...
...In it there is excitement and beauty amid the gutters and the tenements, and terror that communicates itself with great power...
...Of Anouilh's Time Remembered, let it be noted that the Frenchman is rapidly becoming one of the more saleable of imports...
...The principal protagonist all but drowns you in the cascade of his adjectives, nouns, adverbs and, not least, obscenities...
...Besides West Side Story, the season has been garnished with two other items that have made Broadway a place to visit...
...Mrs...
...in this awful, useless brawling trey inject the light of love, and though their story is tragic it has a quality of beauty that illuminates and inspires...
...Compulsion appears on Broadway in what is oddly labeled a "producer's version," which can mean LEWIS FUNKE is drama editor of the New York Times...
...West Side Story is of a different nature entirely...
...n So much for the major errors...
...I have purposely left until last a play which at the moment seems to have a following, but in which I found no satisfaction at all...
...Compulsion is still on the boards as this is written...
...But retaining its franchise on the unpredictable, the stage has been falling behind the pace set by the initial hit, West Side Story...
...Whether the hardier invaders are being saved for the mid-term remains to be seen...
...A college professor defends a former student against the charge of Communism even in the face of circumstantial evidence that the student is a Communist...
...There is The Queen, who happens to have been, once upon a time, an illustrious actress...
...His aunt, in a mad move to rescue him from his desolation, lures a little Parisian milliner to their chateau...
...Another item, Rumple, is hackneyed stuff essentially, though Eddie Foy Jr...
...She has been a playreader for the Theatre Guild and has had close association with the theater through her husband...
...One of these is the return of William Saroyan with The Cave Dwellers, the other Patricia Moyes' adaptation of Jean Anouilh's Time Remembered...
...As I write there are thun-derings on the horizon, with most attention and hope focused upon Ketti Frings' Look Homeward, Angel, based upon the novel by Thomas Wolfe...
...But, with a few exceptions, thus far the frailties have been all too evident...
...Saroyan is too free a spirit to be bound by a strict plot line...
...To have Saroyan around is especially felicitous at a time when negativism and futility appear to hold the stage both inside the four walls of a playhouse as well as elsewhere...
...In Nature's Way, a comedy, the main problem is one of taste, for Wouk has had a look at some theater people and has decided to hold them up to ridicule...
...This season, however, the theater pattern changed and for the first time in recent memory got off to a winging start...
...In addition, there is a supporting cast that is first-rate...
...There are two star-crossed lovers, the girl a sister of the leader of the Puerto Rican band, the boy the leader of the other...
...The disappointment over the insufficiency of The Square Root of Wonderful is especially keen to those who regard its creator as one of our better writers...
...But the wife of Elia Kazan, one of the truly significant talents on Broadway and in Hollywood, is no neophyte in the theater...
...It is strong stuff...
...In her second play she has not been so successful...
...He simply'intends to go on hurting people and grumbling because he hasn't crashed the upper gates or found himself a nice soft spot in the world...
...By its very nature, and the nature of the Broadway theater, it could never expect to reach the same heights of popularity...
...There is a sad lack of flesh and blood in her characters, and the writing, surprisingly, is mostly pretty flat...
...Literature overflows with youthful rebellion...
...Kazan was new as a playwright...
...But, as a piece of dramatic literature, Compulsion leaves a wide margin for improvement...
...Richard Burton plays the prince with the right ennui and the right petulance...
...The play deals with the young people of England who think that the world is terribly out of joint...
...The Cave Dwellers records the adventures of some penniless people who are camping on the stage of an abandoned theater that is about to be pulled down to make way for a housing project...
...there is The King, who once upon a time was a pretty good circus clown...
...The return of Saroyan is something to cherish...
...Copper and Brass made a gallant effort to bring back a touch of old time fun and failed...
...West Side Story follows a line parallel with Romeo and Juliet...
...One moves out of and into the other, and West Side Story as a consequence becomes a magnificent achievement, an undeniable work of art...
...An actress of consummate skill, with a nice flair for comedy, a sense of whimsy plus intelligence and taste, she plays the part with just enough daftness and seriousness to make it memorable...
...it has been fourteen years since his last play in New York...
...To illustrate this point of view M. Anouilh gives us a Gallic prince of the bluest blood and the greatest wealth who, at the time of the play's beginning, has been brooding for years over a lost love, a ballerina he had known for three brief days before her death...
...Among the disappointments of the fall season has been the artistic failure of Compulsion, which cannot be attributed to a single author since Meyer Levin, who did the original adaptation of his novel, has disowned it on the grounds that too many alterations were made without his consent...
...But this nineteen-year-old actress has a personal sparkle and a brain that promise us further pleasures in the years ahead...
...Look Back in Anger, written by John Osborne, a young English playwright, is probably the most vigorous play in terms of language and realistic acting to come from London in many moons...
...In the theater he has been represented by The Traitor and a dramatic version of The Caine Mutiny...
...Realities of the present must be faced, common sense must prevail, and to live in the years and the memories gone by is utter foolishness...
...Of this trio only Mrs...
...In spite of its obvious shortcomings as a drama, it does contain some of the season's most brilliant performances, particularly by Roddy McDowall and Dean Stockwell, playing the parts of Loeb and Leopold, the collegians who stunned society in the early Twenties with their brutal murder of fourteen year old Bobby Franks...
...there is The Duke who once upon a time was a prize-fight champion, and among others there is The Girl, too young for a once-upon-a-time past...
...Barry Jones, playing the clown, is perfect in a performance that mixes humor and sadness in the manner of the old Chaplin movies...
...Whether there will be anything to dispute the supremacy of West Side Story this season is highly doubtful...
...makes a laudable effort to amuse...
...Sig Arno, in particular, is hilarious as the headwaiter of a night club where the prince spent time with his ballerina...
...The trouble is that homosexuals are not meat for comedy...
...For Miss Hayes, in the role of the slightly nutty duchess, this is one of her most rewarding outings...
...As the little milliner who finally manages to put some foundations under the prince, Miss Strasberg indicates that she is the professional we all thought she was when she made her debut in The Diary of Anne Frank...
...Aside from West Side Story, the musical theater has been on the weak side thus far...
...We have had variety, to be sure: musicals, dramas, comedies, farces, staged readings, and an assortment of solo efforts...
...However, since a New York off-Broadway company put on his Thieves Carnival, Anouilh has been "in...
...remember Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing...
...Before the final curtain is lowered there have been a couple of deaths on the stage—not exactly box-office appeal of a gay comedy...
...Those who created West Side Story are still a little surprised at the success they are having...
...That their efforts have won such acclaim has been spiritual tonic of the most pleasing sort...
...Its setting is the West Side of Manhattan, its subject is juvenile delinquency...
...There are two gangs (Capulets and Montagues), one of Puerto Ricans, the other of native Americans...
...Laurents, who is one of our better and more provocative young playwrights, has followed Shakespeare's tragedy in broad terms...
...We have had our plays of social protest and I believe we did them better...
...The propaganda comes first and the human beings second, and this more often than not spells danger and disaster in the theater...
...it is a joy to hear his splendid voice...
...Usually the first production turns out to be a dud, and for reasons beyond my ability to explain, the same may be said for most of the first plays of the fall...
...My Fair Lady is in a sense a fairy tale, featherweight in its basic content, designed for good, light-hearted amusement...
...They have no lives of their own...
...Lena Home has scored a tremendous personal success in Jamaica, which has little story and a score that is basically sound but unfortunately repetitive, as are the dances...
...Characters are manipulated as if they were ideas...
...In The Egghead she was exposing the weakness of "soft" liberals who are prepared to wrestle even with Thor in defense of good causes...
...As for Nature's Way, the tendency in our precinct is to write it off as a prank, as something, indeed, unworthy of Herman Wouk, who as a novelist can write like a streak—witness The Caine Mutiny...
...Actually, the word "story" is somewhat misleading...
...The defeatism and the negativism portrayed are those one expects from spoiled children...
...What have we had to cheer about...
...and Robbins, a choreographer of talent, has provided the movement and the patterns to express both the music and the story...
...It would be the height of absurdity to argue that there is no place on the stage for these people...
...Although it starts off with the idea that this terrible crime has a message for our time, the idea is crushed under the weight of a sprawling and inept script...
...many things—among them that Robert Thorn had a good deal to do with the rewriting...
...They represent the so-called "working class intellectuals" who resent the fact that in England there is no place for them, that the "old school tie" still is the one that binds...
...There have been imports from France and England...
...It is currently established at the Winter Garden and should be there for some time to come...
...But Laurents, Bernstein, and Robbins have a point of view...
...The milliner bears a startling resemblance to the dead love, except that unlike the ballerina, who died for art (she strangled herself rather than spoil the grace and bravura with which she was tying a scarf), the little milliner is as practical as air-conditioning in the summer time...
...Kazan sparked a lot of interesting dialogue on the stage but her play meets its fate in the abyss that so often engulfs thesis plays...
...It was recognized as such by the Broadway reviewers, too, but what caused the majority of my colleagues to bestow their praise upon the work as a theater piece is somewhat difficult to fathom...
...To achieve its effects Time Remembered must have that theatrical magic that can reach across the footlights and transport a grown-up audience into the world of romance and fantasy...
...After that fortuitous event, Broadway has given hearty welcome to his The Lark (as adapted by Lillian Hellman) and The Waltz of the Toreadors (as adapted by Lu-cienne Hill...
...The Cave Dwellers is one of the most enchanting stories he has ever told...
...Nor is there doubt that Osborne has a marvelous command of the English language...
...In writing of a young woman who has been twice divorced from an irascible, half-mad writer, she has hardly achieved the standards for which she is known...
...Happily for all concerned, in front of and behind the footlights, the sponsors have had the grace, intelligence, and downright good fortune to present on a single stage Helen Hayes, Richard Burton, and Susan Strasberg...
...There are a dozen others who wander in and out of the proceedings, and through it all there is the old Saroyan humor and warmth, a splendid sense of improvisation, and indomitable spirit...
...To help tell their story, Bernstein has provided a score that is full of verve and nerve...
Vol. 22 • January 1958 • No. 1
