CHAMPAGNE LADY
(13 February 1989)
[In early
July, I watched a cable broadcast of Mae West’s I’m No Angel
(1933). I thought of a play based on
West’s career that I’d reviewed years ago—25, it turns out—but didn’t go beyond
that brief thought. Then West, who wrote
the script for the film (which co-starred a very young Cary Grant, 29, who also
starred in West’s previous movie of the same year, She Done Him Wrong), delivered one of her iconic lines: “When I'm
good, I'm very good. But, when I'm bad .
. . I’m better.” That’s a perfect
paraprosdokian, a figure of speech on which I blogged on 12 July 2013, so I
posted a short “Comment” on that ROT page with the quotation. (There was already a line—apparently actually
a paraphrase—from another Mae West movie in the posted list of examples: “Between two evils, I always
pick the one I never tried before,” from 1936’s Klondike
Annie.) Then I remembered my old review of the Mae West musical, Champagne
Lady, and I thought it would be fun to look back at an oldie that predates
not only ROT, but even the play reports I started sending some
out-of-town friends in 2003.
[This review
appeared as half of “Drinking and Driving” in the New York Native
on 13 February 1989. (The second half of
the column covered the French Canadian play The Cezanne Syndrome by Normand Canac-Marquis at Soho Rep.) I’ve revised the review and inserted some
information in the version below that didn’t appear in 1989.
[Champagne Lady doesn’t seem to have left much of a footprint:
there’s nary a mention of it (or the cabaret space where it ran, for that
matter) on the ’Net and even the “Paper of Record,” the New York Times
didn’t run a review. (To be fair, though
the Times now covers Off-Broadway pretty extensively, Champagne Lady
was more Off-Off than Off.) The venue
was the cabaret room, dubbed the Trocadero Theatre Club, of a Greenwich Village
restaurant. The play’s slugged as “A
Bawdy, Intoxicating Musical Comedy Of The Prohibition Era” below the title in
the program, and the setting is described as “New York City In The 20’s With
Prohibition In Full Swing.” Directed by Jon-Michael Delon, Champagne Lady was
written by Nelson Jewell and Richard Atkins and produced by Jonel, Ltd.
(presumably for Jon-Michael + Nelson), at The Trocadero Restaurant, at 368 Bleecker
Street, on the corner of Charles. (There
were no set, costume, or lighting credits in the program.) The one-act non-Equity
showcase, comprised of eight scenes and 10 musical numbers, opened on 5 January
1989 and ran Thursdays, Fridays, and Sundays until 26 February.]
In
a low-ceilinged room below the Trocadero Restaurant, on a tiny, nearly bare
stage, Champagne Lady relates the story of Ruby Lil, who’s “never fully
dressed without a man,” and the men who come up and see her sometimes. Taking its plot from the films of Mae West,
it’s the tale of a bad girl who dupes the authorities while outfoxing
the men who think they’ll take advantage of her. This little musical, set in the Prohibition ’20s,
is performed in the restaurant’s cabaret, creating the small irony of drinking
while watching a play which notes the illegality of that practice.
Irony’s
in short supply in Champagne Lady. Ruby Lil (Tracey Morse) is a straight
impression of West, her name taken from Diamond Lil, the title character in
West’s own eponymous 1928
Broadway play, the basis for her 1933 film She Done Him Wrong. The plot elements that librettist Nelson
Jewell’s borrowed from West’s films include the jilting of an unwelcome lover
(John Combs), who then vindictively hales Ruby Lil into court for
bootlegging. She appears before the
judge (Paul Campana), a lecherous drunk who places Ruby Lil under his own
protection rather than jail her. Despite
Campana’s weak impersonation and intrusive New York intonations, Judge “Willy”
Drakenfeld is supposed to be W. C. Fields (born, famously, near Philadelphia—not
anywhere near New York City). Their
relationship is right out of My Little Chickadee (1940), and I waited in vain to hear him ask Ruby Lil if she
were trying to show contempt for the court so she could reply, “Ooh, I’m tryin’
very hard not to, Judge.”
The
addition of a gigolo (John Patti) tangles the plot, but Ruby Lil unravels it
assisted by her black maid, Beulah (Mari Briggs), a character and relationship
taken directly from I’m No Angel.
(In that movie, West has the line, “Beulah, peel me a grape.” In Champagne Lady, Ruby Lil orders
some grapes, and Beulah responds, “Shall I peels ’em for ya?”)
All
this is mildly amusing, even occasionally quite funny. Morse does a creditable Mae West, and Briggs,
despite the stereotyped role, is very comical as squeaky-voiced Beulah (calling
to mind Butterfly McQueen’s Prissy in 1939’s Gone with the Wind, whom Briggs may have been channeling). Morse has a good belt, and, although Patti’s
baritone has little personality, he’s the best singer in the cast. Richard Atkins’s music, though not
particularly apt for either the Roaring ’20s or Mae West, is pleasant and
Atkins and Jewell’s lyrics are often clever.
The
play, however, is neither a spoof in the vein of, say, A Night in the
Ukraine (1980-81) nor a clever recreation like Little Mary Sunshine (Off-Broadway, 1959-62), but a
vehicle seemingly written for the real West and Fields. There are no comments on the absurdity of the
characters or the blatant racism and sexism.
The producers, whose press release compares Champagne Lady to the
Off-Broadway hits A Chorus Line
(1975 at the Public Theater), Hair (1967 OB) and The
Fantasticks (1960-2002),
have hopes for a full two-act version that don’t seem justified. It’s not campy enough to be a send-up, nor
reverent enough to be an homage; however, the availability of drinks and the
cabaret atmosphere of Downstairs at Trocadero render Champagne Lady an
enjoyable way to pass an hour and ten minutes.
[There
were no other published reviews than my own in the Native that I could find 25 years after the fact:
as I noted above, the Times didn’t
cover Champagne Lady (though the
paper did include it in its theater listings), and the other New York dailies
didn’t, either. I didn’t find a notice
in the Village Voice or the theater trade
paper Show Business, but I did happen
upon a column in the other trade weekly, “Bistro Bits” in Back Stage (3 February 1989), in which Bob Harrington
wrote about the show because it was part of a trend of putting on theater
productions in nightclubs like Downstairs at Trocadero. It may have been the only thing that passed
for a review aside from my own notice. Characterizing
the performance as “as much a backers audition . . . as it is a cabaret revue,”
Harrington wrote that “at times, it actually approaches those vintage ’30s
films, though the similarities are mostly in derivative imitations.” In addition, the cabaret columnist felt, “The
whole production seems to teeter between a high camp spoof and a legitimate
comedy, and it never seems to fall one
way or the other.” Of Jewell and
Atkins’s songs, as well as Morse’s “singing persona,” Harrington observed that
they were “more Sophie Tucker than Mae West . . . . But what do the Tuckerish tunes have to do
with the West plot and impersonation . . . ?”
(Morse was a solo singer at clubs like the Duplex and Don’t Tell Mama
before treading the boards in Champagne Lady.) “‘Champagne Lady,’” the Back
Stage columnist concluded, “has some fun
moments and possibilities as a high camp frolic, but it needs a lot of
work.”
[As
for Mae West (1893-1980), the ostensible subject of what Harrington dubbed a
“mini-musical,” beginning with Sex in 1926, she wrote and starred in her own
Broadway plays. Writing under the pen
name Jane Mast (her birth name was Mary Jane West), the star was already famous
for her double entendres and distinctive walk (which she attributed to a
popular female impersonator on the vaudeville circuit where she got her
start). “Discovered” by the New York Times at
18 in a Broadway revue (which closed after eight shows), West was already 33
when she began her playwriting career—and in 1927, after Sex was raided by city police, West was sentenced
to 10 days on Welfare (now Roosevelt) Island for “corrupting the morals of
youth.” (Her morals trial was held at
the Jefferson Market Courthouse at 10th Street and 6th Avenue in Greenwich
Village—a beautiful red-brick building that’s now my neighborhood library!) She went on to write The Drag (1927), The Wicked Age (1927), Diamond Lil (1928), Pleasure Man (1928), and The Constant Sinner (1931). Hollywood called in 1932, when
West was already 39. Despite her age,
usually a disadvantage for women in Hollywood, especially a newcomer, West was
the definition of “star”—and she controlled her own career, a rarity not just
for women but for any actor in the days of the powerful studios and their
bosses. In 1970, West came out of
retirement to appear in Myra Breckinridge, and she made her last movie, Sextette, in 1978. Mae West died in L.A.
at the age of 87.
[W. C. Fields (1880-1946), whose real name was William Claude
Dukenfield and who made scores of comic films from 1915 to 1944, starred
opposite West in My Little
Chickadee in 1940. I used to howl with laughter watching his
antics in the old flicks on TV when I was in college—Fields was a master of
physical comedy of all kinds, but especially juggling, and an expert stick man
in pool, doing his own trick shots, a routine he’d perfected in vaudeville, for
many of his films. I’ve always felt a
special connection to Fields because he died (at 66) on the very day I was born
(a distinction I share with singer Jimmy Buffett).]
(13 December 2004)
[In a recent
ROT report on an art exhibit, I made passing mention of an art show I’d
seen previously at the same museum. When
I was setting up my report on Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing
the Universe (20 July), I noted that the
last exhibit I’d seen at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum was probably The Aztec
Empire in 2004. I wrote about that show five years before I
ever launched ROT, but because it was part of an omnibus report
covering several exhibits and performances, it’s very short. Now, since I’m posting another archival
report, I decided it would be interesting to combine the two brief pieces as a
look back a decade or two (-and-a-half) at the theater and art scenes in New
York City.
[The Aztec Empire,
organized in collaboration with the National Council for Culture and Arts and the National Institute of
Anthropology and History in Mexico City, ran at the Guggenheim,
on 5th Avenue at 89th Street, from 15 October 2004 to 13 February 2005. The guest curator for Aztec Empire was
Felipe Solís Olguín, director of the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, co-curator of the large-scale survey Aztecs at the
Royal Academy in London in 2003, and one of the world's foremost authorities on
Aztec art and culture. I’ve reedited this
report slightly for posting on the blog.]
Both The Aztec Empire show at the
Guggenheim, which my mother and I saw on 30 November 2004, and China: Dawn
of a Golden Age, 200-750 A.D.at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (12 October 2004-23 January 2005), which we saw
later in the holiday weekend, were good shows, but Aztec Empire, an exhibit of more than 440 works, many never before
seen outside Mexico, drawn from both public and private collections—the first
large-scale survey of Aztec art and culture to be seen in the United States in
more than 20 years—was more interesting since we haven’t seen as much of that
culture as we have China. (We did have a Maya exhibit in D.C. this year, Courtly
Art of the Ancient Maya at the National Gallery of Art’s East Building from
4 April to 25 July 2004, which was magnificent-—another really huge show, by
the way [see my report below]—but China gets a lot of attention all the time
here.)
Slugged as
“the most comprehensive survey of the art and culture of the Aztecs ever assembled
outside Mexico,” the Guggenheim display, covering the 13th to 16th centuries
but focusing on the 15th century, roughly the period of the Renaissance in
Europe which it resembled in ancient Mexican culture, was more appealing as
well as easier to access and traverse. Riding an elevator to the top of
the ramp—though there is also a floor higher we had to walk up to and then
return—then taking a leisurely stroll down the spiral is much easier than going
from exhibit case to exhibit case and room to room while dodging the other
viewers following some other self-defined route. (Actually, we did have
to break the Aztec show part way through to grab a little lunch and then return
to the spot where we interrupted our progress. Couldn’t be helped!)
A highlight
of the exhibition are treasures only recently uncovered at the Templo Mayor
archaeological site in Mexico City, including two monumental (both are about
six feet tall) figures of fired clay, one of an eagle warrior (c. 1440–69), an
elite Aztec soldier, and the other of Mictlantecuhtli (c. 1480), god of the
dead. (I’m constantly astounded at shows
like Aztec Empire—as well as at, say,
American Indian exhibits—how some of the relatively delicate items made of wood
or clay or porcelain managed to survive intact or nearly for
hundreds, even thousands of years buried underfoot. Yes, many of the
items were in tombs, but some were just buried. It’s astonishing to
imagine.) The imposing Eagle
Warrior depicts a standing man wearing a helmet in the form of an eagle, through
whose beak the warrior’s face can be seen. The warrior’s costume also includes stylized
wings with feathers made of stucco and a raptor’s talons. Portraying one of the two most prestigious Aztec
warrior classes (the other wore jaguar costumes), this was one of two statues
found flanking the door to a chamber where the eagle warriors met, and is
believed to represent the morning sun.
(In Aztec mythology, the eagle was the symbol of the sun, to whom all
sacrifices were made.)
Mictlantecuhtli (Lord of Mictlan, the Aztec underworld),
who craves human blood, is quite a grotesque image. The statue stands in a darkened corridor of
the museum, the ghastly figure of a decomposing corpse, stripped of most of its
flesh, its grinning skull cavernous, its hands in the form of huge claws, and its
liver dangling from his exposed ribs.
Throughout
the exhibit is a bestiary of naturalistically observed figures of the biosphere
of Mesoamerica featuring wild beasts such as eagles, coyotes, jaguars, monkeys,
rabbits, frogs, and snakes; insects like locusts, fleas, and a
larger-than-life-size (over 7½ inches long), realistically detailed grasshopper
(c. 1500), carved of orange, semi-precious carnelian stone, that looks like it’s
ready to jump, as well as domesticated animals such as dogs and turkeys. As stylized as Eagle Warrior and Mictlantecuhtli
are, the Mexican bestiary, even the tiny insects magnified dozens of times
actual size, is as lifelike as a zoological study. (In Aztec mythology, animals play important
roles in not only the human sphere, but the spiritual and celestial ones as
well. That’s why so many of the Aztec
gods are shown as hybrids of several animals, such as Quetzalcoatl, the famous
“feathered serpent”: to emphasize the presence of characteristics of a
combination of symbolic powers.) In
addition to animal figures, Aztec Empire also includes images of plants and
agricultural products.
In the end, the
Aztec artifacts were the more interesting to me than the Chinese mostly because
I have a thing for that art. When I visited the Yucatan a dozen years
ago, which is the northernmost extremity of the Mayan territory, I couldn’t get
enough of their carvings and statuary. I desperately wanted to find a
really nice reproduction of something as my souvenir—but the ones I could
afford weren’t nice enough and the ones I liked were just too expensive.
(The Maya simply disappeared—no one really knows why for sure—in about 900 C.E.
and the Aztecs, who were centered on what is now Mexico City—Tenochtitlan in
Aztec times—far to the north of the Maya, were just rising at that time;
nonetheless, there is an iconographic similarity between Mayan art and Aztec,
though I don’t know how much actual influence the older culture had on the
newer one.) Chinese art, especially the porcelain works, is beautiful—I
brought home a fake Tang horse from China, as it happens (and my folks brought
home a real one!)—but the imagery and style of the South and Central American
Indians has always knocked me out.
[I have a similar response to
the art of the Indians of the Pacific Northwest—Oregon, Washington, British
Columbia, Alaska—as my reaction to the Aztec and Maya exhibits. In my
estimation, the northwest Indian art may be the most aesthetically magnificent
of all so-called primitive arts. I didn’t even know about it until I went
to Seattle back in 1989, and I just went nuts for it. I brought back a
mask—a piece of signed art by an Indian artist, not a real religious
artifact—and half a dozen or so prints that were made up as fancy cards for
stationery. I had intended to give the cards away as gifts, but I only
gave away one—plus one I bought specifically as a thank-you gift for someone
who had been my host in San Francisco, where I had stopped before going on to
Seattle—and have kept all the others because I can’t part with them! If
you read my journal of my trip to Alaska (“The Last Frontier”; 26 March, 5 April, 30 April, and 10 May 2014) you’ll
see that I still love that art and that this was part of the reason I went
there.]
THE COURTLY ART OF THE ANCIENT MAYA
(11-13 May 2004)
[Since I
made so much in my report on The Aztec Empire of the Maya show at NGA that same year, I
think it’s worth adding the earlier short report I wrote on that exhibit as
well. The coincidence of seeing the art
of these two cultures within about seven months is enough to make the
experience remarkable, but the fact that both shows so impressed me made the
phenomenon all the more notable.
[As I recorded
above, The Courtly Art of
the Ancient Maya ran at the East Building
of the National Gallery from 4 April to 25 July 2004. My mother and I caught it while I was
visiting her in Washington that April for her 81st birthday; I’ve revised this
report, written about a month later, some for ROT. Kathleen Berrin, Fine Arts
Museums of San Francisco, curator of the art of Africa, Oceania, and the
Americas, and Mary Miller, Vincent J. Scully Professor of the History of Art at
Yale University, were the curators for Courtly Art.]
The Courtly
Art of the Ancient Maya is a huge show, 156 works of art from about 30
public and private collections in Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, Chile, the U.S.,
Switzerland, the U.K., and Australia.
The exhibit, organized with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, focuses
on the art of the various Mayan kings and queens and their courts from 600-800
C.E., a 200-year stretch during which they transformed Mayan art, “achieving a
peak of dramatic expression and naturalism unmatched in the ancient New World,”
according to the museum’s publicity.
(The Mayan civilization, which extended from what is now southern Mexico into northern Central
American—present-day Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador—existed from
about 2000 B.C.E. until after the arrival of the
Spanish, but its classical period extended from about 250 to 900 C.E., after
which, for reasons historians don’t understand, it went into a steep decline. By about 1000 C.E., the grandeur of the Mayan
civilization had ended.) Like The Aztec Empire at the Guggenheim and
exhibits of Native American art at the National Museum of the American Indian
(as well as exhibits at the National Museum of African Art), the Maya exhibit’s
focus is the artistic appeal of the items, not their anthropological
value. The works in The Courtly Art
aren’t folk art, but highly refined works by well-trained professionals in a
Mayan court which made stars of its artists.
A second
aspect of this show is also interesting, in addition to the aesthetic focus:
much of the Mayan culture is under reinterpretation because their hieroglyphics
have only recently begun to be deciphered. (It has been observed that the
Mayan hieroglyphics took decades to decipher because there was no Rosetta Stone
for them, which is true, of course. I recall, however, that the code was
first broken at just about the time my folks and I went to Yucatan back in ’92.
It had defied interpretation for centuries, leading to a massive
misunderstanding of the Mayan culture.) I think the repercussions of the
first approach is self-evident, but the second, the reinterpretation of what we
know about this people, meant that even artifacts that have been on view for
decades have come to reveal or exemplify truths only recently understood.
The most
prominent of these reassessments is that the Maya, whom we used to believe were
basically a peaceful people interested in the arts and astronomy, were warlike
and bloody in the extreme. The Maya of The Courtly Art not only loved blood,
but pain. This is borne out in the art
on display at NGA, most clearly in the magnificent full-size modern reproduction of
wall murals from Bonampak showing a king and court presiding over mutilated
captives in “The Court at War” section of the exhibit. Among the many “courtly” activities depicted
in the mural are prisoners being scourged and killed—some having their fingernails pulled out or their fingers sliced off, some
pleading for mercy, and others awaiting further mutilation and death—as well as
other gruesome scenes. (The mural is
reminiscent of the work of a Mesoamerican Hieronymus Bosch, except that Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, for instance, portrays a grotesque fantasy
world while the Bonampak fresco
putatively represents a real one.) In an
earlier part of The Courtly Art, a pair of relief carvings show
individual captives with their arms tied behind their backs—one seemingly stunned,
another crying, a third staring up in wild-eyed panic. In yet another carving, a
limestone relief depicts the wife of a powerful ruler called Shield Jaguar
pulling a thorn-studded rope through her tongue, the blood spattering on paper in
a basket at Lady Xok’s feet. (In terms
of the Maya, ‘courtly’ doesn’t equate with the common usage in the world of
European chivalry. It refers to “the
sanguinary horrors of Mayan imperial rites,” as the Washington Post said
in an editorial review by Mark Jenkins.)
But the one
thing that hasn’t changed—except in our own appreciation of it—is that the Maya
made incredibly beautiful art. In that same relief of Lady Xok, the
details of Mayan textile work is carved into the limestone in exquisite detail,
showing the intricate weaving and delicate embroidery of the lady’s robes and
Shield Jaguar’s form-fitting armor, replete with ornamental tassels, fringes, and elaborate edgings. In “Life at
the Maya Court,” the first gallery of the show, the Portrait Head of Pakal,
a 7th-century ruler from Palenque, is stunning in its beauty. (Beauty in Mayan culture was associated with
the divine, in particular, with the Maize God.) A stucco carving with an elaborate feathered
headdress, the sculpture depicts a handsome young man (Pakal ruled from 615
C.E., when he was12, until he died at 80 in 683—a Methuselean span in his day)
with classic Mayan looks: an elongated head and prominent nose, full lips, and
piercing eyes.
The Yucatan
is the northernmost reach of the Maya territory, which is centered in southern
Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize. The sites we saw near Cancun (Tulum, Coba,
and Chichen-Itza) were smaller and poorer—outposts really of the major
city-states to the south—and even the carvings and sculptures we saw there were
magnificent. [As I explained in the Aztec
Empire report above, I tried in vain to find something I could afford—a
replica, obviously, or a modern work that drew on the Mayan imagery—to bring
home as my souvenir.] Along with the Northwest Indian art, the Mayan
stuff is the most striking of any indigenous culture I have seen. The Courtly
Art show, which has pieces small and large, even monumental—organized into six
sections: “Life at the Maya Court,”
“The Divine Model of Courtly Life,”
“Women at Court,” “Word and Image in the Maya Court,” “The Court at War,” and “Palenque: An Exemplary Maya Court”—was
breathtaking. And exhausting.
I was left
with the question [which I reiterated recently in my report on Italian Futurism, 15 July 2014] of how
to appreciate the aesthetic beauty of this art, which is undeniable, and not
overlook the innate cruelty and brutality of the violence-loving, bloodthirsty
culture that created it. Paul Richard,
the Washington Post art reviewer, described Mayan art as
“curiously unsettling, fabulous yet fearsome, opulent yet painful.” (The New York Times tellingly titled art writer Holland Carter’s review “A Mystique of Blood
and Beauty.”) I haven’t reconciled this
dichotomy for myself, so I can’t provide any guidance for anyone else. The remoteness in time is certainly part of
the calculus; after all, the Dark Ages in Europe were hardly a benign era in
human history, particularly in terms of humankind’s treatment of its fellow
creatures, yet we can admire the art of that time (or there’d be no point in
the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s magnificent Cloisters). On the other hand, the Mayan art we see in The Courtly Art is not only the product
of a brutal culture, but it openly celebrates that brutality and bloodlust. Whatever the answer is—if, indeed, there is
one—The Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya
is an astonishing experience, the impressions from which will doubtlessly
remain with me for a long time. Of
course, as I’ve already admitted: I’m a sucker for this art anyway, so maybe
I’m no gauge.
[It was only
in the middle of the last century that museums, galleries, and the viewing
public began to consider objects from the diverse cultures of Africa and the
Americas as aesthetic items rather than sociological and anthropological
ones. Some Western artists appreciated
the beauty of African art and were even influenced by it in their own work as
early as the 1890s and the 1920s, but most art from Africa and ancient North,
Central, and South America was shown not in art museums in the West but in
museums of ethnography. Big museums like
NMAI and NMAA, opened in 2004 and 1986, respectively, were both originally
small, private museums trying to break new ground in the world-art museum
scene. The eventual acceptance of this
perspective allowed the establishment of institutions like NMAI and NMAA and
exhibits like The Aztec Empire and The Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya.]
