“Moron! Vermin! Curate! Cretin! Crritic!!”: John Simon (1925-2019) - Part 1

[John Simon, former theater reviewer for New York magazine for almost four decades (among other gigs), died in Valhalla, New York, on Sunday, 24 November.  He was not a theater writer for whom I had a great deal of admiration—and I wasn’t alone in this sentiment.  In his New York Times obituary, Robert D. McFadden characterized him as “one of the nation’s most erudite, vitriolic and vilified culture critics, who illuminated and savaged a remarkable range of plays, films, literature and art works and their creators for more than a half-century . . . .”  Andrew Sarris, film critic for the Village Voice, called Simon “the Count Dracula of critics.”

[Simon also had no compunction about savaging actors and even other reviewers in terms that McFadden found “often meanspirited.”  It was this trait that most offended me: the gratuitous insulting of an actor for her appearance or his voice.  (As you’ll see below, he disparaged actor Mandy Patinkin, who, for those who don’t know it, is Jewish, for his “bulky, hulking head, further swelled by a mass of raven hair, [that] makes him look rather like a caricature in the notorious Nazi publication Der Stürmer.”  In the same review, Simon also skewered Christopher Reeve and Alfre Woodard using references to their backgrounds; his remarks about Woodard weren’t just nasty, they were racist..

[Probably, though, Simon’s worst offense as a critic was, as McFadden put it, that he felt that “the arts in America were in decline, or at least in a state of perpetual confusion, and he insisted that his mission was to raise standards through unflinching criticism.”  In his 1974 Drama Review essay “Criticism: Four Faults,” Michael Kirby asserts:

There are critics who actually propose that they are establishing esthetic standards.  (. . . [T]his is obvious arrogance.  It implies that their standards are correct and are superior in some respect to the standards of others.)  Even when no claims are made, the results are the same: the values of one person reinforce or contradict—thereby possibly changing—the values held by others.  Individual taste is forced toward the norm or kept there”

[Kirby, a former New York University professor of Performance Studies and editor of TDR,: “Under fascism, one person or party rules; standardization and conformity are imposed by dictate,” so he decries Simon’s self-proclaimed mission as a “fascism of taste.” 

[As it happens, I had a brief brush with Simon when I was in the criticism game myself.  In the late ’80s, I was a stringer for the New York Native and in March 1989, I was assigned to review The Winter’s Tale, part of the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater’s Shakespeare Marathon (staging all of Shakespeare’s plays over ten years).  My review and John Simon’s New York magazine notice came out on the same date. 

[I was aghast at what Simon said about the work!  I was so angry—I had already dumped my subscription to New York because of his reviews—I decided to write not only to Simon’s editor, Edward Kosner, but the editors of as many New York periodicals as I could think of.  (I wasn’t alone: a slew of theater folk also wrote to publications and denounced Simon’s bigotry and slurs.)  At the end of my letter, I expressed my disgust with the review and the writer and urged “my brother journalists and critics to join me.”

[In recognition of Simon’s passing, I’ve put together some of the documents of that contretemps, starting with his New York review and including my original letter to the editors, along with some other responses to Simon’s column.  There are more than I anticipated, so this will be a multi-part post; Part 1 contains Simon’s review of The Winter’s Tale, plus my review from the Native and columns from a few other papers.  Part 2 will go up on Rick On Theater on 1 December.  Please comeback to ROT for the continuation.]

“LAPINING AWAY”

by John Simon
New York

3 April 1989

[Simon’s review of the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater’s production of William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale appeared in New York (then owned by Ruoert Murdoch) on pages 79-80 on 3 April 1989.]

With its eighth production in the Papp Shakespeare marathon, The Winter’s Tale, the Public Theater has finally succeeded in going private.  Everyone here seems to be doing his own thing, and these foolish things played end to end spell catastrophe.  Take first the idea of the director, James Lapine, to set a play whose characters have mostly Greek and Roman names, and who consult Apollo’s oracle at Delphi, in the eighteenth century, which takes it as far from its intentions as from us.  That rationalist century was as irrational as any, but it made a grand show of enshrining reason as its goddess—for which there is no parallel either in Shakespeare’s world or in Lapine’s head.

I imagine the director chose the settecento setting to accommodate both a huge and a hugely irrelevant reproduction of a Guido Reni painting and a character from the commedia dell’arte, Harlequin, whom he apparently associates with Longhi and the eighteenth century, and whom he turns into a sort of stage manager.  This intruder not only hands the cast costumes from an onstage trunk but also puts on a dumb play à la Hamlet in which to catch the conscience of another king.  (For these inserts, you have to cut out gobs of text; but who cares about that, right?)

Worse, Lapine (best known as director or co-creator of recent Sondheim musicals, as well as those of William Finn, about whom more anon) has presumed to write a new beginning for the play, a practice that, unfortunately, has a precedent at the Public.  Accordingly, the entire play is turned into a fairy tale told by little Mamillius to his mother, Queen Hermione—which effectively robs it of all its drama.  Granted, The Winter’s Tale is one of Shakespeare’s so-called romances; but what makes them, or any romance, exciting is the ability to make the fairy-tale world real.  Lapine’s liminal, antidramatic irony trivializes everything, not least the subsequent death of Mamillius.

And then some.  Parts of the play are gussied up as a contemporary musical comedy—with music by the aforementioned Mr. Finn and his usual orchestrator, Michael Starobin—which has nothing to do with either Shakespeare’s or Lapine’s chosen period, but does fit in with Lapine’s musical-comedy staging, what with, for example, the auxiliary characters often seated on a pair of stairways going off right and left from an upstage platform.  Sitting behind a translucent red curtain and half-lit by Beverly Emmons, the flashy lighting designer, these characters look like a cross between the front-stoop sitters of Street Scene and souls in a window-dresser’s hell.  Luckily for them, they get time off when Autolycus takes a protracted pee where they customarily sit.

Now for the perverse casting and worse acting.  No one here speaks verse as verse (that nicety has been pretty much abolished at the Public), but more important, no one even speaks beautifully.  Instead, we get various kinds of palaver, from prosy to preposterous, that remain utterly unintegrated.  The chief disaster in a close contest is Mandy Patinkin (who should have retired on his Evita laurels, to be fondly remembered ever since) as Leontes, the jealousy-maddened king of Sicilia.  Patinkin talks in a flat New York-accented voice, periodically, and usually inexplicably, lapsing into an inaudible whisper or bursting into an incomprehensible roar.  Since, as he himself has said, and briefly demonstrates, he doesn’t know what to do with his hands, he tends to keep them behind his back, as if he were handcuffed or an international financier.  This, combining with his bulky, hulking head, further swelled by a mass of raven hair, makes him look rather like a caricature in the notorious Nazi publication Der Stürmer.  When, however, he stretches out in a vaguely boot-shaped chaise longue, you’d think him a road company Marat getting ready for Charlotte Corday.

His timing is particularly off, but no more so than that of his fellow king, Polixenes, played by Christopher Reeve, the Superman whom trick photography projected into our skies and onto our screen and stage.  He does not so much speak his lines as gargle with them, in some sort of artfully snotty Ivy League accent, while strutting and striding in his best Skull and Bones manner.  I kept hoping he would transform himself at least into Clark Kent, but no such luck.  Even more bizarre is the Paulina of Alfre Woodard, visually a cross between Topsy and the Medusa, aurally (at any rate in the first half) a pretty fair impersonation of Butterfly McQueen.  If Miss Woodard weren’t black, one might suspect her of racism; as it is, one suspects her merely of not having the foggiest notion about how to play a classical role. 

Perdita, a radiant Proserpine figure, in whom beauty and natural nobility combine into a symbol of the mercies of Providence, requires an actress of salient loveliness and charismatic grace.  Sixty years ago, E.M.W. Tillyard complained that “the part . . . is usually taken by some pretty little fool or pert suburban charmer”; what would the eminent Shakespearean have made of Jennifer Dundas, who, though decidedly little, foolish, and suburban, doesn’t even manage the rest of that reprehended repertoire?  As Antigonus, Graham Brown uses his tissue-paper-over-the-comb-like voice as if he were a big, bleating flugelhorn gone bonkers.  You’d think even the bear who devours him would find him unbearable.  MacIntyre Dixon and Tom McGowan are routine clowns, but Rocco Sisto’s Autolycus is not an “engagingly lighthearted rogue” (Robin May’s phrase) but a greasy, leering, and cold-blooded creep.  As two minor lords, Albert Farrar and Peter Jay Fernandez contribute major damage; Jesse Bernstein cannot even make Mamillius moving.

Under better direction, Graham Winton (Florizel), James Olson (though miscast as Camillo), and Michael Cumpsty (too bad he has to camp up the role of Time) could have done respectably.  Yet the greatest waste is that of Diana Venora, a fine actress but not your ideal Hermione.  She is best in tough, outspoken, witty—even abrasive—roles, and has the perky face and streetwise voice to go with them.  As (sometimes literally) the picture of pure, abused womanhood, she would need more directorial help than she gets here.  Lapine even cuts her crucial last speech.  Rob Besserer moves and dances sinuously as Harlequin, but remains an interloping busybody.

John Arnone is a clever set designer and his present décor would do handily for some other play—although the Bohemian scenes work well enough in this one, too.  His Sicilia, alas, lacks austere grandeur.  Beverly Emmons provides her usual exaggerated lighting effects, and Franne Lee, who specializes in rags and motley, offers mostly that by way of costumes—perhaps appropriately, given that onstage-trunk provenance.  Still, it would be nice if the prince’s and the rogue’s costumes were sufficiently different to alter the wearers’ status when they exchange them, and if the actors were remotely the same size.

In the end, I think I figured out why Lapine imposed that inapposite Reni painting, Nessus and Deianeira, on us.  His entire concept is a Nessus’ shirt, torturing the play to death.  Lapine’s Winter’s Tale is a tale, all right, albeit not one told to Hermione by her son.  Rather, it’s a tale told by an idiot, with unsound sound and puffs of misplaced fury.  Lapine has said, “I’m drawn to dreams. . . .  They’re ineffable.”  I think he is raptly contemplating (to quote Eliot) “his ineffable, effable/Effanineffable” inscrutable dreams.

[McFadden characterized Simon’s prose style as writing that “danced with literary allusions and arch rhetoric”—I’d have said he was infected with the William F. Buckley Syndrome—the compulsion deliberately to choose a $50 word or an arcane reference when a $5 word or accessible allusion is available, just to show off.  You can see what Simon’s obituary writer meant.

[I’ll try to interpret some of the more obvious references in Simon’s Winter’s Tale notice—but I won’t catch all of them.

Guido Reni (1575 -1642)  – an Italian painter of the Baroque period; he painted religious, mythological, and allegorical subjects, one of which is The Abduction of Deianeira (1617-21), also known as Nessus and Deianeira.  The painting illustrates the mythical story (told in Sophocles’ play Women of Trachis) of the centaur Nessus on whose back Deianeira, the beautiful wife of Heracles, rode across the river Euenos. Nessus decided to abduct and rape Deianeira, but Heracles, on the bank of the river, heard Deianeira’s cries and shot Nessus with a poisoned arrow.  In revenge, Nessus told Deianeira that his blood was a charm to ensure that Heracles would be true to her forever and she believed him even though it was commonly known that a centaur’s blood was poisonous.  Deianeira collected Nessus’ blood, and one day, afraid that Heracles had taken a lover, she gave him a tunic soaked in Nessus’ blood.  When Heracles put the tunic on, the poison cooked him alive, and to escape the unbearable pain, he built a funeral pyre and threw himself on it.  Simon alludes to this myth at the end of his review.

Longhi – I’m not sure if Simon’s referring to Alessandro Longhi (1733–1813) or Pietro Longhi (1701–1785 or 1702–1785), both Italian painters of the period.  I suspect he means Pietro Longhi, who was the more prominent artist and who’s more likely, as a genre painter, to have painted actors or stage characters such as Arlecchino (the Italian name for the commedia character Harlequin).

Street Scene – a 1929 play by Elmer Rice (1892-1967) that’s set on the front stoop of a New York City brownstone and in the adjacent street.

his Evita laurels – Patinkin appeared as Che Guevarra in Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Evita in its Broadway première.  The play opened at the Broadway Theatre on 25 September 1979.  As for the other references to Patinkin, he is Jewish, which is what makes the reference below so hurtful, but he’s actually from Chicago, not New York City.

Der Stürmer – as Simon writes, a notorious Nazi periodical published in Germany from 1923 to the end of the Third Reich.  A weekly tabloid newspaper, it was vehemently anti-Semitic and was famous for its insulting and degrading cartoons of Jewish people.

Marat getting ready for Charlotte Corday – Jean-Paul Marat (1743-93) was a French revolutionary who, because he suffered from a skin condition, only found relief by soaking in a medicinal bath.  He was assassinated in his bath by Charlotte Corday (1768-93) on 3 July 1793.  I assume Simon is also making reference to the 1963 play The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (usually just called Marat/Sade) by German playwright Peter Weiss (1916-82), which tells this story.  The Royal Shakespeare Company did a landmark production of the English translation on Broadway in 1965-66.

Christopher Reeve – The actor, born in 1952, was paralyzed by an horseback-riding accident in 1995, just six years after this performance; he died in 2004.  He was, indeed, an Ivy Leaguer—he attended Cornell University—but had no connection to Skull and Bones, which is a secret society at Yale University.  He was an experienced stage actor long before he was cast as Superman in 1978.

Alfre Woodard – The references to Topsy and Butterfly McQueen are particularly egregious.  Topsy is a character in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a young slave girl, and has become a racial stereotype of the “pickaninny.”  Butterfly McQueen (1911-95) was an African-American actress who famously played maids to wealthy white women, such as Prissy, Scarlett O'Hara's maid, in the 1939 film Gone with the Wind.  In that part, McQueen spoke in a high-pitched, squeaky voice and always seemed flustered or frightened.  Simon may not have felt Woodard had any idea how to perform a classical role, but the Actors’ Equity Association felt differently: AEA awarded her the 1989 Joe A. Callaway Award for her performance in The Winter’s Tale.  (The Callaway Award is given to an actor, selected by a panel of critics, for the best performance in a classical play in the New York metropolitan area.)

E. M. W. Tillyard (1889-1962) – an English classical and literary scholar.

Robin May – I’m sorry, but Simon’s got me here; I have no idea who this is.  (Possibly Robin May, 1929-96, an actor who became a writer and journalist specializing in theater, opera, and the American west.)

“his ineffable, effable/Effanineffable” – as you might guess, a quotation from T. S. Eliot’s (1888-1965) Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939), which was later transformed into the 1981 musical Cats by Andrew Lloyd Webber (b. 1948).  The passage is from the poem “The Naming of Cats,” the last lines of which read:

When you notice a cat in profound meditation,

        The reason, I tell you, is always the same:

His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation

        Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:

                His ineffable effable

                Effanineffable

Deep and inscrutable singular Name.

[As for the rest, you’re on  your own I’m afraid.  Just like Simon’s readers in 1989!]

*  *  *  *
“WINTER PLEASURES, SUMMER DOLDRUMS”

Rick

3 April 1989

[This is my own review of Winter’s Tale from page 25 of the New York Native of 3 April 1989.  The column covered two plays; “Summer Doldrums” refers to the second presentation, Adjoining Traces by Randy Buck at the 45th Street Theatre in the Theatre District.  (It’s a play about the summer of 1946, when Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers shared a house on Nantucket while he worked on the script of Summer and Smoke and she adapted her  novel The Member of the Wedding into a stage play.  I have deleted that half of the column because it’s not relevant to this post.)]

James Lapine’s production of The Winter’s Tale is the best Shakespeare I’ve seen in a very long time.  Running three hours plus intermission, the performance is so engaging it seems shorter than some recent one-act offerings I’ve sat through. 

Lapine, best known as Stephen Sondheim’s collaborator and director for Sunday in the Park With George and Into the Woods, mounts the story with energy and honesty.  Despite the famous problems with Winter’s Tale, stumbling blocks for literary scholars, Lapine puts on stage a piece of theater that moves its audience alternately to tears and laughter.  Even given the improbable plot, it is impossible not to be caught up in it.  There were quite a few damp eyes among the audience during the final scene, an astounding response to Shakespeare.

There are no startling directorial tricks or innovations here.  Lapine’s production is straightforward and simple, calling for essentially realistic acting from his cast.  His most noticeable adjustments are to clothe his company, according to the program, in late-eighteenth-century dress (though it looks early nineteenth) and to start the play with the scene, repeated later in its proper place, in which Hermione coaxes Mamillius to “sit by us, And tell’s a tale.”  The costumes, by Franne Lee, give an attractive look to the production, but have little other effect.  The new prologue, however, ends with the appearance of Harlequin (Rob Besserer) who passes out costume bits—sashes, robes, a bear’s head—from a trunk, resolving some of the play’s bumpiness by setting it up as a child’s story (“a sad tale’s best for winter”).  Harlequin’s reappearance at the end of the first act and briefly, behind a scrim, at the end of Act Two, reminds us that we’ve been watching a story.

The device is nice, but what really makes this such a good production is the acting.  Lapine’s cast, drawn essentially from the Joseph Papp Repertory Company, is solid to the last character, creating one of the most even ensembles I have seen on a NYSF stage.  Even fifth-grader Jesse Bernstein (Mamillius) works simply, engaged in each moment even when he is not the focus.  Other standouts in the company are Mandy Patinkin, who makes the difficult role of Leontes, even his mercurial shift from paranoid jealousy to abject penitence, credible and sympathetic; Diane Venora, whose sweet Hermione draws tears from spectators’ eyes; Alfre Woodard, a powerful and stalwart Paulina; and Rocco Sisto, whose Autolycus, a delightful singing rogue, cannot help picking a pocket or lifting a broach at any opportunity.  Other members of the strong cast, including Christopher Reeve (Polixenes), James Olson (Camillo), Tom McGowan (Clown), Graham Winton (Florizel) and Jennifer Dundas (Perdita), provide frequent pleasure, too.

*  *  *  *

“PAPP DEMANDS SIMON’S FIRING”

“Broadway Beat” 
by Dana Maychick

New York Post

30 March 1989

[Readers of Rick On Theater may notice a slight disconnect in this article (and several following ones): its publication date precedes the date on the cover of both Simon’s New York review and my own in the Native.  How can there be a response to the review before it’s on the newsstands?  Well, it’s actually simple to explain—though not to justify: both New York and the New York Native dated their issues ahead of the calendar—so issues with a cover date of Monday, 3 April, were actually published on Monday, 27 March.  I know, it doesn’t really make sense—but that’s the fac’, Jack.  Live with it!]

Claiming flourishes of “racism and anti-Semitism,” New York Shakespeare Festival producer Joseph Papp has called for the firing of New York magazine’s theater critic John Simon over his review of Papp’s latest offering, “The Winter’s Tale.” 

Yesterday, New York magazine Editor and Publisher Ed Kosner refused—through his assistant—to comment.

“What Simon says is an insult to blacks and Jews and all fair-minded people.” Papp said yesterday.  “It goes beyond cruelty, Simon’s favorite weapon, directly to bigotry.  And it’s a reason for the magazine to fire him.”

In his scathing review of “The Winter’s Tale” in the April 3 issue of New York—the most negative among predominantly positive notoces—Simon compared black actress Alfre Woodard to several black caricatures of blacks [sic], including the pickaninny character Topsy from “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and Butterfly McQueen, the actress best known for her portrayal of Scarlett O’Hara’s squeaky-voiced slave Prissy in “Gone With the Wind.”

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has asked that Simon be severely chastised.  “It’s beyond my comprehension that this kind of stuff is still going on,” said spokesperson Hazel Dukes.

Simon also wrote that actor Mandy Patinkin looks “rather like a caricature in the notorious Nazi publication Der Stuermer,” Julius Streicher’s Jew-baiting, Nazi newspaper which often depicted Jews as grotesque, misshapen human beings.

A spokesperson for the Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai B’rith said he will review the matter with the officers of the organization.

Papp went on to  characterize Simon as “perverted.  He hates to see ethnicity.  He hates to look at black people, anybody who’s different.  His philosophy is close to Nazism: it’s as if physical purity is all he looks for.  I’m really disgusted by this.["]

“Mandy has this wonderful, open face,” Papp  continued.  “It’s a Jewish face, yes, a Semitic face.  What’s wrong with that?  Look at Simon himself.  He’s hardly the ideal Aryan.  He may not be Aryan at all.  He may be a denying, self-hating Jew.  And he should look in the mirror.  He looks like the picture of Dorian Gray two years after the deterioration.  And it’s funny, because he’s always dating these 16- and 17-year-olds.”

The mud-slinging continued when Simon was asked to comment.  The critic called the producer a “madman” and “a total wash-out.  He says I should be fired?  Ha!  He’s a great impresario but he should stick to that.  When it comes to taste, he has none.  That productions of Shakespeare in this country should largely rely on what he gives us is a travesty.”

Our phone conversation was interrupted when Simon had to take a call from his magazine.  He called back and agreed to explain his review.

“What I was saying, in essence, is that Patinkin is too ethnic to play the role of Leontes.  You can’t play the king of a Greek or Roman kingdom if you look too ethnic.”  As for Alfre Woodard, “she’s a terrible actress,” Simon said.  “And blacks do not belong in parts for white actresses, unless they can pass for white.  That’s wrong—historically and sociologically and logically.”

When asked if he were, in fact, Jewish himself, Simon said, “I’m not.  No, no.  But I don’t want  that discussed.  My Yugoslavian-ness should have nothing to do with it.”  He called Papp’s comments about the choice of his dates “ludicrous.  Furthermore, it’s not true.  The fact is that the woman I’ve lived with for the last two years is 38.”

[Simon was born in Yugoslavia (when it was known as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes) of Hungarian descent in 1925.  He came to the United States at 16 in 1941.  At the time of the above article, Simon was about six weeks shy of 64 years old.]

*  *  *  *

“MORNING REPORT”

by Aleen McMinn

”Calendar”

Los Angeles Times

3 April 1989

[The story of John Simon’s review of Winter’s Tale and its consequences was picked up across the country, including the West Coast.  Here’s a report from Los Angeles, followed by one from San Francisco.]

STAGE

A top New York drama critic has received harsh notices after suggesting that actors in a new production of Shakespeare’s “Winter’s Tale” are too Jewish and too black for the bard.  Colleen Dewhurst, Actors Equity president, and the play’s producer, Joseph Papp, have both demanded that New York magazine critic John Simon be fired for his remarks.  In his review of the play, which stars Christopher Reeve, Simon said that actor Mandy Patinkin looked like a cartoon Jew and that actress Alfre Woodard resembled Topsy, a character in the novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”  The National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has asked Simon to apologize to Woodard and to every black actor in America for the review, which it described as “dripping with racism.”  Simon, whose reviews have often provoked controversy, insists Shakespearean roles not written specifically for blacks should not be performed by them.

*  *  *  *

“JOHN SIMON REVIEW IS CALLED ‘RACIST’”

“Personals”

by Leah Garchik

San Francisco Chronicle

4 April 1989

New York magazine’s John Simon, the Ivan the Terrible of drama critics, said that one star looked too Jewish and another too black in Joseph Papp’s production of Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale.”

Simon said that Mandy Patinkin looks like a caricature from the Nazi publication “Der Sturmer,” and co-star Alfre Woodard looks like Topsy in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

Colleen Dewhurst, president of Actors Equity, called Simon “a dangerous man and said he should be fired, a view shared by Papp.  Simon fired back, saying that Dewhurst was angry because he had “on occasion” given her “less that adoring reviews.  I’m afraid actors are not generally known for their intellect.”

The New York branch of the NAACP said the review was “dripping with racism” and asked the critic to apologize.

Ed Kosner, editor of New York magazine, defended the writer and said that Simon has had a history of differences of opinion with Papp.

[There's more to come.  I hope you'll return to ROT for the rest of this series on the late theater reviewer, John Simon.  Part 2 will be posted on Sunday, 1 December.]

"A Star Is Made"

[The two articles below were originally published in “The New York Issue” of the New York Times Magazine of 2 June 2019.  The magazine’s cover bore the inscription: “A Star Is Made: Twelve Performers From An Opera Singer To A Subway Dancer Show What It Takes To Light Up The Stage In New York City,” and presented a dozen short profiles of performing artists and the ways they warmed up for their shows.  The performers’ profiles range across a big chunk of the performing arts, including several non-traditional forms, and I culled the two theater artists to republish their reports on Rick On Theater.]

THE BROADWAY STAR

“HOW KELLI O’HARA GETS READY FOR BROADWAY, NIGHT AFTER NIGHT”

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

30 May 2019

The Tony-winning actress takes us inside her dressing room and shares her two-hour pre-curtain regimen.

Kelli O’Hara kisses her children and husband goodbye, buys a salad and boards a train in coastal Connecticut eight times a week to star as Lilli/Kate in “Kiss Me, Kate,” the Tony-nominated revival at Studio 54 for which O’Hara herself was nominated this year, too, for Best Actress in a musical. It’s her seventh Tony nomination — she has one win, in 2015 for Best Actress in “The King and I” — and it’s her 11th Broadway show. She has been doing this for a very long time.

It’s a different crowd every night. That might seem obvious, but it doesn’t always make sense when it’s the same group of indistinct, shadowed faces. Once you’ve got the lines, the songs, the dance moves, the real work is in figuring out a way to deliver them to the people as if they were the only ones to ever receive them.

O’Hara’s dressing room is small, but big for Broadway. It’s filled with flowers sent over by people congratulating her for her nomination. But this year she is not nervous: She has what she calls the “Zen release” of already having won one. Plus, people love an underdog. The minute you’re not an underdog, yes, you won, but that’s not really the same as everyone loving you.

She arrives at the theater sometime between 6 and 6:30 each evening — earlier, obviously, for the matinees — so that she can steam her vocal cords with a personal humidifier she bought at CVS and do her vocal exercises (soft scales and consonants). That has always been part of her routine, but now she also does yoga in the hour before performance: sun salutation, high lunge, side angle pose, triangle.

During the sun salutation, she beseeches her Alexa to time her for a minute in a plank, and during that minute she holds her body in a tight line, hovering above the Oriental rug that is part of the homey atmosphere that someone else created for her. Some of the stuff is hers: the pictures her kids made that hang around the bulbed mirror, a toy box for when they visit, the collection of teas, the crepe-paper streamers from her birthday a few weeks ago. But mostly it’s someone else’s stuff: curtains, a pink velvet fainting couch, books on the shelves. The minute is almost over.

She didn’t always need to do this; it used to be that she could just go onstage. But she’s 43 now, and she’s rubbing the acromion region of her shoulder as she talks — no injury, it just hurts. So, yes, if she doesn’t warm her body up, she’ll feel it later. It never even occurred to her, except that last summer she performed in London, where they have mandatory warm-ups; it changed her thinking. Her kids are small, 9 and 5, so sometimes she might run late and shorten the warm-ups, though if she does that, she suffers: She will be achy, or she won’t have enough energy. She has worked on films and on TV, and she knows that those people, who don’t even perform every night, who rarely sing while they act and who know that they have infinite chances to get a take right, have massage therapists waiting on set.

Around 7:15 p.m., she is called down to the stage for fight call, in which she and Will Chase, who plays her ex-husband, run through the choreography of their extended fight scene, in which she kicks him in the butt several times and he kicks her butt (revivals are weird). They do this every day, no matter what, to remind themselves that there’s acting, there’s singing, but there’s also the risk of becoming so relaxed with each other — indeed, they do this entire rehearsal laughing — that they get hurt. There are so many moving parts in the show, and none of them can stop if you get hurt. Just look at her ring finger: There’s maybe about four millimeters of nail in the nail bed and nothing more because she got her hand stuck in a door one night in February, during the “I Hate Men” number. She slammed the door, and ... her finger was inside the door. She couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t coming free. She stopped for a second, but she still had one phrase left to sing. She called for help in the pause, and once her hand was released, she managed to finish, in shock. Her nail was gone. The point is, if you’re prepared on other fronts, it’s easier to handle the occasional crisis.

She spends some time with her mouth over a vocal steamer, but then Richard, the hair guy, comes in to spin her blond hair into pin curls so that he can weave a microphone through them and then seal them under a stocking and then put someone else’s blond hair on top of the stocking. Richard just did this for another actress in the room across the way. He does almost 100 pin curls a night. How long has Richard been doing this? He was the first person to ever pin curl O’Hara for her first Broadway show 17 years ago.

She spends the rest of her time doing her own makeup. Someone at the beginning of the show’s run will teach her what her makeup should be like, but from then on, it’s just her, just some CoverGirl, just some Maybelline, just some Nars, just some Chanel, just some MAC. Last year, she was performing at the Met, and on a night when they were recording the performance in HD, they did this dramatic makeup for her, but it was really too much, so she needed it taken off. The makeup is everything. You have to look like a real person so that you feel like a real person.

A man calls through an intercom that it’s 30 minutes to showtime, then 15. It’s time for O’Hara to dress. It’s time for her to find the thing inside her that is somehow able to remember that the people in the audience are seeing this for the first time, that they deserve the best of her. How do you keep a thing like that in your head? She closes the door, and now she does her real vocal exercises, the ones she didn’t want to do in front of a reporter, the reporter guesses, and now, throughout backstage, there’s the sound of opera, the sound of theater, the sound that all those two hours created and erected and built toward fortitude. Now she’s ready.

[Kiss Me, Kate, with book by Sam Spewack and Bella Spewack and music and lyrics by Cole Porter, was presented by the Roundabout Theatre Company at Studio 54 from 14 March to 30 June 2019.  It ran 125 regular performances and 30 previews under the direction of  Scott Ellis, winning the LaDuca Award For Outstanding Choreography (Warren Carlyle) from the Drama Desk and the Theatre World Award for Stephanie Styles’s performance as Lois Lane/Bianca. 

[The production was also nominated for two additional Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding Revival Of A Musical and Outstanding Featured Actor In A Musical (Corbin Bleu as Bill Calhoun/Lucentio), and four Tonys for Best Revival Of A Musical, Best Performance By An Actress In A Leading Role In A Musical (Kelli O’Hara as Lilli Vanessi/Katharine), Best Choreography, and Best Orchestrations (Larry Hochman).

[Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine and the author of the novel Fleishman Is in Trouble, to be published this month.]

*  *  *  *

THE BROADWAY ‘SWING’

“THIS PERFORMER HAS TO MASTER 14 PARTS AT ONCE, AND LET GO OF HIS EGO”

by Scott Heller

30 May 2019

[On 9 March 2016, I posted a collection of articles on “Swings” from Equity News, the members’ journal of the Actors’ Equity Association, the union of professional stage actors and theatrical stage managers.  It was part of an occasional series I do on ROT intended to introduce readers from outside the business to some of the professions and jobs that are part of the business of show.  The articles were meant to describe what a Swing is and what those members of a musical’s cast do.  Here is the profile of an actual, working swing, Angelo Soriano, with a description of how he gets ready before every performance.  That’s enough introduction; he’ll tell you the rest himself.]

Angelo Soriano is a “swing” in a Broadway musical — ready to play nearly any role, night after night after night.

It was a Friday afternoon on a two-show day in a nine-performance week, and Angelo Soriano, a cast member in the hit Broadway musical “Aladdin,” was in his sixth-floor dressing room, not yet sure what he might be asked to do that night. Would tumbling be required? Sword fighting? In the exuberant “Friend Like Me” dance number, would he make a comic appearance as a game-show host (in aqua spangles) or be one of the waiters (in red)?

As what’s known in Broadway parlance as a “swing,” Soriano is paid to master a head-spinning 14 roles, though he is never certain he will go onstage in any of them. With a 12-member male ensemble powering through aerobic choreography, there will always be injuries. Add in vacations, and the flu, and the complexities of running a multimillion-dollar Disney show, and you need agile replacements who can sing, dance and not trip over one another while brandishing scimitars in one scene, nailing an exuberant nine-minute tap-heavy number the next.

His job is to make that possible, to know — in his head and his body — a dozen dance roles, or “tracks.” Since he joined the cast four years ago, Soriano has been in “Aladdin” for more than 950 performances. “You make yourself invaluable,” he says simply.

One way to do that is to be comfortable with anonymity. Yes, when you’re in the show your name goes up on the board in the lobby (Also appearing in the ensemble: Angelo Soriano). But backstage the track is identified with the performer who handles it regularly (“You still doing Dickey today?” “I’m Dickey both shows”).

If he’s lucky, and things go wrong — meaning right for him — Soriano will get to take on a part with a name in the Playbill, a role with lines that get the audience laughing, like Omar or Iago, the rotund sidekick to the evil Jafar. But that’s not today — at least not so far. He is paid to stay in the New Amsterdam Theater in case he has to go on. He could be texted at any minute to pick up any of the 14 roles. But when that doesn’t happen, he has to stay practiced at another aspect of the Broadway swing’s skill set: waiting.

Inside the New Amsterdam, they call “Aladdin” a “government job,” as it’s still running strong after five years. Disney treats its employees well, and per the union contract, ensemble members earn a minimum of $2,095 a week; swings get $104.75 on top of that.

Soriano, a 29-year-old Californian by way of the Philippines, earned his Equity card performing at Walt Disney World, where he also met the woman who is now his wife. But even after several auditions, he never got a role in the 45-minute version of “Aladdin” that ran several times a day at Disney California Adventure. Which made it sweeter when, after a year on tour with “Flashdance the Musical” and six confidence-testing months of unemployment, he stepped into an audition for the Broadway production and got a job in the musical’s cast. He didn’t know then that Disney wanted him to swing.

“To be a really good swing, you have to have an incredible mind,” Susan Stroman, the Tony Award-winning director, has said. And while several ensemble members marvel at his ability to learn so much material, Soriano doesn’t see himself as remarkable. He’s one of five swings in the show, and he’s always been a multitasker, a visual thinker, a team player. “Put me in, coach,” he’ll sometimes whisper before leaving the darkness of the wings for the spotlight of the stage.

The night before the two-show Friday, he knew his job ahead of time: the track typically handled by Tyler Roberts, who was “swinging out” for one performance to let Soriano refresh his muscle memory on the most athletically challenging of all his possible assignments. He hadn’t done it in nine months. “It’s my asthma track,” he said. “It’s sometimes hard to sing.” That’s no more true than in “Arabian Nights,” the show’s breathless opening number, which would require Soriano to move downstage in a series of choreographed knee slides. Thirty minutes before curtain, he was on the floor in the wings — stretching his legs as wide as he could, bending his torso forward to loosen his hip flexors — while reviewing reference videos on his phone that pictured, from overhead, how the number would unfold. This is where I’ll be. Then here. Now here. Carry the carpet. Exit with the chicken cage. Enter with the pink cart....

He delivered his one line of the night with a comic sneer: “Go away, filthy beggar!” But his star turn came in “Friend Like Me.” With backstage help, he climbed into a turntable lift that twisted upward from below and deposited him, with a pop, into the can-you-top-this choreography. Dance, smile, exit stage left. Off with the crimson waiter’s jacket, on with the gold-spangled one instead. Tap back onto the stage. Grab a cane. Keep tapping. Big finish!

Soriano still goes on auditions periodically so that the industry doesn’t forget about him, but he’s in no rush to find another job. “As an artist, I have an ego, yes,” he admitted. But the needs of the show come first. “If you ask me to lead, I will. If you ask me to stand back and put my feelings aside, I will.” Being a swing, right now, is just fine. “It doesn’t feel like you’re struggling in New York City,” he said. “It feels like you belong here.”

[Disney’s Aladdin, with book by Chad Beguelin, music by Alan Menken, and lyrics by Howard Ashman and Tim Rice, opened at the New Amsterdam Theatre on West 42nd Street on 20 March 2014 and is still running after 21 previews and 2,374 regular performances (as of 17 November).  Directed and choreographed by Casey Nicholaw, the production has won a Tony for Best Performance By An Actor In A Featured Role In A Musical (James Monroe Iglehart as the Genie) and a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actor In A Musical (Iglehart).  It also received four other Tony nominations and six more Drama Desk nominations.

[Angelo Soriano is currently performing as a swing in the cast, which he joined on 17 February 2015.  He also understudies Iago and Omar.  Previously, Soriano toured with the musical Flashdance.

[Scott Heller is the theater editor at the New York Times.]

The Group Theatre's 'Johnny Johnson'

(19 November 1936-16 January 1937)

[When I was a grad student at New York University, I wrote a paper in May 1984 for a class called 20th-Century Mise-en-Scene, an examination of the staging techniques in modern Western theater taught by the late Michael Kirby  (1931-97).  The paper was a reconstruction of the Group Theatre’s Johnny Johnson, the company’s only musical, with book and lyrics by Paul Green and music by Kurt Weill.  The play ran at Broadway’s 44th Street Theatre from 19 November 1936—83 years ago tomorrow—to 16 January 1937.  

[In the course of my research, I read all the reviews I could locate and as many accounts from participants and later scholars as I could find.  I pored over photographs of the production and studied the ground plans of set designer Donald Oenslager.  

[I made slides of the photos and took them with me to Brooklyn (along with a rented portable projector) to interview Tony Kraber, one of the few cast members then still alive, so he could render commentary on the pictures, which I hoped would jog his memory of the then-47-year-old production.  I was also fortunate that at that time, I was acquainted with Sam Leve, a retired set designer, who had been Oenslager’s assistant.  In the end, I pieced together a description of the production from all these sources, picking out performance and staging details wherever I could glean them.  

[Kirby, then the editor of The Drama Review, proposed that I submit the paper to the journal, which was planning a Group Theatre issue, and the reconstruction was published as “The Group Theatre’s Johnny Johnson (1936)” in the winter issue of 1984 (28.4 – T104).  It was my first published article.

[This post is a combination of my original typescript and the TDR version.  I have also revised it a little for Rick On Theater.]

Introduction

On Thursday, 19 November 1936, the Group Theatre (1931-41) opened its only musical play.  Johnny Johnson, with book and lyrics by Paul Green (1894-1981) and music by Kurt Weill (1900-50), played at the 44th Street Theatre on Broadway for a scant nine weeks—a total of only 68 performances—closing after the matinee and evening shows on Saturday, 16 January 1937.  It was an unusual play in many respects, and certainly would have had a startling effect on its audiences, who couldn’t really have known what to expect. 

According to Green:

The story of the legend—that is what I like to call the play—is the musical autobiography of a common soldier whose natural common sense runs counter to a sophisticated civilization.  The first act is a comedy, the second a tragedy and the third a satire.  That sounds crazy and maybe I can’t get away with it but that is what I have tried to write.

Green communicated his antiwar message in a succession of expressionistic scenes, pervaded by songs, ballads, marches, and hymns by Kurt Weill.

The play, subtitled “The Biography of a Common Man,” told the story of Johnny Johnson, an honest, truth-loving fellow who volunteered to be a soldier in the “war to end all wars.”  Green explained his choice of the leading character’s name in the News-Week review: “The character is named Johnny Johnson because war records show that there were 30,000 Johnsons in the American Army.  Three thousand of them were John Johnsons.” 

Johnny, a tombstone-carver, is introduced at the dedication of a peace monument he’d carved, just at the moment President Woodrow Wilson proclaims war.  His romantic fiancée, Minny Belle Tompkins, is enraptured by the glories of prospective martial heroism, and Johnny goes off to enlist at the local recruiting office. 

He’s put through army training with some difficulty and shipped off to France.  At the front, he contracts a private peace with a young German soldier, whom Johnny sends back to carry a message of peace and brotherhood to the other German soldiers. 

Wounded, Johnny is sent to a hospital from which he escapes with a canister of laughing gas.  He doses the Allied Supreme Command with the gas and temporarily succeeds in calling off the war.  He’s sent home to a lunatic asylum where a mad psychiatrist diagnoses him with as suffering from “peace monomania.”  Finally released, Johnny’s reduced to selling toys on a street corner—not very successfully, however, since he doesn’t carry tin soldiers.

The Origins of the Project

Johnny Johnson was a departure from the Group Theatre’s usual realistic and naturalistic productions coming “out of the Group Theatre’s suggestion, stimulation and actual assistance.”  The idea was spawned early in 1936 after Kurt Weill arrived in America.  The Group had become intrigued with Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, and they befriended him.  Stella Adler (1901-92) eventually suggested Weill write a musical play for the Group, and Weill proposed an American version of Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Schweik, which had been done with some success in Germany by Erwin Piscator in 1927.

Harold Clurman (1901-80) visited Paul Green, who’d written the Group’s first play, The House of Connelly (1931), at his home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  While he was there, Clurman learned that Green had fought in France in World War I and “had an intimate acquaintance with the American soldier of that day.”  He passed on Weill’s proposal, and Green expressed interest.

Returning to New York, Clurman told Cheryl Crawford (1902-86), who, with Clurman  and Lee Strasberg (1901-82), made up the Group’s ruling triumvirate, that Green was the playwright for the job.  When Green definitely agreed to collaborate, Crawford and Weill went to Chapel Hill to start work on the scenario.  Crawford served as “coordinator” and the project became her “adopted child.”

Money being in short supply, the Group customarily spent the summer at an adult camp.  This time it was Pinebrook Club Camp in Nichols, Connecticut.  Clurman was named managing director of the Group, assuming authority over executive decisions.  As he and the Group tried to work out some internal problems, they awaited the arrival of the playwright who’d promised them scripts.

When Green arrived  with his script of Johnny Johnson, it was still unfinished.  It needed more work, and Green took it back to Chapel Hill.  At the summer’s end, Green returned to Pinebrook with the finished rehearsal script, and work began only a week or so before the Group moved back to New York.

The Music

The play that Paul Green wrote for Kurt Weill’s music was what he had come to call “‘symphonic drama’ . . . a ‘sounding together’ in the true meaning of the Greek word.”  From the very start, he said, “I wanted a musical score to be part of the script,” for “without music there could be no war . . . .  Music has always been an integral part of fighting.” 

Weill’s music, the first he wrote for the American stage, was based on American folk and popular songs.  It ranged over several genres, but filtered through his own European sensibilities.  It was variously described as “haunting,” “tuneful, gay and touching,” “lovely,” “seemingly careless, really profoundly sensitive,” “weird,” and “dramatic.”

The musical style itself wasn’t as striking as the way it was interwoven with the book.  A Group advertising flyer for the production explained:

While this is a play with songs, it is not a musical show.  The singing arises naturally from the situations of the imaginative story and the verses of the song flow as simply as the prose of the speech.

In  a theater more accustomed to operettas (Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Show Boat, generally considered the first American book musical, was presented only nine years earlier) and revues, such a production would doubtlessly attract attention.  The Brooklyn Eagle remarked, “All through the proceedings, the players stop at intervals to sing . . .,” and the New York Post called it “a new form in Broadway theatre . . . in that it introduces songs and incidental music regularly through the performance in an artless, haphazard manner . . . .”  The clearest description of how Weill’s music melded with Green’s script is provided by composer Marc Blitzstein:

. . . Weill has practically added a new form to the musical theatre.  It is not opera, although it partakes of the ‘number’ form of Mozart.  And it is decidedly not revue-form.  It owes something to the movies, but it is much more attached to the script.  Take the spot where the exasperated Sergeant tries to put Johnny through all the military paces, and winds up saying—“and you won’t learn, and so the hell with you!” [Act I, scene 4].  As he starts (speaking), the music insinuates itself into his speech, and his enumeration of the maneuvers gains momentum and dash by becoming rhythmical and percussive—until the final expletive, when the music drops out.

As for the performance of Weill’s music, critics nearly unanimously agreed that the Group’s actors weren’t trained singers.  The New York Sun said simply, “They act better than they sing.”  The production’s intent, however, was to present ordinary characters who sing—not professional singers.  The Group had no intention of presenting, nor did Green and Weill write, the usual sort of musical comedy.  Green intended to make the music an integral element of the play—his meaning of “symphonic drama.”  Speaking of Roll Sweet Chariot (1934), his first attempt at this kind of play, Green explained:

I found that in trying to express the inner lives and turmoilings . . . I was having to call upon nearly all the available elements in modern theatrical art . . . .  Folk song and poetry were needed here.  Likewise dance and pantomime and chorus voices.

Lehman Engel (1910-82), musical director of the production, described his encounter with the cast in rehearsal: “There were no singers in the cast, and the songs were worked on chiefly from an acting point of view.”  This, in fact, was precisely what Green wanted and what Weill had written.  As proof of this, there are two independent pieces of evidence. 

In the 1957 MGM Heliodor recording of Johnny Johnson, performers not generally known as singers were cast in the lead roles.  The record producers were probably trying to be true to the Green and Weill’s intentions using people such as Burgess Meredith (1907-97), who sang Johnny, over “legit” singers.  In addition, Lotte Lenya (1898-1981)—who was married to Kurt Weill—also sang on the record, and her unique performance style sounds unmusical to the uninitiated, as were 1936 critics. 

Even the musically knowledgeable could misjudge this new this new style, as Lehman Engel noted with some embarrassment.  He had just met the Weills, and didn’t know that Mrs. Weill was Lotte Lenya.  They were having tea at Engel’s Greenwich Village apartment:

In my desperate need to make conversation, I spoke of The Threepenny Opera with sincere enthusiasm but added that the female singer on a recording I had was terrible!  The Weills smiled indulgently and said that I must have the French recording.  No, I persisted, I had the German one.  It was then I found out that the singer was Lotte Lenya, my guest!  In my young life I held pear-shape vocal tones sacred, and it was to be many years before I could comprehend any other kind of singing.  When I did, I was to worship at the shrine of Lotte Lenya.

With this realization, it’s understandable that the Group would not bring in outside singers to enhance their vocal quality and that as “actors first and singers second, they would have delighted [Bertolt] Brecht with their lack of musical sophistication.” 

The Sets

As soon as the Group returned to New York, construction began on the scenery.  Donald Oenslager (1902-75), who’d been engaged as set designer, determined that “the first act . . . required poetic realism . . . .  The second act . . . employed expressionism . . . .  The third act . . . required distorted settings.”  There were problems, however, putting his concepts into practice. 

First, after Oenslager had made plans for the set according to his own design principles—an outgrowth of the New Stagecraft of Adolphe Appia and E. Gordon Craig—the Group directorate insisted he reconceive the production from an expressionistic point of view.  This caused some difficulty for Oenslager, who was not particularly interested in Expressionism. 

The second problem developed when Oenslager, in a hurry between appointments, left his new drawings in a drug store.  Having lost his second set of plans, he quickly drew a third set in time for construction to begin.  He felt his last-minute rush might have given his designs some serendipitous spontaneity. 

The production was out-of-the-ordinary for the Group, whose reputation had been built on Realism and Naturalism.  Johnny Johnson was “the only Group play that turned away from naturalism in all its elements . . . .”  Lee Strasberg, however, maintained that this was not as unusual as the public thought: “In many of our shows, we really used the principles of abstract art . . . .  [I]n productions like . . . Johnny Johnson, we used modern art forms.”  The overall effect of Oenslager’s “geometric setting”—which suited Green’s three-divisional script—was striking:

The warped perspective created by the exaggeratedly raked floor of the interior platform setting for this play, somewhat derivative of [Nikolai] Akimov’s work in the Soviet theatre after the First World War, helped create the mad whimsy of the play.

This, of course, was not how every critic saw it.  Blitzstein, who admired the music so much, didn’t respond to what he called “the hodgepodge scenic styles in the staging of the Group Theatre’s Johnny Johnson . . . .” 

The scenery was mostly drab colors, gradations of black and white with a “sepia tint.”  The only sets with bright colors were the most starkly mad scenes: the Allied Supreme Command at the Château de Cent Fontaines, which had red, white, and gold appointments; the psychiatrist’s office, with its “red and white desk slanting at an angle of forty-five degrees . . .”; and  in the forensic arena in the insane asylum, also appointed in red and gold, and draped with American flags. 

In the remaining scenes, color was mostly absent, except for the opening celebration scene where color accent was provided by costume pieces such as ribbons and bows, mostly on the little girls.   

Furthermore, to enhance this subdued appearance, the show was spot-lit, illuminating small areas of the stage while leaving the rest in ambiguous darkness.   Even the indoor scenes had the appearance of being lit from one source that pinpointed a particular spot on the set, such as the psychiatrist’s raked desk, with the rest of the stage in increasing shadows receding into darkness.

This shadow effect was exaggerated by the vast stage at the 44th Street Theatre.  By all estimations, the theater was too big for the show.  The large musical house, with its 20- by 30-foot proscenium opening, necessitated that Oenslager design sets too big for the play.  Even with the vast sets, however, the stage area had to be reduced for what was primarily an intimate show, and this was done with lighting, enhancing the ambiguity of the space surrounding the performers.

The Rehearsals

Shortly after returning to New York, Clurman found that his duties as managing director as well as some personal difficulties were overwhelming, and he relinquished the directorship of Johnny Johnson to Lee Strasberg.  Rehearsals had already begun at Pinebrook with the Group’s usual discussions about meaning and content with Green and Weill, who were both in residence by this time.  Sessions continued in New York at the Belmont Theatre, a small house on 48th Street, with improvisations and experimentation.

The Group acting style, a heightened Realism, had by this time been set, and Strasberg saw no cause to develop a different style for Johnny Johnson.  (It’s worth noting here that Strasberg was one of the principle developers of the Stanislavsky-derived acting style known as the Method.)  Sam Leve (1908-99), Oenslager’s former student at the Yale School of Drama and assistant for Johnny Johnson, recalled that though the sets and physical production were heavily expressionistic, the acting, for the most part, was realistic.  In fact, only the “eccentrics” of the play were in any way exaggerated—the High Command, the psychiatrist, and the Brothers in the asylum debating society.

The music, too, was rehearsed in the Group’s usual manner.  Lehman Engel recalled:

The preparation of Johnny was unique among musical shows,  Since it was done with actors saturated in the Stanislavsky Method according to the gospel of Lee Strasberg, the show was studied, improvised, and dissected for  period of about three months prior to the beginning of actual rehearsals.

Many of the songs, in fact, were not even assigned to specific actors until just before performances began.  The whole cast learned and rehearsed the score, except a few songs that had been specifically written for certain performers, such as Private Harwood’s “Cowboy Song: The Rio Grande,” which had been written for Tony Kraber (1905-86).

The ensemble work that the Group had established over the five years of their existence was evident in their rehearsals, as well as the subsequent performances.  Again, Lehman Engel recalled that the company members “were especially considerate of each other’s neuroses and idiosyncrasies, which were legion.”

Then the production moved from the 500-seat Belmont to the 1400-seat 44th Street Theatre.  Lehman Engel described the consequences:

I recall one dress rehearsal when the actors had to encounter Donald Oenslager’s scenery for the first time.  The chief problem suddenly became one of self-preservation in climbing out of World War I trenches and of making costume changes with no allowable time.  The acting problem then became secondary despite the protest of the director.

In this state, Johnny Johnson went into previews.

The Previews

The show was conceived and rehearsed on an intimate scale.  Spectators at Belmont rehearsals were “very moved.”  In the smaller theater, “the production seemed charming: informal, unpretentious and sweet.”  But the company had no choice—only the 44th Street Theatre was available.  Johnny Johnson moved in and was “suddenly dwarfed and the light-handed informality of the performance lost its effectiveness.” 

Clurman’s fears of the effects of the larger theater were borne out: “Our actors’ voices sounded so small they were occasionally inaudible; Donald Oenslager’s sets . . . now appeared monstrous; the performances now looked amateurish.” 

The move to an unfamiliar space, the large set—19 scenes—and the Group’s financial problems all conspired to make the previews a disaster.  The orchestra was under-rehearsed, the actors got lost; “after the first five minutes . . . half the audience left.  By the end of the performance there were no more than twenty people in the auditorium.”

The opening was delayed for two days.  Musical numbers were cut and sets were abandoned (“New York Harbor” and “A road somewhere in France”).  The company stayed up every night till early morning “polishing, cutting and revising . . . .”  According to Clurman, the show improved each night, and by opening night had gone from 19 scenes to 13.  Clurman was astounded: “The performance went smoothly, and the audience appeared wildly enthusiastic.” 

The Response

The press response to Johnny Johnson ”was critically favorable, but discouraged all but the cognoscenti from seeing it.”  The audiences, however, generally enjoyed the show so much, many returned several times.  In the words of the New York Post reviewer, the audience “stood up and whooped loud applause for a good ten minutes . . . when the curtain fell on the opening of ‘Johnny Johnson’ . . . .”  Paul Green came out on stage to more applause, and Clifford Odets, Walter Huston, and Burgess Meredith were “overheard bellylaughing at the gags.” 

Of course, not everyone was this enthusiastic.  Some didn’t care for the comedy that ran through the play.  Some found the play touching; some laughed at the humor.  One reviewer said that “like a revue-goer, you enjoy some [scenes] and are bored stiff by others.”

The Performance

The diversity and strength of the reactions from both reviewers and theatergoers was due as much to the production’s uniqueness as to its quality.  Paul Green’s new form—the “symphonic drama”; Kurt Weill’s “non-musical” score; the ingenuousness of the performance, particularly the singing; and the three-styled expressionistic sets combined to make an event unprecedented on Broadway.  Like it or not, it was different.  In a promotional piece, Lee Strasberg wrote:

We meant to do an American folk legend, full of the humors of old vaudeville and the provincial family album, sharpened with poetic comments on the madness of contemporary life.  We felt that fantasy, extravagance, and dramatic music were intrinsic to such an exciting and ambitious experiment.

An advertising flyer for the show concluded that “the Group Theatre believes Johnny Johnson to be the most unusual and entertaining play it has presented thus far.”  There’s little doubt this was the case.

Paul Green’s attempt to combine various theatrical elements while juxtaposing dramatic genres didn’t always sit well with spectators.  The New York Post complained that “the play . . . leaps from straight drama to the maddest sort of farce and hence into pure fantasy with great abandon.” 

Others found the mélange pleasing: “The piece is built of dialogue, movement, scene, music, all together.  It is a promising—and needed—example of theatre that passes from one to the other of these with equal ease.” 

Despite the diversity of material and the number of scene-changes—which rose from 12 to 13 between opening and closing—an attempt was obviously made to keep the production in motion.    An unidentified reviewer in a weekly review of current plays called Margaret Wentworth's Sign Post remarked on the “quick-changing scenes” and Douglas Gilbert of the New York World said, “Lee Strasberg has staged the piece with a feverish continuity that matches the script.” 

The show’s pace seems due in part to a revolving set.  Though no reviewer mentioned this fact, the Alfredo Valente photographs of the set and Donald Oenslager’s floor-plans clearly show a turntable.  The sets shown in the drawings were specifically designed for a revolve with several back-to-back scenes indicated. 

Oenslager’s sketches suggest that sets were changed behind a blind—a painted backdrop, simple drape, or tall piece of constructed scenery—while a scene was in progress on the other side.  Sam Leve confirmed that this was the case.

What the audience saw was a central set piece—ranging from the complete, realistic front porch of the Tompkins home in Act I, scene 2, to a simple ramp with a painted backdrop for the camp drill-ground in Act I, scene 5—with the rest of the stage closed off by returns and two sets of wings.

In more complex sets, such as the porch, the recruiting office (Act I, scene 3), and the front-line trench (Act II, scene 1), small set pieces were run out from the wings.  It’s obvious from this set-up why spot-lighting was both necessary and desirable to close down the huge stage of the 44th Street Theatre.

The scenes changed so quickly that Russell Collins (1897-1965), who played Johnny, couldn’t completely change from his civilian costume in Act I, scene 3, to a full uniform in scene 4.  Photographs clearly show he was still wearing his civilian trousers under his military tunic until Act II.  It’s possible that some scenes might have revolved into view as the previous scene was ending.  Some photographs of Act I, scene 1, are taken with the scene 2 front porch in the background.

(This isn’t confirmed by any source.  Another explanation, perhaps more likely, is that some photographs of this scene weren’t taken in performance, and for one reason or another were shot before the scene 2 set.  Remember, though, that Lehman Engel recalled actors “making costume changes with no allowable time” in dress rehearsal.)

The acting, as has already been suggested, was primarily realistic.  Like Sam Leve, who witnessed several rehearsals, critics found this detracted from the performance when too much Realism “inhibited freedom of treatment”: “A certain heaviness was apparent in the production of Johnny Johnson, and despite the fine fantastication of Lee Strasberg’s production idea many performances seemed slack and pedestrian.”  The most blatant indictment of this problem came from John Mason Brown, who felt the Group Theatre’s actors

. . . set about the business of being funny with as much self-consciousness as if they were . . . a Greek chorus . . . . 

They reach for the ridiculous with a grim seriousness which does not add to the lightness of the lighter portions of “Johnny Johnson.”  They are all desperately in earnest.

The play opened on the dedication of Johnny’s monument to peace.  The script describes the scene: “The ground is covered with a carpet of green grass, and at the right a quaint young arbor-vitae tree is growing.”  Photographs of this scene show little of such realistic touches.  A certain backdrop bisected the turntable, and except for the Mayor’s bunting-draped “soap-box,” the stage was bare.  Several shots of this scene, including the Mayor speaking from his soap-box, and the confrontation of Johnny and Minny Belle with his rival Anguish Howington, were taken in front of the porch set for scene 2.  There was no documented explanation of this occurrence.

The porch setting was apparently substituted for the living room location described in the script.  The little evidence afforded by photographic records indicates the scene proceeded predictably in all other respects.  Both the setting and performances appeared essentially realistic in detail. 

The same was true of scene 3 in the recruiting office, except that the office was number 596673 in performance, instead of 18659 as indicated in the script.  (This change was apparently also made after the previews, as the 17 November program used the same number as the script; the opening-night program made the alteration.)  

Scene 4 seems to have been added in performance (or deleted from the published script).  It was set at an army training ground:

But the army takes [Johnny].  Then we see him being made into a soldier.  He can’t learn very well because the regulations sound silly to him, and besides he’s left-handed.  Everything is harder in the Army for a left-hander . . . .  He is finally taken off to war, against the better judgement of the whole army, because he seems to have won more favors from a favor-dispensing woman war worker than his sergeant and his captain.

The set for the scene was a virtually bare stage, with a raked platform across the center of the turntable, bisected by a drop painted with a row of military barracks.

The Statue of Liberty scene, originally scene 4, was cut after previews but reinstated sometime during the show’s run as Act I, scene 5.  In the scene, after Johnny sang a declaration of his peaceful intentions and his faithfulness to Minny Belle (“Johnny’s Speech”) to the Statue, the Statue sang a response of haunting sentiment (“Song of the Goddess”).  The song was omitted from the published version and there are no photographs of the scene.

In Act II, the first scene, set on “A road somewhere in France,” was apparently cut as a separate set, and the moment—virtually without dialogue, but with a column of wounded French soldiers returning from the front (“Song of the Wounded”)—was performed as part of the next scene, “The front line trench.”  In this new scene 1, an English Sergeant sang about “Tea.”  The program and published script list Jules (later John) Garfield (1913-52) as having played the part. 

As photographs clearly show, and Kraber clearly remembered, the role was played by Luther Adler (1903-84), and at least one reviewer recorded this reaction to the moment: “. . . and one perfectly atrocious [performance] by the Group’s best actor, Luther Adler.  He is for a few terrible moments a Cockney sergeant.”  The scene ended with Johnny in the trench with his company, who “. . . writhe their limbs in troubled sleep. [while] three great cannon bathed in green light rise over the parapet, and ghoulishly croak a lament . . . .”

In the hospital (Act II, scene 3, in production; scene 4 in the script), the set was minimal: a folding screen and a hospital bed set on the forward quarter of the turntable backed by the same drape used to divide the stage in Act I, scene 1.  The rest of the space appears ambiguous, though one photograph shows empty beds protruding from behind the drape divider.

The Château de Cent Fontaines (Act II, scene 4), set of the Allied Supreme Command, was the first brightly colored set in the show.  A very stylized drop of red and gold panels and a set piece resembling a large fan at the center rear formed the back “wall” of the set, bisecting the turntable.  The commanders all sat in plush-covered chairs of ornate design as they outbid each other for the number of casualties their forces would suffer.  There was an apparent attempt to make the actors in this scene look like their historical counterparts—although the characters are not named either in the script or in the program.

The scene designated in the scripts and the preview program as scene 7 didn’t exist as a separate scene by opening.  It may have been incorporated into the previous scene (“The edge of a great battlefield”).  This scene was a striking visual and musical moment that Charles Dexter of the Daily Worker described: “. . . in the climax, an English [sic – the script and program both say “American”] and a German minister [pray] as the bayonettes flash in the dark . . . .” 

In fact, the two priests chant and sing the same prayer in counterpoint, each in his own language.  (Only the English version of the prayer is in the published script, though the stage directions indicate that the German Priest utters the prayer in German.)  By opening night, this was the last scene in Act II.  The second New York Harbor scene was dropped and remained deleted throughout the run.

Act III opened in the State Hospital in the office of Dr. Mahodan: “. . . The examining psychiatrist was barricaded behind an enormous, crazily-aslant table and, as played by [Morris] Carnovsky [1897-1992] with deliberately jerky and angular gestures and body movements, seemed decidedly crazier than the patient . . . .”  This was the second scene with bright colors.  The raked red-and-white desk, placed in the set’s left front corner (on the turntable), sloped from five feet on the rear left down to three inches at center stage.  The lighting was very bright only on the desk; the rest of the set dimmed considerably.

The third colorful scene was Act III, scene 2, set in “the forensic arena in the house of balm.”  The set, with its sharply angled rear wall, was festooned with flags and brightly lit.  As the Adelphi Debating Society engaged in its discussion “Albert Van Deckers [sic - Dekkers] . . . as a mad gentleman . . . knits while the Senate is in session . . . .”

Finally released from the asylum, Johnny was reduced to selling toys “along a street symbolically leading nowhere.”  The stage was very dimly lit and nearly bare, with only a banistered flight of steps at the front right and an unlit lamppost at the front left.  The light seemed to have emanated from off stage in the rear right corner, leaving the playing area in deep shadows.

The floor plan of the scene shows the slanting rear wall was the same as the walls of Act III, scenes 1 and 2.  It bisected the turntable from eight o’clock to two o’clock in all three scenes, giving further evidence of the use of the revolving stage.

The play’s final moment is indicative of how blackouts were used between the many scenes:

The Paul Green-Kurt Weill musical Johnny Johnson borrows the [Charlie] Chaplin fade-out as its hero, momentarily defeated, goes off whistling, “a little more clearly now, a little more bravely” or (on the record) singing “We’ll never lose our faith and hope and trust in all mankind . . . .”

Conclusion

Visually, thematically, and musically unusual, Johnny Johnson was undoubtedly a controversial event, even among those who simply didn’t care for it.  It spawned discussion among leftists, pacifists, humanists, and adherents of many other causes and philosophies, each espousing Johnny Johnson’s point of view as their own.  Audiences were less confused by the play than critics: “Almost everyone who saw Johnny Johnson was charmed by it. . . .  [I]t had a subtlety and wit which were thoroughly engaging.”

Had the theater been smaller, the success of the production would probably have been assured, not only from a financial standpoint, but a critical one as well: “In a theatre suited to its scale, it would have come across with much greater bite; on that huge stage, it seemed weak.”  (Kraber estimated that the production came within $1,000 of its “nut” every week.  They just couldn’t fill the 1,463 seats of the 44th Street Theatre.

Johnny Johnson was an excellent example of Paul Green’s feeling that “The narrow confines of the usual Broadway play are not fitted to the dramatic needs of the American people.  They cannot contain the richness of our tradition, folkways, singing, dancing and poetry.”  It’s ironic that the thing most responsible for Johnny Johnson’s failure wasn’t a theater too small to contain it, but one too big for it to fill.

[The original production of the Group Theatre’s Johnny Johnson included a number of company members who went on to become well known on stage and on film.  Among these, in addition to those named in the article above, were Phoebe Brand (1907-2004), Lee J. Cobb (1911-76), Elia Kazan (1909-2003), Will Lee (1908-82), and Sanford Meisner (1905-97).

[After the original 1936-37 production of Johnny Johnson by the Group Theatre, there were several revivals of the play.  From 21 October through 28 October 1956, there was an Off-Broadway production presented at the Little Carnegie Playhouse at Carnegie Hall directed by Stella Adler and starring, among others, James Broderick as Johnny Johnson and Gene Saks as the Mad Psychiatrist.  A Broadway revival directed by José Quintero opened, after 10 previews, on 11 April 1971 at the Edison Theatre, and closed after one performance.  The cast included Ralph Williams as Johnny and Alice Cannon as Minny Belle.

[Johnny Johnson was staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company on 6-15 August 1986 at the Almeida Theatre, London, directed by Paul Marcus.  In 2009, a concert version was staged in London by the Discovering Lost Musicals Charitable Trust, with Max Gold in the title role.

[The ReGroup Theatre Company presented two staged readings of the play directed by Estelle Parsons at the 47th Street Theatre in New York on 12 December 2011.  In November 1956, the MGM recording I mentioned above (which was unrelated to the contemporaneous Off-Broadway staging) was released and in November 1996, Erato Records released another album of Weill’s score for Johnny Johnson.

[I’ve written a little about this research and the writing of the report twice before on ROT.  First, because it was my first published essay, I included it in my discussion “Writing,” posted on 9 April 2010; then I included it in a compilation I called “Short Takes: Research Coups” on 5 August 2011 because I made  a  discovery in my research—Oenslager’s use of a turntable in the set design.]