Some Musicals from the Archives

SOUTH PACIFIC

Fichandler Stage, Arena Stage

9 & 12 January 2003

On New Year’s Day evening [2003], my mother and I went to Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage to see South Pacific.  Now, I can’t be very critical about those classic musicals—I love them too much from my childhood.  They’re like theatrical comfort food to me—I hardly see any faults.  (Actually, I don’t think I’d ever seen South Pacific on stage before, believe it or not.  I have the original-cast album—courtesy of my dad—and I’ve seen the 1958 movie, but never the stage show.  There was also a TV version—excerpts, I think, back in the ’50s or ’60s—black-and-white, I recall—with Ezio Pinza (Emile De Becque) and Mary Martin (Nellie Forbush)—but that was a long time ago.)  This production was staged in the Fichandler, which is the arena stage of . . . well, the Arena Stage.  (The Kreeger’s a proscenium.) 

I found some quibbles with Molly Smith’s staging of some scenes in order to accommodate a four-sided audience—movements that were justified only to get the actors to face a new part of the house—but other than that, I loved it.  The Nellie (Kate Baldwin) wasn’t quite cute enough to make me believe that everyone would fall in love with her—she just had thick legs and they wear a lot of shorts and short skirts in South Pacific—but she was a good enough actress and singer to make everything else work.  (Of course, no one can live up to Mary Martin—but that’s not Baldwin’s fault.)  My mother and one of her friends thought that the actor singing Emile (Richard White) had trouble in the high notes, but I didn’t find it too noticeable.  (He even sounded a little like John Raitt.  I wonder if Raitt ever did that role?) 

Altogether, it was a more than enjoyable show.  (Funny side note:  At the beginning of the show, when the staff makes the announcement about photographs and tapes, cell phones and beepers, and so on, the Arena added this:  “No matter how hard you find it to resist, please refrain from singing along with the musical numbers.”  I gather they had trouble with that kind of thing in the past.)

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CAMELOT

Fichandler Stage, Arena Stage

13 January 2004

I saw Arena’s revival of Camelot on New Year’s Eve [2003-04].  As I’ve said before, I have little criticality when it comes to those old musicals, and this production was more than creditable overall.  (There were even some neat casting/costuming things.)  But I had the misfortune of having seen the real, true original—with Julie Andrews and Richard Burton, et al.—and nothing can ever really compare to that no matter who does it.  Especially since I was still a kid—that impression of the big, Broadway show, with all those stars and that story (I had read Once and Future King), is absolutely indelible.  I can’t hear those songs without hearing the original voices. 

(I’m afraid I have the same response to My Fair Lady, which I also saw with the biggies still intact—and I was even younger and more impressionable!  When I was in Oneonta, a bus-and-truck tour of My Fair Lady came through and played at the school theater.  All the theater students went, of course, and I met one of mine in the lobby during intermission.  “It’s really good, isn’t it?” she said.  “Of course, she’s no Audrey Hepburn,” she added.  I chuckled to myself and responded, “Yes, and Hepburn was no Julie Andrews.”  I smiled, both at the student and to myself.  To her, My Fair Lady was an old movie with Audrey Hepburn—using someone else’s voice—and Rex Harrison; to me, it will always be a Broadway experience with Julie Andrews and Harrison.  Perceptions, right?  Harold Hill is always Robert Preston, Maria von Trapp is always Mary Martin—not Andrews, by the way; besides Guinevere and Liza Doolittle, she’s always Cinderella—Fiorello is always Tom Bosley, Quixote is always Richard Kiley, Pseudolus and Hysterium are always Zero Mostel and Jack Gilford, J. Pierrepont Finch is always Robert Morse, Fagin is always Clive Revill, Fanny Brice is always Streisand, Charity is always Gwen Verdon; and, of course, Mrs. Lovett will always be. . .  you know.  Can’t help it.)

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SEÑOR DISCRETION HIMSELF

Fichandler Stage, Arena Stage

11-13 May 2004

I’ll start with the Arena’s world premiere of a Frank Loesser musical: Señor Discretion Himself.  Loesser had written this just before died, but hadn’t finished polishing it and it had never been staged.  It was based on a Budd Schulberg story, but Arena got the Latino writing group Culture Clash (Richard Montoya, Ric Salina, and Herbert Siguenza) to revise the book and dialogue, and some of the songs were shifted around and reassigned.  Even so, it’s not likely to show up here—it’s way too slight a piece to warrant the expense and effort of a New York production, and, despite Peter Mark’s Washington Post’s review, even the songs aren’t all that great.  (I won’t get into the feeling I had that the characters—it’s set in a Mexican village—come close to insulting stereotypes, even though the writers are Latinos.  They’re Chicanos, so I’d have thought they’d have been a little more sensitive.) 

Anyway, the plot’s sort of a Mexican Anyone Can Whistle (which the Post critic also noticed, coincidentally): An impoverished town needs a miracle to draw in tourists and pilgrims, so they engineer one in the person of a the local drunk (Shawn Elliott)—and former town baker—who can parrot things he hears when he’s passed out.  When a loaf of his bread seems to have the image of Mary, he’s hailed as a visionary who has been blessed with divine wisdom (there’s an element of Being There in here, too—which the Post didn’t spot; that’s my observation alone).  The complications are a little more soapy than Anyone: the baker has become a drunk because his business has declined due to the arrival of a big, automated bakery in town.  The owner of the rival bakery (John Bolton) has a thing for young girls, and the old baker has a teenaged daughter (Elena Shaddow) who’s caught the rival’s eye.  He also has an older daughter (Margo Reymundo) who’s less attractive, but who runs the business and looks out for her father.  The young daughter, however, is secretly in love with her tutor (Ivan Hernandez), a young student (whose books provide the “wisdom” her father spouts). 

The whole plot gets underway when the drunken baker comes to the tutor, who is also the town scribe—the baker’s illiterate, don’t you know—to dictate a nasty letter to his rival for his attentions to the older man’s younger daughter.  After he dictates the letter, he passes out, and the tutor rewrites the letter in a gentler tone.  The new bakery owner declares the old drunk a saint because of his forgiveness and generosity, and the drunk parrots a few philosophical phrases he heard while passed out in the tutor’s room.  The loaf with the image is carried in, and the phony miracle is declared.  Of course, the town gets all kinds of attention—tourists, pilgrims, press, clergy—and then the three priests start to fear that their machinations will be revealed when they discover that the tutor still has the drunk’s original letter.  They send him off on a scholarship to study in Mexico City—his dream—and ransack his room to find the letter hidden in one of his books.  When they can’t find it, they burn all his books—but the tutor has taken the letter with him.  He returns because he realizes that he loves the young daughter, who had confessed her love as he was leaving for the train to Mexico City. 

Meanwhile (see, I said it got soapy), the two bakery rivals have become partners and the old man and his daughters have moved into the other man’s mansion.  He thinks he’s waiting for the young daughter to turn 18 (she’s like 15 when the play starts), but the old man has other ideas—he’s planning to marry off his older daughter instead.  The years pass, and just as the young girl turns 18, a cop arrives in town looking for the upstart rival baker.  (This part’s not really funny—though the play glosses over the nastier implications.)  It seems that the younger man’s a fugitive (under a half dozen aliases—he may even be a gringo) as a con-man and an escapee from an asylum where he’d been incarcerated for his penchant for young girls.  (See what I mean.)  The town hoodwinks the cop to keep the man in town (the logic was really twisted, and I don’t remember how they did this anymore), and in the end, he does marry the older daughter (there’s part of the nasty implications no one deals with) and the younger daughter gets the tutor in a double wedding.  The End.  (The whole play is overseen by a sort of conjure-woman/witch, Doreen Montalvo—who looked like she was impersonating Frida Kahlo from one of her self-portraits.  It was a nice idea, but it wasn’t well used theatrically.  She didn’t have enough to do.  The idea of the corrupt priests and the phony miracle juxtaposed with this “old religion” character might have been interesting, but it’s way too dark for this play.)

As you see, the plot isn’t really very good—too contrived and predictable (and there’s way too much of it, too), even without the uglier elements that are swept under the floor covering.  The corrupt priests (Tony Chiroldes, Carlos Lopez, Robert Almodovar)—who are also a little too worldly: they are bored with confession unless someone has a really good sin to confess, like the newcomer’s pedophilia (this was written before the current scandals, remember)—are never caught, much less punished.  The drunk, who doesn’t ever actually reform, marries his daughter to a crook, an escaped mental patient, and a child-molester.  The town protects this guy for their own purposes but no one questions the appropriateness of this action.  It’s a little disturbing—or maybe it’s just me. 

Also, there was something odd about the revised book, too.  I gathered that it was up-dated and modernized—at least ostensibly—but there were some things in it that seemed out of place.  It’s the nature of the slightness of this text that I’ve already forgotten details, but one instance does remain: a reference to the student uprisings in Mexico City.  Those were in ’68, the year before Loesser died, but the play seemed to want to be set today.  There were a couple of other similar things, but I can’t remember what they were now. 

And there’s the fact that the characters all came close to negative stereotypes, as I mentioned before—something that might have happened in ‘69, but wouldn’t pass muster today.  I’d have thought the rewriting team would have up-dated that, too.  Furthermore, though the music and songs are sweet and pleasant, they’re no more than that.  I already don’t remember any of them.  (The Post reviewer mentions one song he thought was wonderful but even though I read the review the day after I saw the show, I couldn’t recall the song.  I remembered when it was sung and what it was about and all—but I couldn’t remember the tune or the lyrics.) 

The production, however, was excellent.  Thomas Lynch’s set—it was in the Fichandler, the arena space—was clever, with the stage ringed with little, tiny buildings of the village (which actually lit up) around a Mexican tile-floored central plaza.  Other set pieces rose up from the floor, including the three grave stones of the cemetery where the old baker’s wife is buried.  (They flipped up, like pop-up book figures; the other pieces came up like elevators.)  Emilio Sosa’s costumes were especially lovely.  I already noted the Frida Kahlo look of the witch, but the other, less prominent costumes were also nice.  (I don’t know if Arena uses the same costumer for all its shows, but this aspect of every production I’ve seen there lately has been excellent.  I remember particularly liking the Camelot costumes last year.)  Also, the singing for this show was the best all around that I’ve heard at Arena in recent years.  (Shaddow, the actress who sang the young daughter—none of the cast had names I knew—had a really wonderful soprano.)  If only the play had been better!

I’ve often said that when a play is neglected, forgotten, or obscure, there’s usually a pretty good reason.  If no one wanted to stage this 1969 script, even though Loesser’s widow had been promoting it apparently, that’s probably a good indication that it wasn’t worth a lot of effort.  It was a pleasant enough evening in the theater, but it really wasn’t worth much in the end.

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DAMN YANKEES

Fichandler Stage, Arena Stage

13 February 2006

I’ve had to be in Washington twice this winter [2005-06], and I caught a show at Arena each time.  Arena used to be a pretty exciting place, presenting new plays that went on to become important additions to American theater (Moonchildren, Indians) or productions that bordered on the experimental (Andrei Serban’s Leonce and Lena—one of his first gigs in the States).  After co-founder and longtime artistic director Zelda Fichandler left to take over the graduate acting program at New York University and after Doug Wager, her successor, was replaced by Molly Smith, the current artistic director, it can still be a pretty good regional company, but its selection of material is often more on the side of audience-pleasers than experience-stretchers.  (My mother has complained about Smith’s choices since she took over and has threatened to drop her subscription altogether.  Mother has cut back and no longer subscribes to Arena’s entire season—there’s a four-play subscription available, instead of the whole six-play bill.) 

So we went to the Arena on New Year’s Eve to see Damn Yankees.  I’d never seen the play on stage, just in the movie version and, in short, I’ll say that it was great fun and very well done.  (Some spectators may have known the name of the actor who played Mr. Applegate, the Devil originally played by Ray Walston: Brad Oscar, who was the original Franz Liebkind, playwright of Springtime for Hitler, the musical-within-the-musical of The Producers.  He later also replaced Nathan Lane as Max Bialystock.)  Oscar was quite good—he got excellent reviews, including one I saw in Variety—but I kept feeling he was projecting a little too hard, as if he forgot he wasn’t in a Broadway house but the more intimate Arena Fichandler (the theater-in-the-round space). 

As I think I’ve said numerous times, when it comes to the old musicals, I have no critical distance.  They’re all nostalgic for me.  If I didn’t see them on stage when I was a kid, I saw the movies (as I did with Damn Yankees) or I listened to the albums, which my dad had from his youth.  (Dad took my mom—both native New Yorkers, though Mom moved to New Jersey as a girl—to the original Oklahoma! on one of their early dates.)  I literally grew up on that music—and when I was little, I knew all the words to all the songs.  That said, Damn Yankees was a more than creditable production.  Oscar made a delightful devil—sort of a used-car-salesman-as-Beelzebub—and Meg Gillentine was very good as Lola.  (She’s no Gwen Verdon—but, then, no one is.  Please.)  She tends to be a better dancer than actor—though she’s an excellent singer, as well—so her witchy seductress is a little by-the-numbers, but given Lola’s routines, that works well enough.  (Lola’s numbers are almost all dance bits anyway.)

As for the Joes, Boyd and Hardy, Lawrence Redmond and Matt Bogart were both fine.  As it happens, I had seen them both at Arena before, Redmond as Luther Billis in South Pacific (another Ray Walston part, by the way) and Bogart as Lancelot in Camelot.  (Say “Bogart as Lancelot in Camelot” five times fast!)  Smith directed, and she did a nice job using the arena space, which I always think is hard to pull off smoothly in a musical.  I’m sure arena staging is tough for any play, but I think it must be harder for a musical—especially the old ones which were conceived for proscenium stages.  The need to get all four sections of the audience some face-time with the actors necessitates some awkward promenading sometimes—moving people around for little logical reason.  In a straight play, you can create a set that gives motivation for such crosses—put a chair on one side, a table in another corner, and the actors have to go to them to sit or pick up a prop. 

The dancing in a musical eliminates a lot of set pieces—the floor’s too small to accommodate both choreography and furniture—so the movements can seem arbitrary.  Smith and her choreographer, Baayork Lee, managed this nicely in Damn Yankees.  There was even one number with props that was marvelous—a dance with TV sets on wheeled stands.  It was a hoot—especially clothed and painted, as the production was, in the Day-Glo pastel colors that evoked the Eisenhower ’50s.  (It kind of made me think of Miami Beach back in the days when I used to visit my grandfather there—the houses were all painted pink, yellow, lime green, and baby blue!  This wasn’t art-deco Miami but kitschy Miami Beach.) 

Damn Yankees isn’t a very deep play, despite its take on Faust.  Yeah, Joe might lose his soul to the Devil, and poor Meg may never see her hubby again and never know why—but you know that’s not going to happen, even if you’ve never seen Damn Yankees before.  It’s not that kind of show.  I mean, we’re not talking Carousel here.  It’s the ‘50s, for goodness’ sake.  So it’s just for fun, a little gratuitous sexiness.  (Not sex—Joe doesn’t succumb, of course.  What do you expect from a show with a song called “The Game” in which every potential sexual encounter ends when the ballplayers “think about the game, the game, the game”?  Like I said: the ’50s.)  But who cares, right?  It’s just a hoot, and the Arena version was more than just a great way to run up to the midnight ball-drop—it was a more-than-enjoyable evening all around.  No one will ever make you forget Gwen Verdon’s Lola—I was barely a teenager when I saw the flick, but, man, that woman was still sexy when she was a grandmother!  But you just have to put that aside, I guess, go with what ya got.  (A little this-a.  A little that-a.  With an emphasis on the latta.  You betcha!)

(Yes, Gwen Verdon is special—and that’s putting it mildly.  I got to see her twice on stage—in Sweet Charity (1966-67) and in Chicago (1976)—with Chita!  Now that’s a pairing for all time!  She was already a grandmother when she did Chicago—and she was still great in every meaning of the word.  She could be a pretty good straight dramatic actress—but, man, when she did song-and-dance, she was in a world of her own.  There are—were; I don’t think they’re making any more like that—very few in that stratosphere.  I count myself very lucky to have gotten to see some of the last of the greats and near-greats before they passed from the scene—Mary Martin, Verdon, Zero, Guilford, Julie Andrews—who hasn’t passed, but her voice has—Stubby Kaye, Howard da Silva, Bea Lillie, and several who are still around but seem to be retired or semi-retired.  There seems to be a self-replenishing supply of good and even great straight actors—even if they go off to Hollywood too fast for my taste—but the great musical ones don’t seem to come along much.  Maybe it’s just me.)

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SHE LOVES ME

Fichandler Stage, Arena Stage

17 January 2007

When I’m with my mom on New Years, it’s our custom to try to find a play on the 31st and then go home and toast in the New Year—sometimes with friends and sometimes just en famille—as we watch the ball drop in Times Square on TV.  This year, the Arena Stage was doing She Loves Me, the 1963 Jerry Bock-Sheldon Harnick-Joe Masteroff musical adaptation of the Hungarian play on which the 1940 Jimmy Stewart-Margaret Sullavan movie Shop Around the Corner is based.  (By some coincidence, the cable channels Turner Classic Movies ran both that movie and then the 1949 film musical adaptation—In the Good Old Summertime with Judy Garland and Van Johnson—the week before we saw the stage musical.  That was kind of fun.  The same material is also the basis for 1998’s You’ve Got Mail, the Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan romantic comedy, but the cable station didn’t run that one. 

All of these are based on Miklós László’s Parfumerie, which, as far as I can tell, has never been performed either on or off Broadway.  I’m not sure the script is even available in English.)  She Loves Me is an old-fashioned musical in the vein of My Fair Lady and Damn Yankees, though a lesser effort.  (Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, of course, had been previously responsible for Fiorello!—my very first Broadway play—and would ultimately create Fiddler on the Roof.  Joe Masteroff would go on to write the book for Cabaret three years later.) 

Still, it is charming and fun, even if the songs are not especially memorable, and it made a perfect entertainment for the New Year’s Eve hours leading up to the propitious moment.  Arena’s production, which included no stars or actors whom I knew, was even, solid, and much more than just competent, though no performance stood out in the ensemble.  Director Kyle Donnelly made good use of the Fichandler’s arena platform—I always feel that staging a musical in the round is particularly hard—and everyone’s voice was strong (they were miked, as usual these days) and vibrant.  I especially liked Arpad’s one solo number, “Try Me,” his self-promotion.  Clifton Guterman, the young actor playing the delivery boy-who-would-be-a-clerk, may look a tad older than a teenager, but his tenor is youthful and his enthusiasm in selling himself (and the song) was delightful. 

But in the end, this was an ensemble production (though its past includes stars: Barbara Cook as Amalia Balash in the original Broadway run along with Jack Cassidy, who won a Tony as the self-serving Steven Kodaly; and near-stars: Boyd Gaines, who won a Tony as Georg Nowack in the 1993 Roundabout Theatre Company/Broadway revival, and Louis Zorich—“Mr." Olympia Dukakis—as Mr. Maraczek); the cast as a whole did a very nice job in what I had actually forgotten (until I watched the movie again the week before) is really a Christmas story. 

Two Looks Back

(Play Reports from Rick’s Archives)

LADY DAY AT EMERSON'S BAR & GRILL (2006)

[In my recent report on Shuffle Along, Or, The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed (posted on 28 June as “Shuffle Along (Redux)”), I mentioned in passing that I’d recently watched Audra McDonald, who stars in Shuffle Along: The Making, in a televised performance of Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill and compared her work as Billie Holiday with her portrayal of Lottie Gee in Shuffle Along: The Making.  I decided to post my brief comments on an earlier production of Lady Day at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage.  Interestingly, I found the opinion I formed of the 2006 stage presentation pretty much unchanged by the HBO cable-cast of March 2016.]

On 26 April 2006, my mother and I went to the Arena Stage to see their revival of Lanie Robertson’s Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill with Lynn Sterling (The Life) as Billie Holiday.  Some folks may remember that this musical bio piece played Off-Broadway in ’86-’87 with Lonette McKee in the title role (briefly—she left for medical reasons) and has been floating around the country for almost 20 years now.  (Coincidentally, Mom saw another revival at Washington’s Studio Theatre back in ’88-’89.)  I’m afraid the only reason for its popularity that I can see is the chance, depending on fortuitous casting, to see a simulation of Billie Holiday singing some of her signature songs (“God Bless the Child,” “Strange Fruit,” “Taint Nobody’s Biz-ness”); it’s really a jukebox musical—though that term hadn’t really become current yet.  

The theater is often set up like a nightclub—the Arena’s Kreeger, the proscenium space, had several cafe tables set up on what would have been the apron and some spectators were seated there—and the only other cast member with lines is the piano player.  Lady Day gives her concert, gets progressively drunker/higher, and recounts the ups and downs of her life from childhood in Baltimore, to her failed and abusive marriage/relationships, her arrest and imprisonment for drug possession, and the final years before her death.  (She died in 1959, the year the play is set in Philadelphia, of cardiac arrest at the age of 44).  

Now, from what I know of Lady Day’s singing (my dad was a fan and a jazzophile), Sterling does a credible job channeling her in the songs, but the monologues are predictable, obvious, and both undramatic and untheatrical.  Maybe a superb actress (or cleverer director than Kenneth Lee Robertson) could do something to enliven the talk, but I doubt it.  There’s nothing there that wouldn’t work better in an A&E Biography or an MTV Behind the Music—or in a biographical book.  Just ‘cause someone dressed like Billie Holiday is saying the words don’t make it theater!  It doesn’t help, I suppose, that Holiday’s story is downbeat and sad—poverty, prejudice, Jim Crow segregation, drugs and alcohol, abuse and violence.  (None of this is entirely unfamiliar, of course.  Aside from the general commonality of the experience with many black performers and other African Americans whose stories have been told in books and film and on TV, Holiday’s story has been available in her own 1956 autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, and the 1972 film of the same name starring Diana Ross.)  Both for her and for us, the music is the only relief.  I’d rather have listened to a record.

[What I determined after watching the HBO cable broadcast of Lady Day, directed by Lonny Price (who staged the live version at the Circle in the Square Theater on Broadway, where it ran from 13 April through 5 October 2014), was that the problems I identified with the monologue parts of the performance were as substantial as they had been at the Arena—as I predicted.  I can’t imagine a better actress to embody Billie Holiday than Audra McDonald, who won her record sixth Tony for the role, because she’s an actress of peerless talent both in dramas and musicals.  (Among her six Tonys, McDonald has also won an award in all four of the categories for which an actress can be considered; her other three are: Leading Actress in a Musical for the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, Featured Actress in a Musical for Ragtime and Carousel, and Featured Actress in a Play for Master Class and Raisin in the Sun.)  

[Yet, even this monumentally accomplished performer, whose renditions of Holiday’s music is spot-on from what I could judge, could do nothing to enliven the long sections of patter between the songs.  It was still just as untheatrical in her hands as it was when assayed by Lynn Sterling.  Just as clearly, director Price didn’t bring anything more to those moments than did Kenneth Lee Robertson at Arena.  The only benefit, and it was slight, was that in the TV version, which allowed the opening-up of the setting because a camera could follow McDonald around the set, Holiday could move about the bar/cabaret while she talked.  I can’t say it helped much with the real problem—it was just eyewash.]

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SHE LOVES ME (2007)

[On 30 June, the Roundabout Theatre Company live-streamed its current production of the musical She Loves Me at Manhattan’s Studio 54.  Nine-and-a-half years ago, I saw a live stage production of the musical, based on the same Hungarian play that was the basis of the 1940 Jimmy Stewart-Margaret Sullavan film, Shop Around the Corner at Arena Stage on New Year’s Eve 2007.  I wrote up my brief remarks about the performance, part of a longer report like the Lady Day comments, and I’m posting them now as a look back at this charmingly old-fashioned theater piece.  (As I mention in the report below, I also saw the Broadway revival that starred Boyd Gaines and Diane Fratantoni when I caught it in May 1994.  That performance, produced like the current one by the Roundabout Theatre Company, predated my practice of writing up my play-going experiences, however.)]

When I’m with my mom on New Years, it’s our custom to try to find a play on the 31st and then go home and toast in the New Year—sometimes with friends and sometimes just en famille—as we watch the ball drop in Times Square.  This year, the Arena Stage was doing She Loves Me, the 1963 Jerry Bock-Sheldon Harnick-Joe Masteroff musical adaptation of the 1937 Hungarian play on which the 1940 Jimmy Stewart-Margaret Sullavan movie Shop Around the Corner is based.  (By some coincidence, one of the cable channels ran both that movie and then the 1949 film musical adaptation—In the Good Old Summertime with Judy Garland and Van Johnson—the week before we saw the stage musical.  That was kind of fun.  The same material is also the basis for 1998’s You’ve Got Mail, the Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan romantic comedy, but the cable station didn’t run that one.  All of these are based on Miklós László’s Parfumerie, which, as far as I can tell, has never been performed either on or off Broadway.  I’m not sure the script is even available in English.)  

She Loves Me is an old-fashioned musical in the vein of My Fair Lady and Damn Yankees, though a lesser effort.  (Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, of course, had been previously responsible for Fiorello!—my very first Broadway play—and would ultimately create Fiddler on the Roof.  Joe Masteroff would go on to write the book for Cabaret three years later.)  Still, it is charming and fun, even if the songs are not especially memorable, and it made a perfect entertainment for the New Year’s Eve hours leading up to the propitious moment.  

Arena’s production, which included no stars or actors whom I knew, was even, solid, and much more than just competent, though no performance stood out in the ensemble.  Director Kyle Donnelly made good use of the Fichandler’s arena platform—I always feel that staging a musical in the round is particularly hard—and everyone’s voice was strong (they were miked, as usual these days) and vibrant.  I especially liked Arpad’s one solo number, “Try Me,” his self-promotion.  Clifton Guterman, the young actor playing the delivery boy-who-would-be-a-clerk, may look a tad older than a teenager, but his tenor is youthful and his enthusiasm in selling himself (and the song) was delightful.  But in the end, this was an ensemble production (though its past includes stars: Barbara Cook as Amalia Balash in the original Broadway run along with Jack Cassidy, who won a Tony as the self-serving Steven Kodaly; and near-stars: Boyd Gaines, who won a Tony as Georg Nowack in the 1993 Roundabout/Broadway revival, and Louis Zorich, “Mr. Olympia Dukakis,” as Mr. Maraczek); the cast as a whole did a very nice job in what I had actually forgotten (until I watched the movie again the week before) is really a Christmas story. 

Appropriation in the Theater

A quick check with the Dramatists Guild in New York confirms that the magpie culture of borrowing and re-appropriation that drives current pop music is largely alien to playwrights, even when one work is in creative conversation with another.  Unlike Hollywood screenwriters who get paid but lose copyright control to the studios, playwrights—usually poorly paid—at least retain copyright.  If a playwright were to try a freewheeling, blurry-lined adaptation of, say, Tony Kushner’s early 1990s “Angels in America” or Ntzoke Shange’s 1975 “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf” without first licensing the rights, odds are pretty good that would be stealing.

So wrote Washington Post theater reviewer Nelson Pressley in a comment about the repercussions from the Gaye v. Thicke and Williams copyright-infringement verdict on 10 March.  I just posted an article about plagiarism in the arts, “What Constitutes Theft in the Arts?,” which focused on pop music (see 5 May on ROT).  That seems to be where most of the copyright-infringement charges turn up and, as Pressley remarks, there aren’t many cases of alleged plagiarism in the theater.  Derivation, yes; actual theft, not so much.

I imagine that there have been instances of charges of plagiarism and copyright infringement levied against playwrights in the past, but I can’t recall reading of any in recent memory (and, trust me, I’ve been around and about for a fair number of years).  There’s a related case, but not of copyright infringement, in the film industry from 1989.  Chris Costner Sizemore, the woman on whose story the 1957 movie The Three Faces of Eve was based, sued 20th Century Fox when she learned that she’d signed over the rights to her whole life story when she agreed to the making of the film.  Fox insisted that she couldn’t sell the motion picture rights to a memoir she’d written (A Mind of My Own; Morrow, 1989) because the studio owned the rights to Sizemore’s entire life, not just the period covered by Three Faces.  Fox lost the suit, but this wasn’t about theater and it wasn’t a copyright-infringement case.

In a case a little like Sizemore’s, but this time in the stage world, David Hampton sued playwright John Guare for $100 million in 1992 with the claim that Guare’s play Six Degrees of Separation had infringed on Hampton’s copyright on his personality and his life story.  Though Hampton’s criminal activities were, in fact, the basis for Guare’s successful 1990 play (it was nominated for 1991 Drama Desk and Tony Awards and Pulitzer Prize; it won the 1990-91 OBIE Award, the 1991 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and the 1993 Laurence Olivier Award), the case was dismissed.  The charge against Guare was copyright infringement (although I’m not sure anyone can copyright a personality or a life story), but this wasn’t a case of plagiarism since Hampton didn’t have anything written that Guare could have stolen.  Further, the suit was clearly frivolous, intended merely to pressure Guare and his producers and publishers to avoid the expense of a trial.  Hampton had previously been convicted of harassing Guare with threats and phone calls demanding money.  Fox had been serious in its suit against Sizemore—serious though arrogant; Hampton was just audacious.

This dearth of litigation among playwrights and stage producers (who, since they don’t own the copyrights to the scripts they produce, unlike film producers, don’t have much standing to sue anyone anyway) doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lot of borrowing, adapting, and appropriating in the theater.  It’s ubiquitous and goes back to pretty ancient times.  I doubt a season just in New York City alone doesn’t pass without at least one adapted or derived play on the boards; nationwide, I can’t imagine that there isn’t at least one in production somewhere at any given time.  Many of our greatest and most popular plays are versions of something else that came before and even if you eliminate non-theatrical sources—movies, novels, even TV shows nowadays—the list would be endless.

The traditional American musical has mostly been an adaptation of a straight play.  In fact, in its earliest incarnation, the musical theater was almost always the result of the musicalization of a straight drama or, more likely, comedy.  Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! (1943) was based on the play Green Grow The Lilacs by Lynn Riggs (1931); Lerner and Lowe’s My Fair Lady (1956) was adapted from George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1913); A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962) by Burt Shevelove, Larry Gelbart, and Stephen Sondheim was based on several classic Roman comedies by Plautus; Purlie (1970) by Gary Geld, Ossie Davis, Peter Udell, and Philip Rose was a musicalization of Davis’s Purlie Victorious (1961); and Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein’s La Cage Aux Folles (1983) was based on the French play of the same title by Jean Poiret (1973).  Add in shows adapted from films (Carnival!, 1961; Woman of the Year, 1981), novels (South Pacific, 1949; Camelot, 1961), TV shows (The Addams Family, 2010; Cinderella, 2013), and even newspaper and magazine features (Pal Joey, 1940; Guys and Dolls, 1950), and the list is endless.  But none of these, regardless of quality or ultimate critical evaluation, are copies—derivative, perhaps, but all of them are original works of theater.

She Loves Me (1963) is a perfect case in point which even comes with an expanded web of connections.  The musical with book by Joe Masteroff, music by Jerry Bock, and lyrics by Sheldon Harnick is, first, adapted from the 1937 Hungarian play by Miklós László that’s known in English as Parfumerie.  (Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, of course, had been previously responsible for Fiorello! (1959)—my very first Broadway play—and would ultimately create Fiddler on the Roof (1964).  Joe Masteroff would go on to write the book for Cabaret in 1966—itself an adaptation of John van Druten’s 1951 I Am a Camera, which was adapted from Christopher Isherwood’s 1945 collection, The Berlin Stories.)  Parfumerie wasn’t produced on a U.S. stage until 2009 when it was presented as The Perfume Shop by the Asolo Repertory Theatre in Sarasota, Florida, in an English adaptation by E. P. Dowdall, László’s nephew.  (A Toronto staging of an adaptation from Canadian writers Adam Pettle and Brenda Robins was also produced that year at the Soulpepper Theatre Company.)  As far as I can learn, the play’s never been presented in New York City.  (I'm not sure the script is even available in English.) 

Before the musical adaption, Parfumerie was the source for a still-popular romantic film comedy starring Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, entitled The Shop Around the Corner (1940), directed by Ernst Lubitsch.  That movie was itself musicalized as In the Good Old Summertime (1949), directed by Robert Z. Leonard and starring Judy Garland and Van Johnson, with the setting shifted from 1930s Budapest to turn-of-the-20th-century Chicago.  That film adaptation was followed several decades later by the Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan 1998 romcom You’ve Got Mail, directed by Nora Ephron from her own script which reset the tale in contemporary New York City and turned the letters the secret lovers send each other into e-mails.  (The shop also changed in each incarnation: in Parfumerie, it’s obviously a perfume shop; in Shop Around the Corner, it’s a gift shop; in Summertime, it’s a music store; in Mail, Hanks and Ryan run rival book stores on the Upper West Side.) 

Finally, at least so far, the MGM straight motion picture, whose script was by Samson Raphaelson and Ben Hecht, was re-adapted (and translated into French!) by Jean-Jacques Zilbermann and Evelyne Fallot in 2001, when it was staged by Zilbermann as a non-musical play, La boutique au coin de la rue (“The shop at the corner of the street”), at Paris’s Théâtre Montparnasse, where it won five Molière Awards (the French equivalent to New York’s Tonys). 

On New Year’s Eve in 2006, I saw a performance of She Loves Me at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.  (I also saw the Broadway revival in May 1994, produced by the Roundabout Theatre Company at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, directed by Scott Ellis and starring Boyd Gaines, but I never wrote a report on the performance.)  Directed by Kyle Donnelly, the Arena production of what executive director Stephen Richard characterized as “an endearing story of letters and love” starred Kevin Kraft as Georg Nowack and Brynn O’Malley as Amalia Balash (the characters called Alfred Kralik and Klara Novak in Shop), and was, of course, staged in the round.  She Loves Me, which Arena artistic director Molly Smith called “a nearly perfect musical,” is old-fashioned in the vein of My Fair Lady or The King and I (getting a major revival right now at New York’s Lincoln Center).  An “homage to one of the greatest romantic ideals, finding a soulmate,” as production dramaturg Michelle T. Hall put it, She Loves Me “courts all the different facets of love: boyish crushes, erotic affairs, married love, broken hearts, and the most elusive of all, true love.”  It’s charming and fun, even if the songs, which Smith described as “completely character-driven” and “expressions of the characters’ feelings and situations,” are not especially memorable (I no longer remember them, a scant nine years later). 

Alluding to the letters of poets Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the love sonnets of Shakespeare, and the fictionalized proxy love correspondence in Cyrano de Bergerac, Hall positioned the musical “in the tradition of epistolary love affairs.”  She also quoted director Donnelly in an oblique comment on the up-dated e-correspondence of You’ve Got Mail: “There is something so tangible, visceral and immediate about a letter.  It can be tucked away and pulled out to read at a moment’s notice.  You hold something that the other person touched, created, and e-mail just doesn’t compare.”  Like the play’s format and structure, the romance at its center is also old-fashioned; outside of the exchange of letters, Georg and Amalia clash like Much Ado About Nothing’s Benedick and Beatrice.

Arena’s production of She Loves Me, which included no stars or actors whom I knew, was even, solid, and much more than just competent, though no performance stood out in the ensemble.  Director Donnelly made good use of the Fichandler’s arena platform—I always feel that staging a musical in the round is particularly hard—and everyone’s voice was strong (they were miked, as usual these days) and vibrant.  I especially liked Arpad’s one solo number, “Try Me,” his self-promotion.  Clifton Guterman, the young actor playing the delivery boy-who-would-be-a-clerk, may have looked a tad older than a teenager, but his tenor was youthful and his enthusiasm in selling himself (and the song) was delightful.  But in the end, this was an ensemble production (though its past includes stars: Barbara Cook as Amalia Balash in the original Broadway run along with Jack Cassidy, who won a Tony as the self-serving Steven Kodaly; and near-stars: Boyd Gaines, who won a Tony as Georg Nowack in the 1993 Roundabout/Broadway revival, and Louis Zorich, “Mr. Olympia Dukakis,” as Mr. Maraczek); the cast as a whole did a very nice job.  (By coincidence, one of the cable channels ran both The Shop Around the Corner and then In the Good Old Summertime the week before I saw the stage musical.  That was kind of fun, though the station unhappily didn’t run You’ve Got Mail as well, and it illustrated many of the aspects of theatrical adaptation.)

Alongside musicalization, the most common form of adaptation in theater is probably translation.  Every translation of a play, usually accomplished by another playwright or other theater professional or a writer from another genre, is a form of adaptation, even when the translator’s intent is to render the original author’s text as directly as possible.  Many translations are also deliberate adaptations, from simply transferring the setting from the original one to one based in the culture of the new language or an up-dating of the play’s time period to even more extensive changes.  A case in point is Nora, a new German version of Henrik Ibsen’s Doll House by Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, a Berlin company, which I saw at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theatre in November 2004. 

Nora is the standard German title for Doll House (1879), but this was more than just a new translation by Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel—and less than a full adaptation.  The pay was reset in the 21st century, both in look and in language (some of the music in the production was by Pharrell Williams), but everything from the original was still in this version—the Helmers were still Norwegians (that is, they weren’t transported to Berlin or something); Torvald was still a banker; Nora was still a stay-at-home wife; they still had three kids; Rank (still a doctor), Krogstad, and Kristine were all still there in the same relationships as Ibsen put them in; and, most significant, Nora had still secretly forged her father’s signature on the loan agreement with which she had borrowed money to pay for her and Torvald’s trip to Italy when he was ill.  There were a few minor changes—there was no nurse in this version, and Helene, the maid, had become Monika, an au pair from Africa. 

The Schaubühne did make some more significant changes to the text/story to make it seem more current, however, and some of them seemed to have diluted the original dramatic impact.  One wasn’t very large—though the meaning was more significant than it might seem: Rank wasn’t dying of cancer; he’d gotten AIDS from having been omni-sexual in his youth.  Now this may not seem like much of an alteration, but it struck me as weakening Ibsen’s point—which is, itself, a little hard to buy today also.  Ibsen believed, as did many in his day, that moral corruption is manifested later in physical illness—and could be passed on, like a hereditary disease, to the children.  This was a pseudo-scientific belief in the late 19th century, and Ibsen used it in a more prominent way in Ghosts, of course—where Osvald’s father’s sexual profligacy is inherited by Osvald as syphilis.  What’s the difference between this and the new version?  Well, as I see it, cancer isn’t a disease we generally blame on willfully unhealthy behavior—especially in the 19th century when no one knew about the connection to smoking and other carcinogenic activities.  So, if Rank has cancer and he blames it on his corrupt youth, then it must be some kind of moral retribution since the youthful behavior didn’t directly cause the cancer.  However, if he has AIDS because he had unprotected sex with infected men and women, his illness is a direct result of his willful behavior.  (Because the adaptation was set in the 2000’s, he can’t even use the excuse that no one knew what caused AIDS when he engaged in the behavior.)  Unless you subscribe to the notion that AIDS is God’s punishment for homosexuality or promiscuity, the moral element was erased from the situation.  (As I said, this aspect of the play is hard to play today, but it only works at all if the play remains set in the 19th century when people actually believed this theory.)  This was somewhat more significant than just as an element in the Rank-Nora subplot—the same theory was applied to Krogstad, who was considered to be morally corrupt and therefore a danger to his family, especially his children.  It was this moral corruption that permitted Torvald to reject Krogstad and forced Krogstad to blackmail Nora with the letter and loan document he left for Torvald at the end of the play.  It was also this belief, which Krogstad explained to Nora, that impelled her to leave her children when her transgression had been revealed—she couldn’t stay in the house with them for fear that she’d infect them with her corruption.  Without this motivation, she didn’t have to leave, and the play’s ending became a purely selfish act and had no dramatic strength.

Now, if all that’s true, then the other, really big change in this version had even greater repercussions.  According to the New York Times review, the company wanted to restore the shock Ibsen’s original audience felt at the end of the play.  (According to theater history, there were even riots in Europe when Doll House opened and Nora leaves, it was such a unheard-of action.)  Without reading the review, you’d never guess what Schmidt-Henkel had done.  He had Nora shoot Torvald before she left.  And it wasn’t just one quick shot—she unloaded an automatic pistol into him, even as he was writhing on the ground, half in the giant fish tank that was a prominent part of the starkly modern apartment set.  Okay, this was shocking, but it changed the whole dynamic of the ending, and made Nora into a straight-out murderer rather than a distraught but enlightened woman who acted out of what she believed was selflessness.  First, for her departure to be justified, she still had to believe that by staying, she endangered her children.  That’s hard to do in the 21st century, but with the “evidence” of the physical manifestations of mortal corruption no longer as clear as it was in Ibsen’s original, it’s even harder.  Second, since Torvald’s only real fault was still that he didn’t leap to Nora’s defense when he learned of her forgery on the loan document—just like in the original, he feared for his position at the bank and that Krogstad would now be able to manipulate him.  Perhaps even more today than in Ibsen’s time, this came off as a supremely egocentric posture, and that made him a chauvinistic pig, as we used to say—but it was hardly a capital crime.  It justified leaving him—maybe enough today not to need the matter of corrupting the kids—but hardly shooting him.  So, instead of being a brave and selfless woman, Nora was a fugitive from a murder charge—and maybe even nuts.  This alone changed the entire meaning of the play.  The shock may have been restored, but it was shock for its own sake, as a theatrical effect, not based on dramatic necessity. 

I suppose that was enough to make the translation/adaptation questionable, but there were other problems I had with this show.  I know that Europe is behind the U.S. in enfranchising women, especially in the marketplace, but they’re not 50 years behind.  (After all, Germany, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and England have all already elected female heads of government—we haven’t yet.)  It’s hard for me to accept that a woman as self-consciously modern as Nora here—the costume she wore to the Christmas party wasn’t some peasant outfit so she could dance a tarantella; she went in complete punk get-up, blood smears and all, and did a techno dance (of which the Germans were fond, I believe)—could be so bereft of options that a) she had to forge her father’s signature for a loan and b) she couldn’t resolve the problem by some more rational means than either leaving or, even more drastically, shooting Torvald.  The whole idea of the “doll-wife” (and that expression was still in the German text, by the way) was a throw-back, even in Europe today.  In fact, moving the whole thing up to the 2000s seemed to make everything a little incredible—contrived, I guess.  Instead of an indictment of a social problem that the playwright saw as universal, this version made the whole thing a play about a seriously dysfunctional couple and their dysfunctional friends.  (I ought to add, too, that the very idea today that a sick man had to go to Italy to recover—and that this was his only remedy—was hard to buy also.  Germans still believed in “taking the cure”—going to a health spa for mineral baths—at least when I was living there a half-century ago, but needing to go south for one’s health was still pretty much an anachronism—more like Death in Venice in 1912 than 21st century.  It was another aspect that really had to remain in Ibsen’s own time to work.)

There was some problem with the acting—I presume Thomas Ostermeier’s direction, really—too.  The actors were good, and I didn’t have any problem believing them in their roles/situations most of the time (outside of the problems of the script above), except that every so often they went off their rockers emotionally for no apparent reason or motivation.  One character might all of a sudden shout (or bark) at another, or another character would behave as if he were in the grips of an epileptic fit or some other odd physical condition and throw himself about the stage violently.  (The final shooting was sort of like this.  Nora had the gun—she was contemplating suicide—but she’d put it away and had even gone off into her room off stage.  Then she came out, pointed the gun at Torvald for a few seconds, and started pulling the trigger again and again.)  Now, maybe I missed something in the German text or in the translation (titles), but I don’t think so.  (I really wished my German were good enough not to have had to refer to the surtitles as much as I did—even though I knew the play fairly well, having taught it.  I did want to see what the translator did with the text.)  It didn’t help matters that the performance was two hours and ten minutes without an intermission—and the Harvey Theatre’s seats are not soft!

Anyway, it was disappointing, but not actually bad.  I pretty much concluded that updating Doll House isn’t profitable—you lose too much that isn’t made up in the modernization—but it was interesting to see the attempt.  It also made me reconsider the original—and how good Ibsen was at constructing plays to say what he wanted, such that trying to make them say something else in part destroys them.  (I saw a 1997 production of Ibsen’s Ghosts at the Arena in which Liviu Ciulei turned the dramatist’s famously realistic play into a symbolistic staging.  It simply didn’t work.)  Ironically, I also concluded that though Ibsen must remain in his own period for the plot to work, the drama—the point, the message, the theme—still communicates to a modern audience.  I mean, we may no longer believe in the nonsense of moral corruption = physical decay, but if we accept that they did, we can still see Ibsen’s point about trust and respect and honesty within a marriage.

We know that Shakespeare borrowed most of his plots from other writers.  Copyright protection didn’t exist in the 16th century, so he and the many other writers who used someone else’s ideas for their own works were on safe legal ground, and because Shakespeare’s final products (leaving aside, please, any argument that he wasn’t the true playwright) were so magnificent most of the time, no one has much cared in the centuries since.  But appropriation was nevertheless common even in the Renaissance (and long before as well: consider how may versions of Oedipus exist in Greek and Roman theater).  Shakespeare composed The Taming of the Shrew between 1590 and 1592 and there were almost immediately adaptations and derivatives on the stages of England and western Europe.  (Probably the best known stage adaptation is Cole Porter’s 1948 musical version, Kiss Me, Kate, which I’ll mention shortly.  The most radical was probably 1973’s The Shew by Charles Marowitz whose Hamlet collage, a 1964 deconstruction, became an international theater phenomenon; his Shrew was composed in much the same way.)

Probably the oldest Shrew variation is The Woman’s Prize, or The Tamer Tamed, a sequel written by John Fletcher (1579-1625) in about 1611.  (The script was first published in 1647, 22 years after Fletcher’s death.)  Characterized by Matt Wolf, a London theater reviewer for Variety, as a play “that virtually no one knows,” The Tamer Tamed (as it’s commonly called) was popular in the 17th and 18th centuries after the Restoration, often more so than its source, but dropped off the stage for about 200 years until 2003 when the Royal Shakespeare Company revived it; I saw it when the RSC came to Washington’s Kennedy Center later that same year with a repertoire that comprised both the Fletcher and its Shakespearean basis.  (I didn’t see the RSC production of Shrew, but I have seen it many times, including one at Shenandoah Shakespeare in Staunton, Virginia, in May 2003, staged in the troupe’s reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Blackfriars theater—see “Blackfriars Playhouse in Virginia,” 18 November 2009 on ROT and “Shenandoah Shakespeare,” 21 November 2009—and then again at Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Lansburgh Theatre in November 2007.)

I have trouble with Shrew to start with.  Okay, I know we’re not supposed to judge a work from the past by current standards, but I’ve never really been able to get around Petruchio’s treatment of Kate in order to “tame” her.  (The STC production piled on because director Rebecca Bayla Taichman posited the idea that Shrew is all about marriage as commerce.  Baptista auctioned off his daughters.)  I’m not sure this analogy will go over real well, but I’ll float it anyway: I once had a dog who got uncontrollably violent when he met another dog.  I spoke to a trainer and her analysis was that I had two choices.  She could break him entirely of his hostility, but he’d be spiritually crushed.  Or she could make him manageable; he wouldn’t be out of control but he could never be let alone with another dog off his leash.  We decided that the second option would be best for the dog (and for me)—but Petruchio seems to have gone for option one.  And for far less cause.  (Now, I’m not really comparing a woman to a dog—please don’t start that—though Petruchio does use animal-training techniques to tame Kate.)  I also understand that Shrew is a comedy—but if you play it entirely for laughs, then you make fun of what amounts to domestic violence.  If you make Kate so shrewish that she seems to need taming, in order to try to justify Petruchio’s behavior, then she ends up not just a strong-willed and independent woman but a truly insane one.  If you play her as a sort of protofeminist (which I maintain is what Shakespeare wrote, though she, of course, is way out of her time in the Renaissance), then Petruchio’s actions are all unwarranted (and even, by our standards, criminal).  Those aren’t really funny situations.  So, maybe I’m just a stick-in-the-mud, but I’ve never been able to reconcile this dilemma.  I don’t have the same problem with the racism of Othello or the anti-Semitism of Merchant, but the sexism of Shrew defeats me. 

As for Tamer Tamed, think Lysistrata meets Shrew—20 years on.  Katherine has died—RSC director Gregory Doran suggested that she’d died “from exhaustion”—and Petruchio has fallen in love again.  His new bride, Maria, refuses to consummate their marriage unless Petruchio changes his ways.  That’s enough to relate . . . because it’s awful.  (I’ve never seen a Jacobean play that was remotely enjoyable: The Duchess of Malfi, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Venice Preserv’d—they’re all grim.  Yech!)  There’s a word often used to describe bad theater, and it’s very apt for Tamer: leaden.  It just lay there lifeless.  The RSC tried so hard to animate it—the reviews all focused on the performances—that they ended up just looking manic, as if they were trying desperately to bring a dead body back to life.  There’s not a single line of poetry or even memorable prose; not one attractive, or even sympathetic, character; and a one-joke plot (all the women are denying all the men sex) that reduces everyone to a cipher.  I couldn’t even keep most of the characters straight—but that was mostly because I didn’t really care.  Not only wasn’t it funny, it wasn’t even clever.  I repeat a caveat I’ve used numerous times: often an unknown or neglected play is unknown and neglected because it’s bad!!!  This adaptation didn’t improve on the original; why RSC decided to dredge it up is a mystery to me. 

In 1999, a Broadway production of Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate (with book by Samuel and Bella Spewack) opened at Broadway’s Martin Beck Theatre (now the Al Hirschfeld), directed by  Michael Blakemore and starring Marin Mazzie as Lilli Vanessi/Kate and Brian Stokes Mitchell as Fred Graham/Petruchio.  The revival, the first since the 1948 début, went on tour after it closed in New York and I saw it with Rachel York and Rex Smith at the Kennedy Center in Washington in July 2001.  Kate is a backstage story about a touring troupe putting on a production of Shakespeare’s Shrew; it’s supposed to have been based on the off-stage lives of the husband-and-wife acting duo Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, who were said to have had a tempestuous relationship when they weren’t on stage.  

Unfortunately, I never wrote up any notes on this show and the only comment I remember making was that Rex Smith was just not a powerful stage persona, leaving a rather large hole in the center of the production where he’s called upon to portray two notoriously chauvinistic males: Petruchio from Shrew and Fred Graham, the director and lead actor of the touring company.  (To soften Fred’s benighted sexism, director Blakemore and uncredited play doctor John Guare made Harrison Howell, Lilli’s new beau since she and Fred separated, into a true MCP of an army general, with a nod to Douglas MacArthur—sunglasses and all—instead of the mere stuffed-shirt politico of the original script.) 

Unlike the Petruchio of Shrew, however, Fred’s far less a problem for me since, first of all, Kate is a musical comedy of the old school and no one is seriously endangered—the comic mobsters notwithstanding—and second, he’s hardly as hard-core as Petruchio and all he’s really up to is winning Lilli back—in his (ahem) fashion.  (Kate is, after all, not just a musical comedy, it’s a romantic comedy.  People don’t get hurt in a romcom!)  Of course, irrespective of production styles and individual performances, Kate is still the very first winner of the Tony for Best Musical and contains Porter’s most beloved stage score, with such perennial faves as “Another Op’nin’, Another Show,” “So In Love,” “Brush Up Your Shakespeare,” and “Wunderbar.”  (There are even several wonderful tunes from Shakespeare’s text, like “Where Is the Life That Late I Led” and “I Am Ashamed That Women Are So Simple.”) 

One of the most peculiar theatrical derivatives I’ve seen in my theatergoing life was Richard Schechner’s The Prometheus Project in December 1985.  Of course, anything Schechner, one of the founders of the 1960s avant-garde theater scene in New York and around the country, does is decidedly . . . well, unconventional.  Prometheus was a work performed in four movements plus a coda, conceived and directed by Schechner and presented by the Wooster Group Visiting Artist Series at the Performing Garage (previously the workspace of Schechner’s Performance Group, Wooster Group’s predecessor). 

Schechner, whose work hadn’t been seen in New York for five years, returned with his version of the Greek classic tragedy Prometheus Bound, attributed to Aeschylus (c. 525/524-c. 456/455 BCE).  The Prometheus Project expounded Schechner’s belief that nuclear firepower is Prometheus’ gift gone awry, and that nuclear destruction is the epitome of man’s violence, which also includes torture and sexual abuse.  The performance attempted to tie all this together and make us recognize our victims. 

To create visions of destruction and brutality, Schechner (who was one of my professors at NYU) and his performers combined movement, gesture, light, speech, and music.  These images were woven into the stories of Prometheus, chained to a mountain for stealing fire, and Io, turned into a cow and forced to wander the earth for rejecting Zeus.  The movement and gesture images were more affecting than the language images, which were unexciting and unconvincing.

Most striking was “Tomoko,” the opening movement, starting with slides from Renzo Kinoshita’s Pica Don depicting Hiroshima before, during, and after the bombing.  When the lights came up, the actors performed every-day tasks in slow motion while cellist Mollie Glazer played Bach’s Kol Nidre.  This segued into Becke Wilenski singing Bach’s oratorio, “Hear Ye, Israel.  O, how hast thou heeded my commandments.”  The scene was compelling, and drew attention to each action, each gesture.      

The succeeding segments were less focused and depended heavily on language and speech.  “Annie” gave us a very excisable porn show by veteran sex educator, former prostitute, stripper, and porno actor Annie Sprinkle, whom we were supposed to see as a victim.  It was during this scene that Schechner’s manipulative inclinations showed themselves.  Two actors dressed in trench coats, slouch hats, and dark glasses—the kind that stereotypical viewers of porn movies or strip shows are supposed to wear—took positions facing the audience, seated on bleacher-like risers at one end of the performance space.  The idea seemed to be that these “men” were there to witness our attendance at a porn show.  But, of course, we didn’t know the scene would take place and there was no way any of us could actually have left if we’d wanted to without disturbing all the rest of the audience and walking across the performance area.  So Schechner was trying to have it both ways—make us captive and unwitting spectators at a sex show and at the same time essentially point at us accusingly for being there.  The conceit actually pissed me off—it seemed dishonest.

In “Io,” while female performers ran back and forth imitating Io’s flight, two women told apparently true stories of abuse by men.  The last movement was “Prometheus” in which a nude Mahmood Karimi-Hakak was ritualistically bound and then recounted the story of his own torture.  Following a moment borrowed from Endgame during which Prometheus was released, the coda presented the entire company looking at us as two readers described a post-holocaustal world.      

Somehow, none of this came together.  Whenever the language began, the performance dragged and paled.  Schechner’s not partial to words, and his mostly novice performers were incapable of making them sound genuine.  After the stirring first movement, The Prometheus Project slackened disappointingly.  (I don’t know if Schechner took this show on a tour—it began in a workshop of college students, who made up most of the cast, and the director-creator may have presented it to other student audiences around the country—but I’m unaware of any revivals of The Prometheus Project in New York City since 1985.)

[Many of my remarks above were taken from past performance reports that predate ROT and even some of the e-mail reports that inspired the blog.  My comments on the Arena Stage revival of She Loves Me were drawn from a report I wrote on 17 January 2007 covering a visit to Washington over the year-end holidays that year, and the section on Nora was based on a 15 November 2004 report.  My brief remarks on The Taming of the Shrew at STC were taken from my 29 November 2007 report, and the comments on The Tamer Tamed were from a report written on 13 January 2004.  (You remember that I had no archived remarks on the Kennedy Center revival of Kiss Me, Kate.)  The discussion of Schechner’s Prometheus Project was actually a short review I wrote for Stages after seeing the performance but which was never published; Stages reduced my remarks to a brief mention in a general survey article in the March 1986 issue.]