Some Vintage Reviews from the Archive

 

[In the late 1980s and early ’90s, I wrote reviews for Stages, a monthly magazine that covered theater all over the country (but principally in New York City) and was distributed free in selected theaters from 1984 to 1996, and the New York Native, a biweekly gay newspaper published in New York City from 1980 until 1997.  I covered mostly Off-Off-Broadway and occasionally Off-Broadway. 

[I forget now what my word limit was for Stages (probably around 500 words), but it varied for large subjects such as the visit of the Grand Kabuki company of Japan, which played at the Met in a two-night repertory in July 1985, or when I did a feature article on theater in Washington, D.C. (see “Grand Kabuki (July 1985),” posted on Rick On Theatre on 6 November 2010, and “‘Stages in DC’ (Summer 1985),” 25 December 2011, respectively). 

[The length of the Native notices was also limited—about 800 words—and the paper ran reviews in pairs, so there were two plays covered in the column.  I could, however, divide the column up between the two productions any way I wanted.  (For some of the reviews republished here, the companion play has been omitted—though it may have been published in another post.)]

SUMMIT CONFERENCE

by Robert David MacDonald

New York Theatre Studio

TOMI Terrace Theatre 

[I reviewed Scottish playwright Robert David MacDonald’s Summit Conference for Stages in July/August 1985.  Directed by Richard Romagnoli, the show ran from 18 May to 9 July 1985 (its New York première) at the TOMI Terrace Theatre in the Park Royal Hotel on West 73rd Street.  (TOMI stood for “Theatre Opera Music Institute.”) 

[The production had sets by Gerard P. Bourcier, lights by John Hickey, costumes by Walker Hicklin, sound by Tommy Hawk, and hair and make-up by Michael Kriston.] 

It is not clear why the New York Theatre Studio chose to produce Robert David MacDonald’s Summit Conference, except perhaps to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of VE Day (8 May).  The play purports to be a fictional meeting in 1941 Berlin between the mistresses of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, Eva Braun and Clara Petacci.  Very shortly, however, the women become surrogates for their “friends,”  speaking and acting like men, and behaving just like the gangsters Petacci says such men must be. 

What they talk about is pap history—the Axis alliance as seen by the two dictators.  Nothing new:  Hitler is a depraved, bigotted megalomaniac and Mussolini a pompous buffoon, puffed up with the hot air of his imagined Roman heritage.  With the proper humor we might have been treated to an Anglo version of the Romans of Asterix the Gaul.  Unfortunately, the humor all derives from the gratuitous sex-shift and cheap ethnic jokes.  MacDonald’s only point seems to be that all persecution is cruel, senseless, and opportunistic.  Don’t most of us know that by now?

The performances are adequate, but cannot overcome the plodding script.  Susan Sharkey’s Braun is alternately mousy and bullying and Mary Jay’s Petacci is sensuously attractive. Laurence Overmire, as the SS soldier assigned to serve the two women, is convincingly naive and  virginal as he suffers harassment, seduction, humiliation, and, finally, persecution as a Jew.  The play, however, is so static and talky that no performance would likely be able to enliven it. 

It is doubtful any director could make this leaden script bouyant enough to float, though Richard Romagnoli does not seem to have tried very hard.  It is not clear, for instance, why the actors use heavy accents.  Certainly, when Braun talks to the soldier before Petacci’s arrival, they would speak unaccented “German.” 

In fact, the whole issue of what “language” the women are speaking is confusing.  Is Braun speaking Italian?  Or Petacci German?  I’m not aware that either mistress spoke anything but her native tongue.  Are they speaking English with one another?

There’s an attempted joke that only works if they’re speaking English, but both women would also have to understand German.  Petacci asks Braun if she has any children.  Sharkey’s Braun answers simply, “Nein”—German for ‘No.’  But Petacci interprets that to be “Nine,” and responds with surprise, “Nine children?”  It’s a dumb bilingual pun—and makes no sense in context.

John Hickey’s lighting seems arbitrary.  When Braun begins to taunt the soldier and convince him he is Jewish, the lights dim, leaving Petacci in the dark fringes of the set.  Granted, MacDonald seems to have forgotten her at this point, but she is still part of the play.  She may be better off before the lights come back up.

[A curious sidelight: Robert David MacDonald (who died in 2004 at 74) saw Summit Conference produced in London’s West End in 1982.  Esteemed British actress Glenda Jackson played Eva Braun.]

*  *  *  *

THE SECOND NEW YORK INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF CLOWN THEATRE
“All Fall Down (Clown Shorts #10)”
If Every Fool, Inc.
Westbeth Theatre Center, Theatre B 

[Not all my assignments were for traditional plays.  I saw all kinds of performances as a stringer for Stages, like the Grand Kabuki (which I actually requested) and the clown festival I covered in the fall of the same year.  My review of one program of the Second New York International Festival of Clown Theatre (11-30 June 1985) at the Westbeth Theatre Center on Bank Street in Greenwich Village ran in Stages in September 1985.

[An evening of ensemble clowning, the program was coordinated by John Towsen with lights by Drew Richardson and Christopher Agostino and a performance ensemble comprised of Christopher Agostino, Susan Avino, Laine Barton, Mari Briggs, Bernie Collins, Terry Dinneen, Maris Engel, Marilyn Galfin, Judith Harding, Joe Killian, Ian Kramer, Richard Nasch, Drew Richardson, John Rusk, Wellington Santos, Andy Teirstein, and Aaron Watkins.  I saw the performance at 8 p.m. on Saturday, 15 June.]

“If every fool wore a crown, we would all be kings” is the motto of the Second New York International Festival of Clown Theatre’s sponsor, and if there were no majestic jesters onstage at the Westbeth Theatre Center, there were clown princelings aplenty.  

One of four programs of “clown shorts” in the schedule, the evening ranges from the space-age a capella musical, “The Right Stuff,” to Shakespeare’s “Rude Mechanicals,” extracted from William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  On the way, it stops at “Joe’s Restaurant” and the barricaded garden of the “Bocci Brides,” two pieces devoted almost exclusively to the corporeal pyrotechnics of physical comedy.

All the performers are young, animated and clearly enjoy their tomfoolery.  So does the audience.  The company is a mix of experienced professionals, novices, amateurs, and “ordinary” actors trying their hands at clowning.  

Not every fool is crowned with equal success, however.  The silliness of “The Right Stuff,” which depicts America’s race for space, is so childlike it often crosses the border into childish.  One spectator observed very accurately that the performance was “like [what] the kids put on every summer” at camp. 

In both “Joe’s Restaurant” and “Bocci Brides,” the physical buffoonery, though frequently clever, is so carefully executed, the technique is visible.  Some lazzi can be seen on the way before they arrive, which is a little like knowing the punchline before the joke is told.  On the other hand, the clowning in “Rude Mechanicals” is better than most of the acting, though Wellington Santos’ Flute/Thisbe at Pyramus’ death is the belly-laughable quintessence of “the art of coarse acting.” 

That short also provides a wonderful see-saw routine as Bottom (Bernie Collins) repeatedly springs up causing his comrades to tumble off the other end of a tipping bench.  The variations on this turn are increasingly hilarious.

All in all, this was a delightful evening—despite torture-rack folding chairs that nearly caused paralysis—and it will likely be true for the whole festival, a smorgasbord of clowning, mime, buffoonery, and satire.  If you like clowns, there is something here for you: foreign or domestic, political or pure entertainment, high or low.  There are even classes in clowning for the participation-minded.

*  *  *  *

WHAT’S A NICE COUNTRY LIKE YOU . . . DOING IN A STATE LIKE THIS?

by Cary Hoffman and Ira Gasman

Actors’ Playhouse 

[The same issue of Stages, September 1985, contained my review of the musical entertainment What’s A Nice Country Like You . . . Doing In A State Like This?, a revue presented by Alice Kopreski & Bick Goss.  It was directed and choreographed by Suzanne Astor Hoffman with sets by Charles Plummer, lights by John McKernon, and costumes by Henrietta Louise Howard.  The cast included Missy Baldino, Jane Brucker, Steve Mulch, and Hugh Panaro and Rob Resnick.

[The show ran at the Actors’ Playhouse on 7th Avenue South (in Greenwich Village) for 252 performances from 31 July 1985 to 9 February 1986; I saw it in August 1985.]

Before What’s A Nice Country started, a woman came onto the stage, and proceeded to rearrange the audience.  Several large groups had been separated from one another and she wanted to put people back with those “to whom they belonged.”  The audience cooperated cheerfully, or amiably declared they were happy where they were.  That is the tone of this amusing little entertainment: friendly. 

Billing itself as a “typically topical revue,” and warning us all to “Get Out of Here” in the opening number, Country is a non-threatening, cute, decidedly liberal send-up of current and recent news items.  Performed by five very perky young singers, the evening covers such national and local concerns as the religious right (“Church and State” and “Hallelujah”), new sexual roles (“Male Chauvinist Pig of Myself” and “Liberation Tango”), Latin America (“Carlos, Juan & Miguel” and “Nicaragua”), Herpes (“I’m Not Taking a Chance on Love”), organ transplants (“I’m Not Myself Anymore”), life in New York (“A Mugger’s Work is Never Done” and “How’m I Doing”), and Bernhard Goetz (“Everybody Ought to Have a Gun”). 

Though some of this is as new as last week’s headlines, most is as old as the decade, and some even harks back to the ’70s.  (As it happens, Country was first presented at the American Place Theatre in 1972.)  A notification appears in the program with the “Musical Numbers” warning: “Similar to our foreign policy, this program order s subject to change without notice.”

A few numbers were extremely platitudinous, like  “Why Do I Keep Going to the Theatre?” and “Nicaragua,” both of which were superficial and sentimental.  Worse yet, the lyrics of “Take Us Back, King George,” a mock punk number, were unintelligible.

The most amusing moments, however, were really timeless.  Missy Baldino, for instance, had a recurring role as a woman who falls in love with all manner of unreciprocative types: a bisexual, a priest, a transvestite . . . (“I’m in Love With”).  In “Runaway Suite,” Steve Mulch did a very touching turn about growing up with “It’s Getting Better,” and Baldino poignantly explained how “I Like Me.” 

In the end, though the audience quite enjoyed themselves, the topicality was, for the most part, safe and tame, aimed at the easy targets.  There were few surprises either in the subject matter or the music (by Cary Hoffman) and lyrics (Ira Gasman).  For cleverness and bite, Country cannot hold a candle to Mark Russell, Tom Lehrer, or even TV’s old That Was The Week That Was.

[A couple of quasi-historical notes—for those under 50 or who grew up beyond New York City:

[“How’m I Doing” is an evocation of the catchphrase of Edward I. Koch (1924-2013) who was Mayor of New York from 1978 to 1989.  He habitually rode the city subway or stood on street corners greeting passersby with the slogan “How'm I doin'?”

[Bernhard Goetz (b. 1947 in Kew Gardens, Queens) was known after 22 December 1984 as “the Subway Vigilante.”  On that date, Goetz shot and wounded four African-American teens on a New York City subway train in Manhattan.  He was charged with attempted murder, assault, reckless endangerment, and several firearms offenses.  After several grand juries and trials, a trial jury found Goetz guilty of one count of carrying an unlicensed firearm, for which he served eight months of a one-year sentence. 

[On a personal point, Goetz lived in my neighborhood—he had an apartment somewhere in Greenwich Village—and I used to see him now and then on the streets near my home or going in or out of the 7th Avenue-and-14th Street subway station.  We were not acquainted.]

*  *  *  *
ONLY KIDDING
by Jim Geoghan
American Jewish Theater
Susan Bloch Theater 

[“Hitting Below the Borscht Belt,” the headline I gave my notice for Only Kidding by Jim Geoghan, ran in the New York Native on 14 November 1988.  The play premièred at the American Jewish Theatre’s Susan Bloch Theatre on West 26th Street in Chelsea; it later moved to the Westside Theatre on 43rd Street in the theatre district where it won two Theatre World Awards and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award.] 

Early in the first act of Only Kidding, Catskills comic Jackie Dwayne (Larry Keith) tells one tired, old joke after another to Sheldon Kelinski (Michael Jeter), who has been sent by Dwayne’s manager to write new material for him.  Each time, Kelinski beats the middle-aged comic to the punchline.  That’s the way it is with the whole play: we know the “snappers” before playwright Jim Geoghan tells us.

Only Kidding, which Geoghan says is partly autobiographical, explores the underside of stand-up comedy, focusing on two kinds of Jewish performers.  In the first act, we meet Dwayne, the older man with the mostly ethnic one-liners whose main claim to fame is that he did The Ed Sullivan Show back in the ’50s. 

As soon as obsessive, compulsive Sheldon shows up, we know they will clash.  In the second act we are introduced to Jerry Goldstein (Paul Provenza), the younger, hipper fellow who does character schtick and off-beat situations.  It is immediately clear that he and his Irish partner (Ethan Phillips) are bound for a split-up, and when the owner (Sam Zap) of the Brooklyn nightery in which the team are performing offers them a management contract, we can see he will use his mafia contacts to coerce them.  

The only real difference between the two men, though, is that Dwayne drinks rum and Coke and Goldstein does pills and coke.  Both comedians are waiting for their big break, an appearance on the Buddy King Show, a Tonight Show clone.  Before the third act begins, we know that both men will make it one way or another, and that there will be a confrontation between them.  Along the way, we are treated to a flow of low, vulgar, ethnic jokes that provide something to offend everyone. 

Some familiar targets for insult humor are gays, Italians, Poles, Greeks, and, of course, Jews.  That some of the jokes are funny has little to do with the play itself, which is supposed to be a paean to humanity and honor.  Geoghan doesn’t introduce this theme, however, until the last moments of the play, when the young comic’s mafioso manager engineers the removal of the older man from the show.

Despite the material, director Larry Arrick cast his production suitably.  The actors create credible characters from the stereotypes provided by the playwright.  None, however, rises above the script’s mediocrities.  Akira Yoshimura’s sets and Jeffrey L. Ullman’s costumes are appropriate and serviceable, as is Susan A. White’s lighting. 

This is AJT’s first production in its new space, the Susan Bloch Theater, to which it moved because its previous theater was inadequate.  It should be noted, then, that the sightlines in this theater are so bad that, even from as close as the third row of the three-sided auditorium, it was difficult to see anything below table-top level.

*  *  *  *
THE MAJESTIC KID
by Mark Medoff
Golden Glow Unlimited, Ltd.
Theater at Saint Peter’s Church 

[“Cowboys and Fools,” the omnibus title for my reviews of The Majestic Kid by Mark Medoff (1940-2019) and Jean Colonomos, Peter Dee, and Edward Taussig’s Chain of Fools, appeared in the New York Native of 19 December 1988.  The production of Majestic Kid, which seems to have been the New York première, ran at the Theatre at St. Peter’s Church (Lexington Avenue in Manhattan’s Midtown East) from 1 December 1988 to 15 January 1989. 

[Medoff’s play was first performed, as were most of his works, at the American Southwest Theatre Company at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, where Medoff headed the theater department and served as artistic director if the theater company, in March 1981 under the direction of the playwright (who’s best known as the composer of Children of a Lesser God, Broadway 1980-82, which won three Tonys, including Best Play, and two Drama Desks.)

[The Majestic Kid  went on to mountings in Aspen, Colorado, in July 1983 and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in February 1985.  It has been a perennial in regional theaters ever since, and is still popular today.  The No Strings Theatre Company of Las Cruces, for example, just streamed The Majestic Kid in November 2020.]

Hopalong Cassidy.  The Cisco Kid.  The Lone Ranger.  Wild Bill Hickok.  Gene Autry.  Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. 

Do these names strike guitar chords in you?  Did your childhood heroes wear buckskins, chaps, and ten-gallon hats?  Were their best friends a horse and a funny sidekick?  After helping the good folks, did they ride off into the sunset and never get the girl?  If this sounds like you fifteen or twenty years ago, then you will identify with Aaron Weiss, who fancies himself The Majestic Kid, helping “people without hurting other people.” 

It’s an engaging image.  We all sometimes wish we could be the wonderful heroes and heroines of our more innocent childhoods.  Aaron, however, has kept his idol with him; The Laredo Kid, dressed in an elaborate black-and-white wrangler’s outfit, comes down off the screen and out of Aaron’s imagination to advise and help him.  But, as Aaron finds out—somewhat later in life perhaps than the rest of us—Laredo’s world and the real one don’t mesh. 

Mark Medoff’s new play, staged by Derek Wolshonak. links the cowboy-movie hero and the modern-day citizens-advocacy lawyer.  With old movie stills for scenery, extras, and mood-establishing backgrounds, the production digs into a large number of problems.  As lawyers, Aaron (Stuart Zagnit) and his partner, A. J. Pollard (Kay Walbye), pit right against wrong in their fight with the local ranchers on behalf of Apache Indians who claim the land as their ancestral property. 

Then there’s the matter of preserving the land, which is being bought up by Judge William S. Hart Finlay (Michael Cullen) for a toxic waste dump.  At the same time, Aaron is torn between loving his yuppie partner and the young rancher Lisa (Juliette Kurth), neither of whom wants to play the sidekick role the way Laredo (Alex Wipf) would have it. 

Aaron is also uncomfortable with the lone, macho hero image, preferring to share the struggle with his love.  Woven all through the play is the clash of Laredo’s fantasy world and Aaron’s real one, which parallels but doesn’t meet the clash of the mythological Old West with the reality of the modern one. 

As hard as it is to focus on one or two of these themes, the send-up of the old movie situations and dialogue, Laredo’s film plots and songs (a love song for him is an homage to his horse), and the cartoon characterizations—particularly Laredo and Finlay—make for an amusing and entertaining performance.  If the play is at its best when it is least serious, there is still much fun in The Majestic Kid.

*  *  *  *

CHAIN OF FOOLS
by Jean Colonomos, Peter Dee, and Edward Taussig
Actors’ Alliance, Inc.
Nat Horne Theatre 

[The Chain of Fools review was part of the same column as the Majestic Kid notice, published on 19 December 1988.  The show was presented in its “world première” at the Nat Horne Theatre on Theatre Row from 1 to 18 December 1988.]

Actors’ Alliance is a group of theater artists who meet regularly for workshops.  Sometimes the workshops develop into full-scale productions, and their season often includes original works by the group’s resident playwrights.  Chain of Fools, this season’s opener, is a collaboration among three of the company’s writers, each one writing a section of the play and then passing it along to a colleague when he or she had no more to contribute.   

You can’t tell where the seams are between each of the sections, but the play does have a pass-along structure anyway.  Like a La Ronde for the ’80s, Chain of Fools creates relationships between pairs of people that is passed along by one half of the couple.  Kate (Judith Heineman) loves husband Bill (Tim van Pelt); Bill loves Brandon (Daniel J. Sherman); Brandon doesn’t love anyone, but is pursued by Jennifer (Lee Robin).  Linking the chain together is Natasha (Juanita Walsh), a psychic at whose apartment Kate, Bill, and Jennifer all meet for the penultimate confrontation. 

It is all very contemporary, though in the end it is little more than an eternal rectangle which the final scene between Kate and Brandon does not resolve.  When Brandon admits that he cannot return love, either from Jennifer or Bill, Kate calls him a “cliché” and leaves.  As he was the catalyst for the crisis, he is also the cause of its ultimate inconclusiveness.

Director Melanie Sutherland has melded the elements into a smooth performance, moving from the apparently disconnected monologues of the opening to more integrated scenes, opening up the characters a little at a time so we can get to know them and sympathize with them. 

A few scenes seem more slowly paced than they ought to be, but the characters and situation do involve us and the actors develop an effective ensemble.  Set designer James A. Crocker has created a jagged, geometrical environment of raw wood triangles and squares that is appropriate to the unfinished lives of the characters. 

*  *  *  *

SMILE & LIE

Power Lunch by Alan Ball & Tribe by P. Kevin Strader

Alarm Dog Rep

HOME for Contemporary Theatre and Art 

[My review of the two-one-act bill of Smile & Lie was published in the New York Native on 31 December 1990 as part of “Money, Money, Money”; the second play in this pairing was Martha Horstman’s Junglebird, a slight Cinderella comedy.

[The production was staged at the HOME for Contemporary Theatre and Art in TriBeCa in lower Manhattan from 29 November to 15 December 1990.] 

You have to wonder about the patrons of the restaurant in Power Lunch, the first one-act in Alarm Dog Rep’s Smile & Lie.  Not only are they served by a waitress named Dorothy who looks like a man (until she has the world’s fastest sex-change operation and comes out a man named Donald who looks like a woman), but they silently witness a relentless ’90s version of the battle of the sexes.  The combatants would probably call it “the battle of the genders.” 

Power Lunch by Alan Ball and its companion play, Tribe by P. Kevin Strader, are witty, slightly off-center, and endlessly surprising.  Smile & Lie is also excellently mounted by the ADR ensemble, who clearly have a quirky, clear-eyed view of our modern world. 

Though both plays winnow out the chaff of life, reserving only its most basic elements—Strader even reduces some language to a telegraphic Newspeak—they differ in style and structure.  Power Lunch, directed by Jeff Mousseau, is for the most part realistically acted, with a few well-timed exceptions. 

A businessman (author Ball) and -woman (Carol McCann) test each other’s vulnerabilities in language stolen from Psychology Today and Dr. Ruth [Westheimer (b, 4 June 1928); German-American sex therapist, media personality, author, radio, and television talk show host].  Ball is Gordon Gekko-manqué: arrogant, brusque, and condescending; McCann is a neo-feminist put-down artist: superior, tough, and self-assured. 

There is considerable gender-switching as each in turn goes after Dorothy/Donald (Andrew Watts and Carol Halstead, respectively).  Halstead is the quintessential bimbo, a Vanna White wannabe.  Watts, however, provides the evening’s most incongruous performance.  A large man who looks like he ought to play a quarterback, his Dorothy is sensitive, modest, and vulnerable. 

Strader’s Tribe, directed by Ball, is a cartoon.  Along with its truncated language, its set is a gray-and-white cardboard apartment cut-out.  The two black-clad couples meeting for dinner are so upscale they are entirely ignorant of practical matters.  The paradigm is Minx (Tara Buckley) who charges other people “a real lot” of money to advise them on taste.  “Taste of what?” asks her hostess, Pam (Vicki March).  “Everything,” replies Minx, asserting that people need the assurance that what they have is good. 

Consumerism and boredom are hallmarks of this world.  Host Jim (Watts) owns a riding mower, although he lives in a highrise apartment “with no grass.”  When the evening’s activities lag, the four are terrified until Jim saves them by turning on the TV. 

But it is egocentrism that holds these people’s lives together.  Guest Rex (Marc Ashmore) is a performance artist whose subject is essentially himself, as he demonstrates in a puerile movement piece about his small-town home.  Pam is raising their “infant” by tape-recordings piped through tiny earphones; it is also catheterized so she never has to change it.

The cast, speaking as if in balloons, acts two-dimensionally, with mercurial changes of affect as though each moment were a cartoon panel come momentarily to life.  Tribe is extremely clever—Strader deftly targets television news, commercials, diplomacy, and yuppie oenophilia—but it’s cleverness with a sharp point and a wacky perspective, a reductio ad absurdum.

Marc Ashmore’s sets and Richie Williamson’s lighting for both Power Lunch and Tribe add extra dimensions to the style, wit, and theatricality of Smile & Lie.

"Unopened": 'The Baker’s Wife'

 

[The failed Broadway première of The Baker’s Wife is the subject of New York Times theater and arts journalist Laura Collins-Hughes’s entry in the “Unopened” series.  Published on 5 November 2020 in the “Arts” section of the Times—and  posted on the paper’s website as “Patti LuPone Was a Constant. The Other Ingredients Never Cooked” on 4 November—the report examines the breakdown of the transfer of the novel and screenplay by Jean Giono for the 1938 French film La femme du boulanger, directed by Marcel Pagnol (1895-1974), to the American musical stage.

[This is the last of the five articles in the Times’ “Unopened” series on failed Broadway attempts.  As I’ve been saying all along, the reports aren’t connected except by the common theme.  Reading all the articles, however, provides an overview of the reasons for and causes of aborted Broadway openings, some of which had every expectation for success.  If you haven’t been reading the whole series, I recommend going back and catching the four preceding articles, posted on 26 February and 1, 4, and 7 March.]

“WHAT COULD GO WRONG? EVERYTHING”
by Laura Collins-Hughes
 

With a marquee creative team, this romantic musical should have been a sure bet. One great song survived the out-of-town turmoil.

The producer David Merrick [1911-2000] was no slouch at offstage drama. With a new musical in rough shape on the road, he devised an audacious caper to fix it.

The place was the Shubert Theater in Boston, the year 1976, the show “The Baker’s Wife” — with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz [b. 1948], a book by Joseph Stein [1912-2010] and a cringe-making trail of reviews that seemed only to be getting worse.

At the start of the five-city, six-month Broadway-bound tour, in May, the Los Angeles Times had kindly deemed the show “not an embarrassment.” By September, The Boston Globe declared acidly that it didn’t “have a prayer.”

To Merrick, the song “Meadowlark” — sung by the title character, played by a not yet famous, 27-year-old Patti LuPone [b. 1949] — was part of the problem. It was more than seven minutes long, and he wanted it out. So after a Wednesday matinee, he ordered the conductor, Robert Billig [b. 1947], to pull all of the sheet music for the song and bring it to the stage.

“I did as I was asked,” Billig recalled by email this week, “and Mr. Merrick put the music in his attaché case and departed for New York.”

The notoriously combative producer left the others to figure out how to make the evening performance work around the hole he had just smashed in it.

“This could all just be myth,” LuPone said by phone the other day, hushing her voice for effect, “but let’s hope it’s true: He was heard in a bar the night before saying, ‘I’ll get that song out of the show if I have to poison the birdseed.’”

“Meadowlark,” which went on to become a cabaret standard, a popular audition number and one of LuPone’s signature solo songs, didn’t stay cut. Billig got on the phone to Schwartz, Schwartz called his agent, threats were made. The orchestra got its music back the next day.

“By that point in the proceedings,” Schwartz said recently by video call, “this is why we couldn’t fix it.” Meaning the show, that is. “Because everything had sort of descended into chaos. Nobody was making really rational decisions.”

In terms of sheer, eye-popping dysfunction, the “Meadowlark” incident — which amuses Schwartz now — is emblematic of the grim slog that was the cross-country out-of-town tryout for “The Baker’s Wife,” whose star, Chaim Topol [Israeli actor, singer, and comedian, b. 1935; aka:  Topol], eventually followed other axed creatives out the door.

Even LuPone, playing Geneviève, was a replacement for the original leading lady, Carole Demas [b. 1940], who was let go in Los Angeles. At that same stop on the tour, Jerome Robbins [choreographer and director, 1918-98] came to see the musical, invited by Merrick and Stein in the hope that he might take over the production. No dice.

“There was like a revolving door of directors,” Schwartz said.

“Every time somebody joined the company,” LuPone said, “we looked at them and went, ‘Oh my God, what did you do that put you in the bowels of hell?’“

“The Baker’s Wife” arrived with great ambitions, expected to join the string of Schwartz hits already on Broadway in the autumn of ’76: “Pippin,” “The Magic Show,” “Godspell.” It still hasn’t played there, and not until 2005 did Schwartz and Stein find its proper shape. But its creation story does have a happy ending, and we will get to that.

First, though, the horror show — which, like all the best horror shows, begins with no inkling of trouble.

In 1972 or ’73, when Schwartz was a 20-something boy wonder, Neil Simon [playwright, 1927-2018] invited him to lunch. Broadway’s reigning king of comedies, Simon suggested they write a musical together. But none of the ideas that he proposed — “Mutiny on the Bounty,” maybe? — appealed to Schwartz.

Then, over dessert, Simon told the story of Marcel Pagnol’s 1938 French film “La Femme du Boulanger,” in which a village baker’s much younger wife leaves him for a man nearer to her age. By the time Simon got to the ending, Schwartz was in.

And he stayed in after Simon, newly widowed, dropped out of the nascent project and Stein, who wrote the book to “Fiddler on the Roof,” joined it.

Centering their musical on the baker, Aimable, Schwartz and Stein had hoped to cast the “Fiddler” star Zero Mostel [1915-77]. When he turned them down, they took Merrick’s suggestion and went to Topol, who had played Tevye in the 1971 “Fiddler” movie.

“It turned out to be a kind of disastrous choice,” Schwartz said. “Because Topol was never comfortable playing someone who was an older and less attractive man. He had this sense of virility and sexiness.”

“Nothing could be done as long as Topol was there,” LuPone said, recalling one performance when he didn’t like the lyrics and substituted “blah blah blah” instead. “He sabotaged the show.”

A group of his fellow actors wrote to Actors’ Equity, lobbying to have him fired. (Reached by telephone, Topol’s agent declined to make him available for an interview.)

But by the time Paul Sorvino [b. 1939] replaced him, in late October on the tour’s last stop — at the Kennedy Center in Washington, less than a month before the scheduled Broadway start — the actors were so “bloody and beaten” that they only wanted to be left alone by this new leading man who was trying to rally them, LuPone said.

For her, some of the erosion of morale involved “Meadowlark,” which tells the story of Geneviève’s decision to leave her husband. In LuPone’s recollection, it was consistently in the show until Merrick’s stunt in Boston, the tour’s penultimate stop. After that, “it was out, in, out, in, out, in, between Boston and Washington,” she said.

The last time it was pulled from the show, she remembers walking out of a company notes session and telling “the director du jour,” John Berry [1917-99], that he could go straight to hell.

“I left and went into my dressing room, started crying, started smashing stuff,” she said. “And like a flock of sea gulls after the notes session, the company came in and put a Valium in my throat — and then left the room!”

LuPone laughed. At this distance, she cherishes her forged-in-fire “Baker’s Wife” anecdotes, and she is sure about the disheartening disappearance and reappearance of her big song — a number that, at her own concerts, fans demand to hear as much as they demand “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.”

But Billig, the conductor, said he didn’t remember the song being pulled more than once. Schwartz, whose daughter, Jessica, was born during the tour, was at home for much of its second half. Still, he said the song would not have been out of the show after his agent objected vociferously the first time.

One point of agreement about “The Baker’s Wife” back then is that it never did come into focus, no matter how relentlessly it was reworked. (To those who blame Stein’s book, Schwartz retorts loyally that “if we didn’t solve things, it’s because we didn’t solve them together.”)

Toward the end, as the show kept unraveling, those involved badly wanted out. Eventually Schwartz and Stein — who remained friends until Stein’s death at 98 in 2010 — went to Merrick and asked him not to take it to Broadway.

And when the closing notice went up that November?

“The entire company erupted in tears of joy,” LuPone said.

After they closed, LuPone, Sorvino and other cast members recorded an album of Schwartz’s favorite solos and duets from the show, which attracted a cult following and put “Meadowlark” into the world.

Trevor Nunn [English director, b. 1940] heard songs from the album enough times in auditions to pique his interest. In 1989, he directed a revamped version of “The Baker’s Wife” in London and supplied what was to Schwartz and Stein a crucial insight: that the central character is not the baker but the village — that it’s the story of a community responding to a small domestic crisis that touches them all.

It wasn’t until 2005, though, at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey, that Schwartz finally saw a version of “” that felt finished to him. The director Gordon Greenberg [b. 1968], who years earlier had fallen for the show through the album, worked with Schwartz and Stein to realign its bones, lending it what Greenberg called a “Gallic shrug.” Alice Ripley [b. 1963] played Geneviève — about 40 in that incarnation, but still with an older husband and a 20-something love.

Before the pandemic struck, Greenberg said, he had an offer to direct “The Baker’s Wife” in London that would have put him in rehearsals there right about now.

But it’s the Paper Mill production that Schwartz comes back to. As his favorite review said, it was the lovely little show that he and Stein had always wanted. It only took 30 years.

“For a long time, of course, it was the child that didn’t survive,” Schwartz said. “I’m really proud of the fact that we never gave up.”

[Before the scheduled Broadway opening on 21 November 1976 at the Martin Beck Theatre, The Baker’s Wife went on a five-city try-out tour.  It opened in Los Angeles at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on 11 May 1976 and closed there on 26 June; then it traveled north to San Francisco and played the Curran Theatre from 29 July to 31 July. 

[The Baker’s Wife opened at the Municipal Opera House (the “Muny”) on 16 August and played there until 22 August before moving on to Boston.  It played the Shubert Theatre from 15 September to 2 October, then moved south to Washington, D.C., to open at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’ Eisenhower Opera House on 4 October.

[The closing notice was posted in Washington and after the final performance there on 13 November, the tour ended and the planned transfer to Broadway was canceled.  The Baker’s Wife has never played in New York City except for a staged concert presentation by the York Theatre Company on 26-28 October 2007.

[The Paper Mill Playhouse (the “State Theater of New Jersey,” Millburn, N.J.) production of The Baker’s Wife, directed by Gordon Greenberg, ran from 13 April to 15 May 2005.  The review I believe Collins-Hughes cites was published in Section NJ (“New Jersey”) of the New York Times of Sunday, 24 April 2005; in the notice, reviewer Naomi Siegel wrote: “And, after 30 years of fine-tuning, Messieurs Stein and Schwartz will have the lovely little musical they always wanted.”]

"Unopened": 'Scratch'

 

[Adam Langer’s examination of Scratch (for “Old Scratch,” a nickname for the Devil), is number four in the Times’ “Unopened” series.  It was published in the “Arts” section of the New York Times of 4 November 2020. The web version of the article, posted on 3 November, had the same headline as the print version.

[Once again, let me suggest that readers who are just finding this series go back and read the first three articles of the Times’ “Unopened,” posted on 26 February and 1 and 4 March.  Though the articles aren’t linked except by the theme of failed Broadway attempts, reading all five reports does show the breadth of the causes of the failures.  It’s a sad lesson, but a lesson nonetheless.]

“BOB DYLAN’S FIRST MUSICAL HAD A DEVIL OF A TIME”
by Adam Langer

The task: write songs for Archibald MacLeish’s adaptation of a classic New England morality tale. What audiences saw (briefly): A play without music.

It sounded like a fine idea at the time — pair two poetic giants of different generations and get them to collaborate on reinventing an American classic.

The year was 1969. The producer Stuart Ostrow [b. 1932] and the director Peter Hunt [1938-2020] already had a hit show on Broadway with “1776.” Now they were setting their sights on “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” Stephen Vincent Benét’s [1898-1943] classic 1936 story about Jabez Stone, a New Hampshire farmer who sells his soul to the devil, has second thoughts, and enlists the orator and statesman Daniel Webster [1782-1852] to argue his case before a jury composed of American villains. The tale had been adapted into a 1939 opera and a 1941 movie, but never a musical.

Archibald MacLeish [1892-1982], the three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and author of the Tony Award-winning play “J.B.,” which reimagined the Book of Job, would write the book. The composer and lyricist would be Bob Dylan [b. 1941] — decades before he proffered his songbook to Twyla Tharp [dancer and choreographer, b. 1941] for 2006’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and to Conor McPherson [Irish dramatist, b. 1971] for “Girl From the North Country.” (That show’s Broadway run was interrupted by the pandemic.)

“Stuart had this idea that we would get the oldest poet of note and the youngest poet of note to work together,” Hunt recalled in a conversation earlier this year, before he died at 81 from complications of Parkinson’s disease.

“I thought coupling the Republic’s poet laureate and America’s balladeer was a unique invitation to young and old audiences,” Ostrow added in a recent email.

“Scratch” took its title from the name the devil calls himself in Benét’s story. MacLeish offered a deeply-considered meditation on the nature of good and evil, obliquely asking whether the ideals upon which America was founded could endure in the time of Richard Nixon [1913-94; 37th President of the United States, 1969-74] and Vietnam.

The show would be the “opposite of a musical,” MacLeish wrote to Ostrow in papers now held by the Billy Rose Theater Division of the New York Public Library; “it would be a “ballad play,” featuring an actor in modern dress who would sing songs and serve as conduit between the audience and the action onstage.

As for what this 20th century troubadour would sing, well, that was Dylan’s job.

MacLeish proposed some song titles — among them, “Red Hands,” “Lower World,” “New Morning,” and “Father of Night,” and Dylan, who’d wearied of the limelight and was trying on new personas, started writing on spec.

The poet effused over Dylan’s initial contributions. “Those songs of yours have been haunting me — and exciting me,” he wrote to Dylan. “‘New Morning’ marries the opening as though they’d been intended for each other.”

But Dylan and MacLeish were separated not only by age but by background, style, temperament, and sensibility. MacLeish divided his time between his western Massachusetts home and a private club in Antigua, and was the product of boarding schools and Ivy League universities. Dylan, a more instinctive, less deliberative artist, was the Minnesota-born son of a Jewish appliance store owner, and was, as he averred on “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” his latest album, “born on the wrong side of the railroad track, like [Alan] Ginsberg [Beat poet, 1926-97], [Gregory] Corso [Beat poet, 1930-2001] and [Jack] Kerouac [Beat novelist and writer, 1922-69].”

A disagreement over lyrics to “Father of Night” epitomized the difference between the two visions. Dylan’s song was full of oppositions (“Father of day, Father of night/Father of black, father of white”). MacLeish liked the melody but thought the song should comment more exclusively on the nature of evil; he suggested alternative lyrics: “Father of night, father of dread/Father of cold in the void overhead/Father of serpent under the stone/Father of fear in the dark alone.”

As relayed in Dylan’s fanciful 2004 memoir, “Chronicles: Volume One,” a meeting between the septuagenarian MacLeish and the 20-something Dylan — with the elder poet discoursing on Sappho, Socrates, Dante and John Donne — reads like deleted dialogue from the scene in “Trading Places,” when Eddie Murphy’s [actor and comedian, b. 1961] street-smart con man finds himself improbably welcomed into the home of blue-blooded Dan Aykroyd [Canadian actor, comedian, and musician, b. 1952].

Inevitably, the creative process on “Scratch” devolved; the story of how that happened differs depending on who’s telling it.

“I backed out of the production,” Dylan wrote in the liner notes to “Biograph,” his 1985 collection of outtakes, bootlegs, and previously-released material. “It was nothing really, kind of like a misunderstanding I supposed.”

Then later, in “Chronicles”: “I knew that I couldn’t have anything to add to the message of [MacLeish’s] play. He didn’t need my help anyway.”

In his 2005 memoir “Present at the Creation: Leaping in the Dark and Going Against the Grain,” Ostrow, a quadruple Tony winner whose Broadway career spanned four decades, takes issue with Dylan’s version of events, to say the least. He presents the future Nobel Laureate [Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016] as a monosyllabic dolt and poseur who froze in the presence of a true man of American letters and spent his time at MacLeish’s home pounding brandy, then conking out.

“The only impression the celebrated folk singer had made was a nasty ring from his brandy snifter on the MacLeish’s 1785 cherry table,” Ostrow wrote.

Despite his early enthusiasm, MacLeish soured on Dylan’s contributions. “Dylan proved incapable of writing new songs,” he wrote in a 1970 letter.

In an email, Ostrow put it more bluntly: “Dylan could not collaborate.”

Perhaps. But, seeing as Dylan had just released “Nashville Skyline,” which featured a duet with Johnny Cash, and, two years earlier, had worked with the Band on recordings that would become known as “The Basement Tapes,” the truth seems more specific: Dylan could collaborate when he felt like it, just not with Archibald MacLeish.

Ostrow and MacLeish considered presenting “Scratch” with songs that Dylan had already recorded, but when the show opened at Broadway’s St. James Theater on May 6, 1971, it did so as a straight play, starring Patrick Magee [Irish actor, 1922-82] as Daniel Webster, Will Geer [American actor, 1902-78] as Scratch, and Will Mackenzie [American actor, b. 1938] as Jabez Stone.

Without the balancing voice of a contemporary songwriter, it registered as pompous and outdated, characterized by what The New York Times critic Walter Kerr [1913-96] called “echoes of a vanishing style.”

“It has a vacuum where its art should be,” wrote his fellow critic, Clive Barnes [1927-2008].

The actress Joanne Nail [b. 1947], who made her Broadway debut in “Scratch,” believes that MacLeish was “too married to his words,” which landed with audiences better out of town.

“We had played previews in Boston and people loved it there because it was about their area of the country, their history,” she explained recently. “But when we came to New York, Will MacKenzie and I thought it might be too long, and some of the dialogue was not going to fly. So, we went to Peter Hunt and told him, but Archibald didn’t want to change anything.”

The show closed two days later.

“It was conceived as a musical, ergo it failed,” Ostrow said simply, by email.

As for Dylan, months earlier, he had released “New Morning,” a collection of a dozen new songs [1970], including the title track and his version of “Father of Night.” It was, Greil Marcus [music journalist, b. 1945] wrote in the Times, “his best album in years.”

[Benét’s short story was first published in The Saturday Evening Post on 24 October 1936.  The operatic adaptation by Benét and composer Douglas Stuart Moore, which they labeled a “folk-opera,” premièred by the American Lyric Theatre at the Martin Beck Theatre in New York City’s Theatre District on 18 May 1939.  The music was conducted by Fritz Reiner and the one-act opera was staged by John Houseman. 

[The presentation, which was paired with the one-act musical The Filling Station written by Virgil Thomson, ran for six performances, closing on 26 May.  Lansing Hatfield sang Daniel Webster, George Rasely was Mr. Scratch, and John Gurney sang Jabez Stone.

[Originally entitled All That Money Can Buy, the film version of Benét’s story, directed by William Dieterle from a screenplay by Dan Totheroh, was released (in New York City) by RKO Radio Pictures on 16 October 1941.  Edward Arnold played Daniel Webster, Walter Huston was Mr. Scratch, and James Craig was Jabez Stone. 

[Conor McPherson’s Girl from the North Country, with music and lyrics by Bob Dylan, started previews at the Belasco Theatre on 7 February 2020 and opened on 5 March before the theaters shut down because of the pandemic.  The musical was first produced on 8 July 2017 by London’s Old Vic (formally, the Royal Victoria Hall); it’s U.S. première was on 11 September 2018 at the Joseph Papp Public Theater’s Newman Theater in Manhattan’s East Village.

[Directed by Peter H. Hunt, Scratch started previews at the St. James Theatre on 28 April 1971 and opened on 6 May.  It closed on 8 May after eight previews and four regular performances.  The Boston try-out had previews at the Colonial Theatre from 3 to 6 April 1971 and opened on 7 April; it ran through 24 April.

[Next in “Unopened” (10 March): “Patti LuPone’s first-act ballad became a standard, but the show it came from never did.”]

"Unopened": 'A Pray by Blecht'

 

[The third installment in the New York Times “Unopened” series is the paper’s co-chief theater reviewer Jesse Green’s report on the demise of the Broadway plans for a musical with the unlikely title of A Pray by Blecht (and no, that’s not a typo).  It ran in the “Arts” section of the Times of 5 November 2020; the online version of the story was posted on 2 November under the headline “A Golden Team, a Terrible Title and a Show That Vanished.”

[As I observed in the introduction to the second installment of “Unopened,” the individual articles in this series aren’t connected (except by the common theme), but reading them all gives a (dismaying) picture of the traps and hurdles that have scuttled more than a few Broadway-bound endeavors.  I recommend, for those who are just joining the series, going back to parts one and two, posted on 26 February and 1 March, to read about the founderings of Lone Star Love in 2007 and Face Value in 1993.]

“A TOP TEAM, BUT THE SHOW VANISHED”
by Jesse Green

Would you like to see a new musical from the people who brought you “West Side Story”? For better or worse, you probably never will.

How do you top “West Side Story”?

If you’re Leonard Bernstein [1918-90], Stephen Sondheim [b. 1930] and Jerome Robbins [1918-98], the answer is: You don’t.

Well, you try. Ten years after the composer, the lyricist and the director-choreographer of that show (along with its book writer, Arthur Laurents [1917-2011]) changed the musical theater with their contemporary take on “Romeo and Juliet,” they rejoined forces to develop another project.

The idea was Robbins’s. He thought that one of Bertolt Brecht’s Lehrstücke, or teaching plays, could make a good musical, being short and pointed and fable-like. In 1967, he asked Sondheim to read “The Measures Taken,” the first in a collection of four translations, for possible adaptation. When Sondheim balked, finding the material too inert, Robbins told him to read the next play in the book.

That one, “The Exception and the Rule,” is about a rapacious oil merchant (read: capitalism) who races another merchant across a desert to win a lucrative deal. Accompanying him are a guide and a porter; when the three get lost, and the porter (read: exploited labor) tries to help the merchant, the merchant misunderstands the gesture and shoots him. Naturally, being of the ruling class, he is acquitted: Self-defense, the judge decides, applies even if the threat is imaginary.

Sondheim, eager to work with Robbins, whom he called “the only genius I had ever associated with,” thought this story might work, even though he found most of Brecht [1898-1956], and especially the teaching plays, “insufferably simplistic.” In his book “Look, I Made a Hat,” he wrote that there was “too much Lehr in each stück” — too much teaching in each play — “to hold my attention.”

Indeed, his attention waned after “taking a stab” at two songs. Giving up, he suggested that Robbins get Bernstein to write both music and lyrics. But Robbins instead asked Jerry Leiber [1933-2011], the word half of the pop songwriting team of Leiber and [Michael] Stoller [b. 1933], to work with the maestro. Though the odd couple did complete some numbers, the show stalled out. Most do, usually for their own good.

But “The Exception and the Rule,” as it was then called, had a gleam of possibility that kept it from dying completely. Perhaps it would be an exception itself, as “West Side Story,” which almost fell through several times, was in its day.

What looked like the key arrived when the playwright John Guare [b. 1938], then known for surreal way-off-Broadway comedies, joined up with a great idea for the adaptation.

The story would now take place in a television studio where the Brecht play is being readied for broadcast. The tension between the star actor playing the merchant (who was to be white) and the supporting actors playing the guide and porter (who were to be Black) would parallel the class paranoia of the inner scenes, while adding an element of racial paranoia to the mix. Sondheim, noting that the Brecht would be chopped up by scenes set in the present, “and thus not be so relentlessly Brechtian,” rejoined the team.

By April 1968, a New York Times theater column trumpeted a January 1969 opening for the new musical. Later that year, the producers announced that the Broadway star Zero Mostel [1915-77] would play the lead. It seemed a mere glitch in its inevitable success when, in October, the show, budgeted at $600,000 [$4.6 million today] and now bearing Bernstein’s awful Spooneristic title “A Pray by Blecht,” was postponed until the following fall.

[Spooneristic is a word I haven’t heard much lately, so if you’re unfamiliar with the expression, it means ‘having the form of a spoonerism.’  A spoonerism, according to Wikipedia, “is an error in speech in which corresponding consonants, vowels, or morphemes are switched . . . between two words in a phrase.”  

[An example, from one of my middle school teachers, is “duddy stubble hall” for “double study hall” (which is where I first heard the word spoonerism—my teacher called herself out on it).  An intentional spoonerism, from comedian George Carlin (1937-2008): “Don’t sweat the petty things and don’t pet the sweaty things.”  

[The speech error is named after William Archibald Spooner (1844-1930), an Oxford don and ordained minister who was renowned for mixing up the syllables in spoken phrases.]

And then: nothing.

It was so dead that Bernstein, nine years later, describing it as “a big wonderful show that could have been,” got its title wrong. He called it “The Measures Taken.”

What happened? According to “Look, I Made a Hat,” in which Sondheim relates “almost all” of the tale, the golden collaboration was “no fun at all”; he stepped away again after he and Bernstein, who treated him as if he were “still an apprentice” from “West Side Story” days, wrote eight songs. Robbins quit soon thereafter: In the middle of auditions, he excused himself to Guare and Bernstein, left the theater and took off in a cab to Kennedy Airport.

Perhaps it is better that some shows should die so that others might live. After “A Pray by Blecht” collapsed, Sondheim went on almost immediately to write “Company,” “Follies” and “A Little Night Music.” Guare’s 1971 play “The House of Blue Leaves” jump-started his career. Bernstein and Robbins would each return to Broadway, albeit with mixed success, while continuing to excel in classical music and ballet.

Yet it was Robbins, the runaway, who couldn’t let the idea die. In the spring of 1987, at Lincoln Center Theater, he directed a multiweek workshop of a new version of the show called “The Race to Urga.” Sondheim attended only two rehearsals, which (he recalled in an email) were inchoate and disorganized.

“I couldn’t tell anything about it,” he wrote, “except that it seemed (as I’d always thought it was) self-consciously Important instead of spontaneous and exuberant, which is the chief saving grace of any Brecht play (and was Brecht’s intention).”

Guare, who provided the necessary new lyrics, recently declined to comment on the experience, having “closed the door” on it ages ago.

One person was happy to comment, though: Zero Mostel’s son Josh [b. 1946]. In the 1987 workshop, he was cast (after Kevin Kline [b. 1947] apparently withdrew) in the role originally intended for his father.

By the time the show was performed for invited audiences in May of that year, he recalled, Robbins had given up on the white vs. Black theme; Joe Grifasi [b. 1944] played the guide and Thomas Ikeda the porter, still unfortunately referred to as the “coolie.” But Brecht’s warning about the dangers of unlimited power remained — and not just in the coda, during which planted actors rose from the audience to sing about revolution. Robbins himself was a warning about unlimited power.

“Working with Jerry was torture,” Mostel said. “Thomas Ikeda literally passed out in my arms in rehearsal, from exhaustion. At our last show, Bernstein fell down the stairs trying to get out of there. Jerry was nasty even to Guare, a very sweet guy. He was so controlling and paranoid he wouldn’t tell us what time the performances were until right before they started.

“But I have to say the songs were brilliant. And the book was one of the best of any musical I’d been in. Some friends brought a 6-year-old to the show, and he said, ‘Is that all?’ — which is a pretty good review. It should have moved forward, and the reason it didn’t is that no one could stand Jerry.”

That’s a shame; a musical exploring the prerogatives of class (and the power imbalances inherent in the theater) would be exceedingly timely now. At one point, Sondheim has a police officer sing proudly of his beat, “Thirty natives and all so quiet,” to which his partner replies, “Thirty-seven before the riot.”

That’s a lyric that needs no alteration to work as satire, or tragedy — or at any rate a stageworthy bit of Lehr — in 2020.

[Readers of Rick On Theater may note that I’ve mentioned the Brecht play The Measures Taken in a number of posts.  It was produced in New York City by the experimental theater troupe Shaliko in 1974 and I used it as an illustration in my discussion “Acting: Testimony & Role vs. Character,” posted on 25 September 2013. 

[After try-outs in Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia, the groundbreaking Broadway production of West Side Story opened at the Winter Garden Theatre (at 50th Street and Broadway) on 26 September 1957 and ran 732 performances before closing on 27 June 1959, a year and nine months later. 

[The production was nominated for five Tony Awards in 1958, including Best Musical (WSS lost to The Music Man), and won two (Best Scenic Design for Oliver Smith and Best Choreography for Robbins; the production also won Carol Lawrence, who played Maria, a Theatre World Award.

[Unlike the other Broadway attempts that didn’t make it to opening covered by this series, A Pray by Blecht was never even seen by a public audience.  The Lincoln Center workshop, performed as The Race to Urga before an invited audience, occurred in April and May 1987.

[Next in “Unopened” (7 March): “The Bob Dylan musical that tried to find a way—way before ‘Girl From the North Country.’”]

"Unopened": 'Face Value'

 

[Alexis Soloski’s article about David Henry Hwang’s 1993 comedy Face Value, the second installment in the “Unopened” series, which the paper dubbed “The curious history of shows aimed for Broadway that never got to opening night,” appeared in the print edition of the New York Times “Arts” section on 2 November 2020.  The online version of the story, called “David Henry Hwang’s ‘M. Butterfly’ Followup: ‘M. Turkey,’” was posted on 1 November 2020.

[The articles in this series are not connected—except for the fact that they’re each about a play that failed to open on Broadway—but it’s interesting to compare the circumstances of the plays under examination.  If readers are interested in keeping up and haven’t read the previous entry in the series, I suggest going back to 26 February and reading “‘Unopened’: Lone Star Love.”]

“FARCE THAT COULDN’T GET OUT OF ITS OWN WAY”
by Alexis Soloski

The goal: a comedy about mistaken racial identity inspired by protests over “Miss Saigon.” The result: a backstage farce that never got to opening night.

David Henry Hwang’s “Face Value” arrived on Broadway on March 9, 1993. It left five days later. For Gina Torres [b. 1969], an actress in that production, the news came as a relief. “Because we were pushing that stone uphill for a good long time,” she said.

“Face Value,” Hwang’s follow-up to the Tony Award-winning “M. Butterfly,” was a farce — and not entirely in the ways that Hwang [b. 1957] and Jerry Zaks [b. 1946], the play’s director, intended.

In 1990, Hwang, the first Asian-American to win a playwriting Tony, joined members of Actor’s Equity in objecting to the casting of Jonathan Pryce [Welsh actor, b. 1947] as a Eurasian character in the Broadway production of “Miss Saigon.” Equity rejected the casting.

When the producer Cameron Mackintosh [b. 1946] canceled the production, the union reversed the rejection, stipulating that Pryce could perform provided Asian-American actors were sought as replacements and that Pryce no longer used eye prosthetics or skin darkening bronzer as he had in London.

Hwang took the loss as only a playwright can. He went to work on “Face Value,” a comedy of mistaken racial anxiety that modeled on the farces of Michael Frayn [British dramatist, b. 1933] and Joe Orton [British dramatist, 1933-67]. It centers on a new musical, “The Real Fu Manchu,” and the pair of Asian-American actors, Randall and Linda, who plan to protest it on opening night at the Imperialist Theater.

“Fu Manchu” has cast a white actor in the title role and it includes a big number called “He’s Inscrutable,” so there’s a lot to protest. “It’s racist, sexist, imperialist, misogynist — and I didn’t even get an audition,” Randall complains.

Set largely backstage, “Face Value” crammed in yellowface, whiteface, gun play, Pirandellian asides, crisscrossing sexual complications and various people hiding in closets.

“I remember finishing the first draft and feeling well, this is going to need a lot of development,” Hwang recalled this summer.

But the producer Stuart Ostrow signed on immediately. Other producers, including Scott Rudin, soon followed. Zaks assembled a tiptop cast — Mark Linn-Baker [b. 1954] as the white actor playing Fu Manchu; Jane Krakowski [b. 1968] as a dithery actress; a then-unknown Torres as a put-upon stage manager; Mia Korf [b. 1965] as Linda. (BD Wong [b. 1960], who had won a Tony for “M. Butterfly,” later joined as Randall.)

Two million dollars were raised. Rehearsals began.

“It all came together probably too quickly,” Hwang said. “I was hubristic. I felt like, ‘Oh, I can fix it in four weeks, and then an out-of-town tryout in Boston.’ And I couldn’t.”

Torres remembers the first night of the Boston tryout. “Nobody laughed,” she said.

Frantic rewriting began, with new lines, new cuts, new scenes arriving nearly every day. “We might have cut intermission at one point,” Torres said, “like we’re going to hit them fast and furious and not give a chance to leave.”

It was an exhausting process — physically, emotionally. The play opened on Valentine’s Day to reviews that were less than loving. Hwang recalls one that ran with the headline “M. Turkey.”

But “M. Butterfly” also hadn’t done especially well out-of-town. So the producers made a decision to move forward. Torres remembered the excitement of walking by the Cort Theater and seeing her name on the posters. “We thought: ‘Oh, now we’re in New York. We can turn this around because New York has a more diverse audience. They’re waiting for us,’” she said.

Hwang began another round of revisions. Decades on, he couldn’t recall exactly what changed. “I’ve probably blocked a lot of that,” he said. But a New York Times article reported a new beginning and a new ending.

Somehow these made the play worse. The Boston script, Hwang said, at least had a certain singleness of purpose. The New York one, rewritten in desperation, did not. And it wasn’t any funnier.

Torres thinks that has more to do with content than with comedy. “It really made you look at the absurdity of color and how we perceive it in human beings, which is I believe, ultimately what killed us,” she said. She often wonders how it would play today.

“Face Value” shuttered after eight previews, with the producers, in a Times article, citing “a lack of box-office interest.” The actors moved on. Torres finally made her Broadway debut a year later with the barely longer lived “The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public.” (“What it ain’t got is fun,” the Times critic wrote.)

It would take another decade for a Broadway show to close during previews, the Farrah Fawcett-starring [actress, principally film and television, 1947-2009; aka: Farrah Fawcett-Majors] “Bobbi Boland.”

Hwang moved on, too. “I can compartmentalize pretty well,” he said. But the idea of mistaken racial identity continued to nag at it him. He revisited it years later in the Obie-winning “Yellow Face,” a semi-autobiographical comedy that also took on the “Miss Saigon” controversy as well as newer strains of anti-Asian racism.

In “Yellow Face,” a character known as DHH mounts a Broadway play called “Face Value.” It flops in this fiction, too.

That real-life debacle bruised Hwang’s ego and deflated his boy wonder reputation. It didn’t keep him away from Broadway. He has had five further shows there, plus a 2017 “M. Butterfly” revival.

“Having a play close in previews on Broadway would generally be considered one of the worst things that can happen to your career, and it is, but I survived it,” he said.

“The worst thing happened to me,” he added. “And I’m still here.”

[The première of Hwang’s M. Butterfly started previews at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre on 13 March 1988 and opened on 20 March.  It ran for nine previews and 777 regular performances, closing on 27 January 1990.  The production, directed by John Dexter and starring John Lithgow and BD Wong, won 1988 Tony Awards for Best Play, Best Featured Actor in a Play (Wong) and Best Direction of a Play (Dexter), and was nominated for four other Tonys.

[The production also won 1988 Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding New Play, Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play (Wong), and Outstanding Director of a Play (Dexter), and the Theatre World Award for Wong.  Hwang was nominated for the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

[The play was revived on Broadway in 2017 under the direction of Julie Taymor.  Starring Clive Owen and Jin Ha, the revival ran 61 performances.

[The Broadway première of Claude-Michel Schönberg; Alain Boublil; and Richard Maltby, Jr.’s musical Miss Saigon opened at the Broadway Theatre on 11 April 1991, having started previews on 23 March.  It ran for 19 previews and 4,092 regular performances, closing on 28 January 2001.  The production was staged by Nicholas Hytner and Bob Avian did the musical staging.

[The principal performers in New York City and London were Lea Salonga and Jonathan Pryce.  The Broadway production won three performance Tony Awards (Best Actor in a Musical – Pryce; Best Actress in a Musical – Salonga; Best Featured Actor in a Musical – Hinton Battle), four Drama Desk Awards, and a Theatre World Award.  There was a Broadway revival of Miss Saigon in 2017-18.

[Hwang’s Face Value began previews at Broadway’s Cort Theatre on 9 March 1993 and ran for eight preview performances, closing on 14 March.  Directed by Jerry Zaks, it was scheduled to open on 21 March.

[Bobbi Boland by Nancy Hasty premièred Off-Broadway at the Arclight Theatre (on the Upper West Side of Manhattan) on 1 March; it ran to 10 July 2001 with staging by Evan Bergman; playwright Hasty played the title role.  

[A Broadway production directed by David Esbjornson, scheduled to open 24 November 2003 with Farrah Fawcett in the lead, opened for previews at the Cort Theatre on 4 November and closed on 9 November after 7 performances.  The producer stated that “the play simply does not work in a Broadway house,” according to the New York Times.

[Yellow Face premièred at the Joseph Papp Public Theater’s Martinson Hall on 10 December 2007 after starting previews on 19 November.  It ran until 13 January 2008 under the direction of Leigh Silverman. With Hoon Lee and Noah Bean as the leads, Yellow Face won an Obie Award in Playwriting for Hwang; he earned his third Pulitzer Prize nomination for Drama for the play.

[In the play, which is semi-autobiographical, Hoon Lee played a fictional character called DHH, which stands for “David Henry Hwang.”  Francis Jue (whom I saw in Cambodian Rock Band, see my report on 14 March 2020) played HYH, a fictionalized stand-in for Henry Yuan Hwang, the playwright’s father.

[Next in “Unopened” (4 March): “Bernstein, Robbins, Sondheim and . . . Brecht?  Almost, but not quite.”]