Re-Reading Shaw – Plays from 1909 to 1920

by Kirk Woodward

[Below is the third installment of Kirk Woodward’s series of articles on the theater writings of George Bernard Shaw, based on his reading of all six volumes of the Complete Plays with Prefaces (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1963).  The first and second segments, covering, respectively, plays written from 1885 to 1902 and 1901 to 1909, were posted on 3 and 18 July.  While it’s not necessary to read parts 1 and 2 before you read part 3, it’s helpful—and I recommend reading the whole series in whatever order in any case because, whether or not you’re a Shaw fan (as both Kirk and I are), he’s an endlessly fascinating figure and Kirk’s take on his work and ideas is more than worth reading.]

MISALLIANCE (1909-1910 / 1910) – The preface, “Parents and Children,” begins aggressively enough in tone to raise suspicions that Shaw wrote it out of frustration over his marriage and his wife Charlotte’s fear and revulsion (according to Michael Holroyd’s 1997 biography Bernard Shaw) at the idea of having children.

Whether this is so or not, the preface ferociously redefines all the aspects of childrearing that Shaw can think of – children are “slaves,” doctors are “quacks,” “the family ideal is a humbug and a nuisance.” Underneath one can feel Shaw’s pain from his own childhood. 

The preface does calm down somewhat as it goes along, although Shaw continues to make statements that are, to say the least, arguable, for example that “families are not kept together at present by family feeling but by human feeling,” an assertion that to say the least takes in a lot of territory.  

“We must reconcile education with liberty,” he says; urges toleration; and writes, “What is needed in dealing with children is not logic but sense.” Ultimately, “Fine art is the only teacher except torture.”  

In a sense the preface is written backward; an acknowledgement that few families resemble each other comes toward the end, when it would have been more helpful at the beginning.

Misalliance, a long play in one act, although usually performed with one or two intermissions, is a play that Shaw does seem to have written by starting to write and seeing what happens, rather than by plotting it out first.

It and its preface have an interesting relationship: the preface expands on the themes and topics in the play in ways that the play only lightly suggests.

The play itself is a romp, or perhaps we should say, a ripping good time. Unfortunately the characters in the play are not really very interesting. Aristotle may have been on to something when he said that plot is the soul of the drama.

The play has precious little plot, so it sails along on the strength of its dialogue, but it’s hard to be interested in anyone in it. Nothing very good or bad is going happen to them. It feels like a Heartbreak House where no one is particularly worried, depressed, or threatened.

In the middle of the play, an airplane crashes; it turns out to contain, not a bomb, but a young female Polish acrobat, vibrant enough to stir up a great deal more talk about marriage. She is definitely a dea ex machina, if not for the storyline, at least for the play itself.

Holroyd writes:

The extravagant ideas and incidents that cluster within the second part of Misalliance . . . all help to establish Shaw’s kinship with Ionesco . . . and show him to be, in R. J. Kaufmann’s words, ‘the godfather, if not actually finicky paterfamilias to the theater of the absurd.’ G.B.S. was familiar with early modernist experiments and had his own agenda for clearing away the dominance of the well-made play.

Shaw even comes close to “breaking the fourth wall,” the imaginary separation of the stage and the audience. We will see more of this kind of daring.  I forgot to mention that there is also a mysterious intruder with a gun who hides in a Turkish bath.

The play, in other words, is not a model of tight construction. I wonder if Shaw, who was criticized for borrowing the plots of other plays, was irritated when people criticized him because he didn’t.

“The Dark Lady of the Sonnets” (1910) – Shaw knew Shakespeare’s verse, including the Sonnets, backwards and forwards. He wrote this one act “occasional piece” as part of an effort to create a British Shakespeare National Theater. In it Shakespeare, pursuing his “Dark Lady,” has an unexpected encounter with Queen Elizabeth.

At least the first half of Shaw’s preface, in which he describes why he decided to use Mary Fitton (1578-1647) as the “Dark Lady” in this playlet, is engaging, and the preface contains a line that sets him extremely high in my estimation.

He describes spending his days at the British Library reading, and making the acquaintance of an obsessed Shakespeare researcher named Thomas Tyler, a friendless and solitary man of “astonishing and crushing ugliness,” disfigured by two large goiters on his face.

Shaw struck up an acquaintance with Tyler because “I am not,” as he declares magisterially, “to be frightened or prejudiced by a tumor.” That surely is (to use W. S. Gilbert’s words from H.M.S. Pinafore) “greatly to his credit.”

Shaw had a remarkable ability to make friends, many that one would assume would be his enemies. He was also, of course, a handful, leading Oscar Wilde to call Shaw “an excellent man; he has no enemies, and none of his friends like him.” Friendship is complex; but Shaw did have many friends.

FANNY’S FIRST PLAY (1911) is the surprising answer to the trivia question: “Which play by Shaw had the longest initial run?” It ran for 622 performances, an astonishing number, and deserved its long run. It is a charming comedy.

The preface is short and one of Shaw’s best:

Mere morality, or the substitution of custom for conscience, was once accounted a shameful and cynical thing: people talked of right and wrong, of honor and dishonor, of sin and grace, of salvation and damnation, not of morality and immorality. The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car.

Fanny’s first play – meaning the first play she has written – is a play within a play; she has invited several London critics to see her work (they don’t know she wrote it) and tell her what they think. Shaw has fun with this concept: he doesn’t name himself as the actual author, and he models the critics on reviewers of the time. (One of them, Arthur Walkley, who also suggested the idea that became Don Juan in Hell, liked this concept so much that he helped the actor who played “him” with his makeup and movement.)

The play within a play is the only one by Shaw to have a group of young people as its central characters. They and their parents make up most of the play. The young people have all been in jail recently for various hijinks, and those experiences have helped them reach authentic understandings of who they are. Their parents are shocked, and must do their own growing.

Although Shaw calls the play a potboiler – it certainly is an audience pleaser – it contains a number of his themes: women who are miles ahead of men; the way people pretend to be anything but who they really are; the idea that we are better off doing what we want to do, and taking the consequences, than spending our time doing what we think we ought to do in order to please others.

Shaw writes in the preface:

Is it any wonder that I am driven to offer to young people in our suburbs the desperate advice: Do something that will get you into trouble? . . . I hate to see dead people walking about: it is unnatural.

ANDROCLES AND THE LION (1912 / 1913) – Shaw said he wrote Androcles to “show what a play for children should be like.” With its dancing lion, it has reminded many of a British Christmas pantomime. It had a short initial run (55 performances), apparently because it was reported to be irreligious. In fact it characterizes its Christians fairly, if skeptically. The preface is another story.

Shaw’s hundred-page preface (for a two-act play, and seven more pages of explanation follow it!) is titled “Preface on the Prospects of Christianity: Why Not Give Christianity a Trial?” Christians excited by the title might want to calm down. Shaw seldom accepts anyone else’s definition of a concept, a belief, or anything else. He redefines everything.

In this case, he redefines Christianity, re-creating Jesus in his own image. This is not a unique phenomenon, as Fr. Raymond Brown, in An Introduction to the New Testament (Doubleday, 1997) has pointed out:

In The Quest for the Historical Jesus . . . A[lbert] Schweitzer passed judgment on more than a hundred years of such “historical Jesus” research. He contended that most of the investigation . . . told us more about the investigators than about Jesus, for they were describing their own mirror-image reflection.

Here is Shaw:

I must still insist that if Jesus could have worked out the practical problems of a Communist constitution, an admitted obligation to deal with crime without revenge or punishment, and a full assumption by humanity of divine responsibilities, he would have conferred an incalculable benefit on mankind, because these distinctive demands of his are now turning out to be good sense and sound economics.

Shaw’s preface can be intelligent. But it is limited both by his Enlightenment-based scholarship, which has been in many cases superseded; and by his assumptions, which rule out anything he would call supernatural – this from a man who champions the Superman and the Life Force! – who therefore has to assume that toward the end of his ministry Jesus became delusional.

Needless to say, Shaw has no belief in Jesus’ resurrection, which leaves him the problem of accounting for what motivated Jesus’ followers to have the effect they did on the world. He explains this by asserting that the apostle Paul basically invented a new religion using Jesus’ name. This explanation too is seldom today considered credible on the evidence.

Anyone creating a new Jesus story confronts the same problem: the gospel texts and the other New Testament books are the only source materials from the period (the gnostic writings come significantly later).

So anyone trying to pick and choose a Jesus story from those sources is like Dickens’ character Mrs. Todgers (in the novel Martin Chuzzlewit, 1843-44) “a dodgin’ among the tender bits with a fork, and an eatin’ of ‘em.” Making a “version” of the story means choosing the parts one likes, based on one’s own assumptions, and discarding the parts one doesn’t like.

Shaw buttresses his narrative with by now familiar overwrought assertions:

The attitude of the Roman Emperor and the officers of his staff towards the opinions at issue were much the same as those of a modern British Home Secretary towards members of the lower middle classes when some pious policeman charges them with Bad Taste, technically called blasphemy…

After the preface the play is a relief. Androcles shares with The Devil’s Disciple (and others of Shaw’s plays) the theme of a person – numerous persons in this case – who with death imminent finds out what she or he really believes. It is hardly a play for children.

But it is exceptionally well written. Shaw takes religion seriously. The theological discussions in the play emerge from the characters and their situations. Androcles is a wonderful character. So is the lion. The second act is a marvel of dramaturgy: everyone gets a moment.

“Overruled” (1912) – In his preface, Shaw writes about “my playlet, which I offer as a model to all future writers of farcical comedy.” “Overruled” is farcical in its situation: a man and woman, in love with each other on a ship, find that their spouses are also on the ship – and also in love with each other. Aside from this, the play is not a farce but a comedy, in which sex is thoroughly discussed and analyzed.

Shaw’s preface, remarkably serious-minded considering the play that follows it, begins with a discussion of what Shaw calls “polygamy” and most of us would call “infidelity;” jealousy as a learned response; the lack of statistical information on sexual behavior; revenge; farce; sex on stage; realistic stage scenery; the purpose of art; and the failure of farce to fully illustrate sex. It’s hard to think what he left out.

Noel Coward was familiar with Shaw’s plays (Shaw defended him when Coward was accused of plagiarizing the plot of You Never Can Tell for 1921’s The Young Idea). The situation in “Overruled” reappeared in 1930 in Coward’s brilliant play Private Lives.

PYGMALION (1912-1913 / 1913) – Shaw’s biggest popular success is not this or any of his plays, but the musical My Fair Lady (1956), based on this wonderful play about the dictatorial, oblivious language teacher Henry Higgins and the flower seller Eliza Doolittle whom he teaches to act like an upper-class lady.

                     

Alan Jay Lerner, librettist and lyricist of My Fair Lady, took significant pieces of dialogue intact from Shaw’s play. He also brought Higgins and Eliza together at the end of the play, which Shaw would have strenuously objected to, except that he had died in 1950.

My own reading of the play is that Lerner is correct in his estimate of the trajectory of the plot, and Shaw is not; I find his notes about what happens to the characters after the curtain goes down unpersuasive. On this matter opinions, of course, differ.

What I think is unarguable is that Pygmalion is a brilliantly written play, a practically flawless comedy, with an original and engaging plot, vigorous characterization, and frequently hilarious dialogue based, not on gags or jokes, but on the characters themselves.

Shaw claimed that he didn’t work out the plots of his plays in advance, but wrote them as the words came to him, without any thought for structure, and this same comment is often made about his plays as an objection to them. For example, C. D. Warner, in The Library of the World’s Best Literature (1917), writes:

As a playwright, Shaw has never been particularly interested in problems of construction. In his earlier pieces, he was satisfied to pour new wine into old bottles. The content of these early plays was new, but the structure was based upon the pattern which Pinero had previously borrowed from T. W. Robertson. In his later plays, Shaw has introduced no notable improvements in technique. At times he has discarded altogether the pattern of “the well-made play”; at other times he has reverted to the loose and easy pattern of the Elizabethan “chronicle-history”: but in such experiments as these, he has merely revolted against the rigors of contemporary dramaturgy without offering any acceptable substitute for the structure which he has attempted to discard. As an architect of plays, Shaw is certainly inferior to Pinero and Jones, and possibly to Galsworthy. He has never made a pattern so remarkable as that of ‘The Thunderbolt’ or ‘Mrs. Dane’s Defense’; and he has never built a structure so self-sustaining and so rigorous as that of ‘Strife.’

The plays of Bernard Shaw may lose their potency within a score of years, because they were so novel at the time when they were written.

I see contradictions in this passage. In any case, it’s possible that Shaw wrote some of his plays by starting at one end and writing until he was finished, without prior calculation. It’s equally possible that he was so aware of the requirements of play structure that he didn’t have to think much about it.

But it’s just as likely that a number of his plays were carefully plotted in advance, whether on paper or in his mind. The structure of Pygmalion is impeccable. It’s just a marvelous play in every way.

  

“Great Catherine” (1913) is a raucous playlet about the Russian Empress and an English military man. It has no obvious purpose – Catherine is not even a superman! – beyond contrasting the presumably sexually uninhibited Catherine with the rigid Englishman for laughs; it premiered at London’s Vaudeville Theater. The preface begins by defending the play’s version of history, but gives that up and settles for observations on theater:

Playwrights do not write for ideal actors when their livelihood is at stake. . . . [But] in the long run, the actors will get the authors, and the authors the actors, they deserve.

“The Music-Cure” (1913 / 1914) was written as a curtain-raiser for Magic (1913), a play by G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936). A spindly young man who has had a breakdown, and can only play popular songs on the piano, is confronted by a brilliant, forceful lady classical pianist. They work out a sort of duet and decide to get married. Shaw subtitled the play “A Piece of Utter Nonsense”; it took him nine months to finish. From the preface:

This is not a serious play: it is what is called a Variety Turn for two musicians. . . . As a last desperate resort a pianola behind the scenes can be employed; but the result will lack spontaneity.

There is, however, no pressing reason why the thing should be performed at all.

“O’Flaherty V.C.” (1915 / 1917) – “V.C.” stands for “Victoria Cross,” England’s highest military honor. O’Flaherty, who has won it, is an Irish peasant lad who went to fight for England in World War I because his home life in Ireland was so frustrating, irritating, stultifying, and boring.

As a truth-telling experience the play ranks with John Bull’s Other Island, but Shaw tells us in his preface that it was designed as a recruiting poster for the Irish. In effect it says, “Join the English Army – your life in Ireland is so wretched that fighting for England can’t be any worse.”

Remarkably, England’s military was not enthusiastic about the play, particularly one in which a character says “It’s in the nature of governments to tell lies.” Eventually it was allowed to be produced, in 1917, for troops already in Belgium.

“The Inca of Perusalem” (1916) is Kaiser Wilhelm II, then fighting England in the World War. We see him in disguise, on a romantic errand. In the course of the play he makes it clear how little control he has over the actual war. One cannot imagine this approach was very popular at the time.

“Augustus Does His Bit” (1916 / 1917) is one of several short plays Shaw wrote during World War I. The play is a satire on the way England is conducting it, and it mocks everybody except the troops. 

Augustus is a War Office official, a nincompoop and straight man to two comedians, one his clerk and one, a woman, trying to steal a confidential list on a bet, which she does. With the war in such hands . . . . Shaw knows how to write comedy scenes, and does.

“Annajanska the Bolshevik Empress” (written 1917, performed 1918), a variety show sketch, is a spoof on the Russian Revolution and to my mind remarkably unfunny. Annajanska is a princess who has escaped and become a Bolshevik. Good luck with that, honey.

Apparently it went over like a house afire because of its performers. Shaw says the only compliment he got on his writing was from a friend who commented, “It is the only one of your works that is not too long.”

HEARTBREAK HOUSE (1913-1919 / 1920) – Shaw had a hard time getting this play produced, despite his substantial reputation as a playwright. It was finally produced to, it appears, a number of critical yawns. My guess is that many in his audience were suffering from World War fatigue.

In any case, I find the play, which Shaw called a fantasia on Russian – that is, Chekhovian – themes, one of his most appealing. Heartbreak House is a play about weakness. Captain Shotover, the owner of Heartbreak House, is substantially insane, and his guests are all damaged goods; even the billionaire in the play is a timid fellow.

So many of the characters in Shaw’s plays strenuously try to justify themselves. The characters in Heartbreak House know that that effort is futile.

[For those who haven’t been following Kirk’s series, I’ll restate the plan (such as it is).  There are five segments in the collection and I’m running them every couple of weeks.  The next section, covering plays from 1918 to 1933, will appear (as if by magic—which, of course, is how computers work) in about two weeks.  I hope you’ll come back to ROT to read Kirk’s further thoughts on the Irish playwright and his works.]

'Butler'

On 16 May 1861, Benjamin Franklin Butler (1818-93) was promoted to major general in the Army of the United States by Pres. Abraham Lincoln.  (The Civil War had started in earnest on 16 April when secessionist troops fired on the Union forces at Fort Sumter, South Carolina.)  The former Massachusetts lawyer, born in New Hampshire, was immediately dispatched to take command of Fort Monroe on the mouth of the James River in southeastern Virginia.  He arrived to take up his new post on Wednesday, 22 May—and the Virginia legislature ratified the vote to secede the very next day, joining South Carolina (seceded 20 December 1860), Mississippi (9 January 1861), Florida (10 January 1861), Alabama (11 January 1861), Georgia (19 January 1861), Louisiana (26 January 1861), Texas (1 February 1861), Arkansas (6 May 1861), and North Carolina (20 May 1861); of the ultimately 11 Confederate States, only Tennessee hadn’t yet seceded (it would do so on 8 June 1861). 

On the same day as Virginia’s official separation from the Union, three runaway slaves rowed across the inlet separating Union-held Fort Monroe from the Confederate stronghold at Sewell’s Point in Hampton Roads, all of 15 miles on the water, but an incomprehensible gulf in the mind and in politics, the gulf between slavery and freedom, between one world and another.  At least, that’s what the three men, Frank Baker, about 42; Shepard Mallory, 20; and James Townsend, 36, must have thought.  Presenting themselves to the fort’s commander, the escaped slaves requested sanctuary.  The three men, forced by their owner, rebel Colonel Charles King Mallory (1820-75), to build fortifications and artillery emplacements to oppose the Union fort, provided intelligence about Confederate fortifications, armaments, and troop strength. 

The men’s request for refuge at the fort, however, prompted Butler, known as an attorney for his ability to weave his way through any statute and discover a way to demolish his opponents’ arguments, to devise the innovative legal theory that these escaped slaves, because they’d been used to further the enemy’s war efforts, were “contraband of war,” no different from a canon, a musket, or a cavalry horse, and did not have to be returned despite the articles of war, the U.S. Constitution, and the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act that declared they must be.  This was an astonishing move for Butler, a staunch Union man but, at his own admission, no abolitionist.  He’d even voted for Jefferson Davis (who, by February 1861, was President of the Confederate States of America) against John C. Breckenridge at the 1860 Democratic Convention in Charleston as his party’s presidential nominee to run against Republican Abraham Lincoln. 

No sooner had the general declared the three runaways contraband, legally retained by the Union army, than a virtual flood of escaping slaves, having heard the story through a remarkably efficient slave grapevine, followed their example; on Sunday, the 26th, eight more escapees showed up at the fort’s gates and on the 27th, there were 47 more—including women, children, and old men.  Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler, an army officer for all of four weeks by this time, became an unlikely hero of freedom from slavery a year-and-a-half before President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.  Lincoln ultimately endorsed Butler’s decision and commanders throughout the Union military adopted his practice regarding Southern slaves. 

(The general’s subsequent military career was mostly successful but undistinguished.  He was, in fact, considered by Southerners in areas he administered such as New Orleans as brutal and ruthless, attaining the sobriquet “Beast Butler.”  Even today, Butler’s a despised figure among some Southerners.  After the war, however, Benjamin Franklin Butler, who served in the Massachusetts state senate before the war, would go on to be elected to congress from Massachusetts from 1867 to 1875 and 1877 to 1879, and then served as Governor of Massachusetts from 1883 to 1884.  He ran for president in 1884 as the nominee of the Greenback and Anti-Monopoly parties but lost to Democrat Grover Cleveland; Butler came in a very distant fourth, behind not only Cleveland but Republican James G. Blaine and Prohibition Party candidate John St. John.  He returned to the practice of law, a profession in which he was deemed a brilliant practitioner, his difficulties in other fields of endeavor notwithstanding, and died in a Washington, D.C., court on 11 January 1893 at the age of 74.)

Having read about this bit of historical lore in a footnote in a biography of Abraham Lincoln, playwright Richard Strand (Clown, The Bug) was intrigued.  “The information was tantalizing because it didn't make logical sense,” insisted Strand. “I couldn't understand why an anti-abolitionist supporter of Jefferson Davis would take such a personally risky stand against slavery.”  Additional research didn’t solve the puzzle for the dramatist, so he decided to write a play about the momentous historical footnote and the man who perpetrated it; in 2012, that play became Butler, which premièred at the New Jersey Repertory Company in Long Branch, on the Jersey Shore, from 12 June to 13 July 2014.  “Writing the play,” explained Strand, “was my attempt to find a plausible explanation for something that seemed inexplicable.”  The dramatist has acknowledged that he composed Butler to suggest one scenario of what might have occurred at Fort Monroe in May of 1861.

That NJ Rep staging, directed by Joseph Discher, eventually moved to New York City where it began previews as part of the 5A Season at the 59E59 Theaters on 15 July for an opening on the 27th, scheduled to run in Theater A until 28 August.  Though it’s my preference to see a play after it opens—I don’t like seeing productions that aren’t finished yet—my usual theater companion, Diana, and I went to Butler at its first preview on Friday, the 15th.  (For further description of 59E59 and its programs, see my report on “Summer Shorts 2015, Series A,” 12 August 2015.)  Prior to this New York première, there were independent productions of Butler in small theaters around the country, including the Peninsula Players Theatre in Fish Creek, Wisconsin (20-31 August 2014); the Barrington Stage Company, Pittsfield, Massachusetts (14 May-13 June 2015); the Florida Studio Theatre, Sarasota (9 December 2015-5 March 2016); the Phoenix Theatre, Indianapolis (7 January-7 February 2016); the Detroit Repertory Theatre (7 January-13 March 2016); the Majestic Theater, West Springfield, Massachusetts (25 February-3 April 2016); and the Northlight Theatre, Skokie, Illinois (11 March-17 April 2016).

The plot of Butler is essentially the history I laid out above, though most of the play, said Strand, “is conjectural.”  Strand’s play begins with Major General Butler (Ames Adamson) at his desk in his office (designed by Jessica L. Parks, and lit by Jill Nagle) when he’s interrupted by Lieutenant Kelly (Benjamin Sterling), a young West Pointer who’d started in the army as a private, fighting in the Mexican War (1846-48) before attending the academy.  The general’s aide (the only character of the four in Butler who’s fictional, as far as I can determine) enters to inform the commandant that a “Negro slave” is demanding to speak with him.  Well, this sets Butler off on a tear (which I later realized was Butler’s style of courtroom cross-examination).  He’s “astonished,” he tells Kelly, in no uncertain terms, and demands that Kelly explain why he’s astonished and not merely surprised.  Because there’s a runaway slave in the fort and the general didn’t know it until now, guesses Kelly.  No, that would only be surprising, retorts Butler.  Because there are not one but three slaves in the fort?  No again.  

Because the slave—Kelly never asked the man’s name, which displeases Butler all the more—has “demanded” to speak with the commandant, not requested or asked.  Butler reminds Kelly that no later than the day before, he’d explained to the lieutenant that one thing that he most dislikes is people who make demands on him.  The only people who can do that, Butler elucidates, are President Lincoln; Secretary of State William Seward and other cabinet members; Gen. Winfield Scott, general-in-chief of the army; any officer who outranks him . . . and, Kelly chimes in, the general’s wife.  But what really got Butler’s dander up, he instructed the young officer, was that Kelly had reported that the Negro slave had made this demand! 

By all accounts, General Butler was a rough, uncouth, and irascible man, and it seems that this initiating scene is meant to establish that personality in a slightly humorous way.  (Butler isn’t a comedy, but there are many funny lines and moments in it.)  In any case, the inadvisability of making demands on Butler is a leitmotif in Strand’s script.  Butler is reputed to have had one other character trait that’s important to the play’s unfolding—and which comes closest to explaining why this particular man took the action he did: he’s said to have had a soft heart.  So when he tells Kelly at first that he won’t see the slave and Kelly observes that if the men are sent back to their owner, they’ll likely be killed for escaping, the general hesitates.  He can’t offer the men sanctuary at the fort because that violates both the law and the articles of war, not to mention President Lincoln’s own statements about not interfering with slavery where it was legal.  But he can’t send them back to die, either.  So what can he do?  He orders Kelly to show the slave in, and we finally meet Shepard Mallory (John G. Williams), who’s made himself the spokesman for the three asylum-seekers.  (We never see the other two men, though their names are mentioned more than once—as is the name Colonel Mallory, the slave-holding former judge to whom the men belong.)

Butler and Mallory (the question of whether Shepard and the rebel colonel are related is raised a few times because of their last names, but left unresolved) finally meet, and Butler becomes intrigued with the well-spoken man (he’s learned Butler’s full name from reading the crates with the general’s belongings that are scattered around the headquarters—he’d been taught to read against custom and law—and he uses the word “convoluted,” which actually makes Butler stop for a second or two) who has landed on the officer’s doorstep.  The two men engage in an unexpected and extraordinary battle of wills and wits.  Mallory, it turns out, is just as obstinate as Butler is—in fact, they are something of kindred spirits, which may be part of the reason Butler is impelled to find a way to help the three escapees.

Meanwhile, Butler reveals that he’s received word that the Confederates are sending an officer under a flag of truce to retrieve Colonel Mallory’s property.  That officer, not by coincidence Shepard Mallory reckons, is Maj. John B. Cary (1819-98), the colonel’s artillery expert who doubtlessly has been assigned to take advantage of the situation to gather information on Fort Monroe’s armaments and emplacements.  When Cary arrives, Butler’s decided to blindfold him, and it turns into a sight-and-sound gag off stage as he’s obviously guided by Kelly so that he bumps into furniture and open doors on his way to General Butler’s office.

When Major Cary (David Sitler) enters and is relieved of his blindfold, he proceeds to read the demands—oh, that word!—Colonel Mallory has sent with him.  Cary, whom Butler insists he met at the 1860 Convention when the then-Massachusetts state senator supported Jefferson Davis, steadfastly denies any acquaintance with the Union officer.  Uniformed like a Confederate peacock, in gloves he makes a elaborate display of removing and tall, black cavalry boots, his gray tunic embellished with a red sash around his waist and more gold braid on his sleeves than the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, carrying a cavalry hat with an impossibly broad brim, and wearing expansive side whiskers, Cary even refuses to take a glass of the general’s “particularly good” sherry with him.  This is something in which Butler apparently puts great store as he made Mallory take a glass earlier and will insist again at the end of the play.  (In addition to the sash, Sitler’s costume also has copious red trim signifying an artillery officer, and Cary may actually have been one, though I only found a few mentions of this on the ’Net.  Lieutenant Kelly wears an artillery officer’s uniform, too, though there’s no mention in the play—or the program—of his military specialty.  It may merely have been that the costumer, Patricia E. Doherty, liked the look of a blue uniform with red trim—although photos of most of the other productions of Butler that depict Kelly, show him in the red-trimmed uniform of an artilleryman.)  

So, making demands on him, insisting they never met, and refusing to drink with him, Cary has seriously ticked Butler off but good, which is certainly the second part of Strand’s reason for the general to deny the return of the fugitive slaves.  Nearly foaming at the mouth as Kelly puts the blindfold back on him, Cary is sent back to his colonel empty handed—bringing back neither useful intelligence nor the escaped slaves.  But now, Butler has to come up with a rationale for doing what he just did—or he and Kelly will face courts-martial and Mallory will be returned to face execution.

As the play ends, Butler has begun writing his dispatch justifying his actions to the president, secretary of war, and general-in-chief, and he, Kelly, and Mallory swear to keep the act secret, but we hear a large commotion on the parade ground outside the commandant’s office.  Kelly reports that eight more runaways have entered the fort—what we know, but they don’t, will be just the beginning of a flood.  (Historically, we also know that Butler’s “contraband decision” becomes the foundation of a general order for Union forces during the Civil War.)  The men drink a toast . . . “to contraband!” 

There’s little biographical information available on Strand.  He wrote his first play, a one act entitled Harry and Sylvia, while he was a college student in 1976.  He directed it himself and it won two national awards and was published by Hunter Press in Edinburgh, Scotland.  A full length version of the same play, called Clown, premiered at the Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago in 1981.  His scripts have premièred at the Actors Theater of Louisville, GeVa Theatre, Victory Gardens, Steppenwolf, Mixed Blood, the Eugene O’Neill Center, and other venues.  The Bug, Strand’s most successful play so far, has been translated into five languages for productions in France, Germany, Greece, Spain, Italy, and the United States.

Strand is currently the chairman of the theater department, technical director, and set designer at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, California (near Los Angels), where he also teaches playwriting and the history of theater; he lives in California with his wife.  Previously, he was production manager at Columbia College School of Dance in Chicago and at Centre East in Skokie, Illinois.  In addition to his plays, Strand’s written articles on technical theater that have been published in Dramatics magazine.  He has an MFA from the Playwright’s Workshop at the University of Iowa.

The New Jersey Repertory Company was founded in 1997 by husband-and-wife partners Executive Producer Gabor Barabas and Artistic Director SuzAnne Barabas.  Located in Long Branch in Monmouth County on the New Jersey shore (about 55 miles south of New York City), the theater’s goal is the development and production of new plays.  Since its inauguration, New Jersey Rep has produced more than 90 plays in pursuit of this mission, including over 60 world premieres, in its small, 64-seat playhouse (on Broadway!), a few blocks west of the boardwalk.  (The company is currently negotiating to purchase two additional properties in Long Branch for an expansion of its services to the community with a movie house for art films and an art museum.)  The theater has committed itself to nurturing the work of both established and emerging writers and, maintaining an open-submission policy, receives scripts from throughout the U.S. and around the world.  In 2012 New Jersey Rep received a National Theater Company Award from the American Theatre Wing, sponsor of the Tony Awards, and 2013’s Broomstick, by New Orleans playwright John Biguenet, was nominated for the Steinberg Award by the American Theatre Critics Association.  The theater has also received several New American Plays Awards from the Edgerton Foundation of Beverly Hills, including one for the world première of Butler, which won the award. 

The problem I had with Butler is that Strand clearly never satisfactorily worked out his puzzle.  He hasn’t come up with an explanation for why Butler, the anti-abolitionist who voted for Jefferson Davis as his party’s presidential nominee, would invent a legalistic rationale for not returning escaped slaves to their “rightful owner.”  Butler’s entirely a semi-humorous treatment of the historical moment that has no real dramatic point.  If it weren’t largely fictionalized—the dialogue is imagined by Strand, and he’s invented one of the four characters—it would be a classroom role-play or a History Channel docudrama.  

The script is well enough written and the production is well done, however, and the performances are creditable without being exceptional.  As enjoyable as it is, though, Strand has relied on Butler’s reputed kind heart, hidden behind his peppery bluster, and his obvious exasperation with Major Cary’s arrogance to motivate the momentous action the general takes.  Though I compliment Strand on not telegraphing Butler’s soft-heartedness—it’s never mentioned by anyone, we just glean it from his response to the plight of Shepard Mallory and his companions—it and his irritation at Cary’s behavior are rather wan motivation for defying orders, the law, and the constitution.  (Okay, I’ll admit that the reason there isn’t a cogent explanation for Butler’s decision in the history books may well be that it was just peevishness and tender-heartedness that led him to it, but life isn’t drama, and real life isn’t necessarily dramatic.  To paraphrase something that George Bernard Shaw wrote which I quoted recently, it’s a playwright’s job to enhance the facts of history to make a story stageworthy.  As I said of George C. Wolfe’s remake of Shuffle Along in my report of 28 June, Butler isn’t a documentary play, but it is a history play, and even Shakespeare meddled with fact to make great drama of recorded events.) 

On the positive side, Strand has found wonderful ways to enliven history with humor without resorting to jokes and slapstick, or even ridicule.  (He may have let a little of the last slip into his portrait of Confederate Major Cary, who’s portrayed as something of a popinjay—though some of that’s surely the responsibility of Sitler and director Discher.)  As Aaron C. Thomas wondered in American Theatre, “The Civil War is an unlikely setting for a comedy.  After all, how do you mine humor from one of our nation’s bloodiest periods?  Can a play about America’s shameful legacy of slavery manage to shine light on a neglected corner of that story—and also get laughs?”  The answer appears to be yes.  

Strand believes that it’s the very situation depicted in Butler that is the basis of the humor.  The “very absurdity of slavery,” as AT’s Thomas put it, generates the comic circumstances.  “I was aware that both Butler and Cary (the Confederate officer) accept the absurd premise that one man can own another man,” explains the playwright.  “I knew that their acceptance of that premise would force them to defend things that were indefensible and, therefore, that portions of the play could become humorous.”  He’s not making fun of slavery or slaves, as some might fear at first blush; he’s making fun of people who twist themselves into pretzels to justify a tacitly absurd and indefensible practice—and the equally absurd lengths others found it necessary to go to in order to oppose it.

The humor, however, isn’t either a sidelight or a mask.  It doesn’t distract from or cover over the serious and, indeed, unpleasant truths inherent in the play’s situation.  In large part, it serves as the “spoonful of sugar” that helps the disturbing facts go down.  But some of the comedy acts as a spotlight—or perhaps a fluoroscope is a better image, letting us see things hidden behind the immediate circumstances.  In scene three, for instance, when General Butler notices that the runaway slave and his owner have the same last name, he asks, “Is he a relative of yours?”  It’s a laugh-line, made funnier by Shepard Mallory’s response: “Not as far as I know.  But I‘m a little hazy on just who my relatives are.  Colonel Mallory owns me.”  At the same time, though, without actually raising the issue, the exchange alludes to the practice among slave-owners to rape and father children by the African-American women they owned.  (Not all of the abhorrent realities of slavery and its era are handled with humor.  The whipping of slaves for minor and even perceived misdeeds is confronted straight-on when Mallory shows Butler the scars on his back and the general is genuinely shocked.  This launches a difficult and perceptive exchange about why people with power perpetrate violence on those they control.  It will be understandable if spectators start to think about Black Lives Matter and its cause of action.)

The writer’s also telescoped time enough to keep the story rolling—the real events took five days (plus the aftermath); the play runs two hours—even though the play’s mostly talk—some of it animated, granted.  Strand also wisely stays away from attempts to make the language sound like mid-19th-century prose, even as he’s also avoided obvious rhetorical anachronisms, so that we hear what the characters are saying rather than how they’re saying it.  As Thomas of American Theatre observed, Butler “shows how two men in a room can break each other’s defenses down, make each other (and the audience) laugh, and develop a respect for one another as intellectual and moral equals, no matter their official status.”  Butler isn’t great drama (or even good dramatic literature), but it does make good theater—Ken Jaworowski of the New York Times stated categorically a the time of the Long Branch début, “Just call it splendid”—especially in the hands of an accomplished director and cast.  (As a spotlight on an obscure moment in American history that ended up having far-reaching consequences, Strand’s play serves an honorable purpose beyond art.)

Though some reviewers and spectators will complain that Strand’s light-hearted rendering of history—especially such a weighty moment—is wrong-headed and flip, I find it endearing that a great historical decision may have been based on no more than one man’s prickly personality.  It recalls my response to the 1969 musical 1776 in which the decision to declare independence for Britain’s American colonies hung on the choice of one delegate in Philadelphia, James Wilson of Pennsylvania, to vote for independence because it was easier to maintain his historical anonymity as one of the many who voted in favor than as the one man whose vote defeated the proposal.  Wilson’s fellow Pennsylvanian John Dickinson asks, “And is that how new nations are formed—by a nonentity seeking to preserve the anonymity he so richly deserves?”  Well, in Strand’s view, the momentous determination not to return escaped slaves to their Confederate masters turned on a lone major general’s snap decision in a fit of pique at a hubristic secessionist.  How fundamentally, endearingly human!

Joseph Discher manages to keep the production on target, never letting the comedy overwhelm the serious theme but, conversely, not allowing the often dire aspects of the story to swamp the humor.  In Parks’s tight office set, a prop-cluttered space, Discher, who’s directed Butler twice before aside from the New Jersey début (the two Bay State stagings at the Barrington Stage and Majestic Theater), prompted the actors to move and behave completely naturally even when there were four men on stage together.  (Thanks to fight director Brad Lemons, Williams and Adamson even engage in a brief tussle in the cramped office—and pull it off rather nicely.)  The actors, however, all came off a little stiffly—far from historical animatronics, but not quite warm-blooded beings, either.  Even though Diana and I caught the very first preview of the New York run, I’d have thought after performing the month’s run in Long Branch they’d have been more comfortable in their roles.  Perhaps the two-year lay-off was more than the Off-Broadway rehearsal period could overcome (which is why I prefer to see plays after they open).  Adamson and Sterling’s opening scene, for example, was brittle and artificial as Butler and Kelly fenced through the general’s response to the announcement of Mallory’s arrival at the fort.  It seemed not only contrived, but as if the two actors didn’t quite believe what they were saying.  Some of Sitler’s interview with Adamson, especially Cary’s and Butler’s first lunges and parries, was similarly remote and canned.  I hope that the cast works its way out of this rabbit hole by 27 July, but I lay the problem at the feet of Discher.

Parks’s set is a model of a busy man’s cluttered work place, filled to overflowing with the boxes of his newly-arrived personal belongings, his papers and books stuffed into his secretary and other nooks and crannies, a desk at center-left, several chairs, a wash basin and pitcher on a stand, the requisite flag in a corner (33 stars?—it was draped so I couldn’t tell) and portrait of Lincoln on the wall, a map of the fort and its environs, and the table with the sherry decanter and glasses up center.  The room is lit effectively by Nagle and the realism of the production’s look is completed convincingly by Doherty’s three soldiers’ uniforms and Mallory’s earth-toned garb (perhaps a little clean and neat for a slave who’s lit out in the midst of a day at hard construction labor).  The costume designer outdid herself with Major Cary’s foppish look, however, including his outlandish mutton chops—closely resembling the famous side whiskers of Union General Ambrose Burnside, namesake of ‘sideburns.’  They defy gravity!  (Wigs and, I presume, prosthetic whiskers, are designed by Leah J. Loukas.)

(A totally irrelevant sidebar: Back in the 1960s, when the Civil War was marking its centenary, there were hundreds of articles and books, both fiction and non-fiction—and many combinations of the two—on the war and its many personalities.  I devoured a lot of these, including a slim volume called If the South Had Won the Civil War by  MacKinlay Kantor.  I remember one article, published where and by whom I don’t recall, in which the author did a survey of Civil War generals and correlated the volume of their whiskers with their success on the battlefield.  Statistically, the writer demonstrated, the most successful field commanders on both sides were those with the most facial hair.  In the majority of match-ups, the commander with the biggest beard beat his less hirsute opponent.  General Burnside, with his distinctive side whiskers but no beard, fared less well than his more heavily bearded counterparts.  By this standard, General Butler would be at a decided disadvantage since he wore only a small mustache and no beard or side whiskers at all.  Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant were fairly evenly matched in the beard department, but Jefferson Davis’s goatee was no match for Abraham Lincoln’s chin whiskers.  I just think it’s a fun factoid.)

Adamson’s Butler is appropriately stuffy and petty when we meet him, but the actor manages incrementally to reveal the general’s quirks and idiosyncrasies, as well as his shrewd legal intellect.  Despite some line problems on the night I saw the play, Adamson gives us a solid portrait of the title character’s complex personality as he deals with the dilemma that could at the very least end his military career, land him in a stockade, and potentially mean the death of his accidental charges.  As the slave Mallory, Williams seems to have taken some liberties with his status and the era—encouraged, to be sure, by Strand’s script and Discher’s direction—but creates a believable figure in extremis, a man who knows that he’s caught between the rock of the law and convention and the hard place of summary execution at the hands of his former master.  Strand has made Mallory not just intelligent, even astute—he reads Butler pretty accurately and knows himself pretty clearly as well—but self-educated and Williams plays these characteristics forthrightly.  Yet he doesn’t overlook the more elemental, emotional aspects of the character’s situation, not only when he shows Butler the flogging scars he bears but his panic when the general tumbles to the fact that this slave can read and Mallory fears that the officer will reveal his secret.  Strand doesn’t say so in the script, but if we know that a slave who’s been taught to read—and any person who teaches one—is a punishable offense in the South, we can understand Williams honest reaction to this possibility.

Sterling’s Lieutenant Kelly is really a glorified messenger, bringing the world outside the commandant’s office in, but Strand has given the young officer enough of a character for the actor to build upon.  Sterling allows us to see the touch of disdain the West Pointer who came up through the ranks holds for the general who used influence and political pressure to gain a lofty rank (at the time, Major General was the highest rank in the Union army) and a command and even more strongly, the contempt he had for Shepard Mallory and his slave companions.  But Sterling also shows us how, over the several days of contact, he comes to respect Mallory, a transformation that comes somewhat abruptly in the script, but which the actor pulls off successfully.  In Sitler’s hands, Major Cary is stiff-necked and condescending.  Although the character was a schoolteacher before the war (Cary was headmaster at a military academy and in the 1880s was appointed superintendent of Richmond’s school system), Sitler, who strongly resembles actor Željko Ivanek,  plays him as an aristocratic member of the FFV, looking down not only on the black slaves but Northerners like Butler.  While Sitler’s Southern accent (and the Tidewater region of Virginia, where Cary and Colonel Mallory came from, has a very distinct accent of its own, derived, many believe, from the 17th-century English spoken by the original British settlers) was a little strained, his characterization of Major Cary was vivid and solid, making him a viable foil of the testy Butler—and a credible motivation for the general’s refusal to turn the slaves over to him for repatriation.

Since I saw the play early in its preview run, I waited until opening to survey the reviews.  That also meant that not all the weeklies and monthlies had posted notices yet, so the pool of reviews was shallower than it might have been later in the play’s run.  Show-Score, which included in its average rating the coverage of the out-of-town productions, posted only eight reviews from the 59E59 New York première.  (My round-up will include a larger sampling of press coverage, and I’ve recalculated Show-Score’s rating to exclude the reviews of performances beyond New York.)  The website’s review collection,  all highly positive (89%) except one (11%), averages out to a fairly high score of 86.

The New York Times merely reran excepts from Ken Jaworowski’s 2014 review of the 2014 Long Branch première.  After acknowledging, “It’s hard to categorize ‘Butler.’  The play is part comedy, part historical drama and part biography, often all at once, and sometimes none of those,” the “Paper of Record” repeated the reviewer’s declaration that it’s “splendid.”  Jaworowski reported, “The beauty of the script . . . is how it approaches these thorny topics.  In short, it’s a hoot.”  The Timesman explained, “Rather than dry exposition or long-winded discussions, these men use wordplay that is by turns sarcastic, droll and witty.”  He praised Adamson for “a powerhouse performance” and Williams as “smooth.”  Jaworowski summed up by affirming, “At the end, it’s still not clear how to classify this two-hour show. . . .  Only one category really matters to theatergoers: good play.  Into that slot, ‘Butler’ fits effortlessly.”  (The full text of the 2014 notice is on line at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/29/nyregion/a-review-of-butler-in-long-branch.html.)

The Times was the only print outlet that published a review while I was compiling this survey.  The remaining notices were all on websites.  Carole Di Tosti called the play “superb” on Theater Pizzazz, adding that it’s “tightly directed.”  Sterling’s Lieutenant Kelly is “played with vigor and likeability,” said Di Tosti, “Adamson is a knockout” as Butler, and Williams’s Mallory is “wonderfully portrayed.”  The “plot development is neither pat nor obvious,” the TP reviewer reported, and “set-up in the extremely capable hands of” Discher.  “The play is full of explosive confrontations when Butler and Mallory go head to head,” Di Tosti added, thanks to “Strand’s brilliant writing.”  In conclusion, the TP writer declared, “The production is just stunning!  Butler is marvelous theater.”  On CurtainUp, Elyse Sommer characterized Strand as “shrewd” and his “talk between Butler and Mallory” as “both amusing and witty.”  Sommer predicted that Butler “will have a solid life” ahead of it and that “audiences will respond to” it. 

Samuel L. Leiter characterized Butler as “both informative and highly entertaining” and an “engaging historical comedy” on his website, Theatre’s Leiter Side.  “The vibrant verbal volleys between Mallory and Butler,” reported Leiter, “invest the piece with wit and wisdom” and “Strand has comedic fun playing with the relationships among the” three military men and the fugitive slave.  Praising the physical production, Leiter cautioned, however, that the play’s “style is heightened for dramatic effect, its tone is mildly anachronistic, and its details conflated, so you have to take much of it with a grain of salt.”  Philip Dorian of Scene on Stage asserted, “Rarely has a slice of history been as entertainingly portrayed as in Butler.”  “Deftly directed by Joseph Discher,” continued Dorian, “Strand’s characters evolve from mutual hatred to grudging respect and even gestures of friendship and equality.”  With compliments for all the actors, the SoS reviewer concluded, “Making imaginary or real characters so sympathetic, so funny and so relevant, is damn good playwriting no matter the source.”

On Broadway World, Marina Kennedy dubbed Butler a “comedic-drama” with an “artful script,” “meticulous direction,” and “four excellent actors,” and affirmed that “the show is a wonderfully staged, unforgettable story of humanity.”  Kennedy reported, “The cast of Butler captures the spirited, intense, often humorous dialogue that makes this show completely captivating,” adding kudos to each member.  Her overall assessment of Butler was, “More than an entertaining show, it is a significant piece of theater and a timeless exploration of social conscience and individual responsibility.”  Howard Miller of Talkin’ Broadway called Butler a “glittering seriocomic play” that’s “amusing stuff, but rather puzzling” at its start.  Strand, however, “has taken an actual historic event and characters and turned it into an engrossing, non-pedantic play,” affirmed Miller, adding, “More surprising, the play is delightfully funny, packed with wit, farce, and slapstick.”  Of the staging, the TB review-writer said that “under Joseph Discher's sprightly direction,” all four characters are “splendidly realized.”  He concluded, “All told, this is a terrific show.”

TheaterMania’s Zachary Stewart suggested that Butler “might just be the funniest play ever written about Civil War-era slavery.”  The play, however, “is simultaneously thought-provoking and sidesplitting,” continued Stewart.  Stewart went on to make some astonishing comparisons, too: “the physical style of performance . . . owes much to classic sitcoms like The Odd Couple and I Love Lucy,” observed the TM writer, but “Adamson and Williams . . . play their scenes as if they were performing Beatrice and Benedick from Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing.”  David Roberts labeled the play “scintillating” on Theatre Reviews Limited, in which Strand “delineates [the] conflicts carefully and—with the help of history—creates an admirable level of authenticity.”  Within Strand’s “well-written script,” Adamson’s and Williams’s “performances could not be more irresistible” as directed by Discher “with passion and sensitivity and brings out the best in his talented ensemble cast.”

The sole negative notice was David Barbour’s on Lighting and Sound America, in which the writer asked, “Do we really need a boulevard comedy about slavery?”  Barbour contended that Strand “has aims to illuminate a little-known piece of Civil War history in the manner of, say, Kaufman and Hart or Garson Kanin, an ambition that, on the face of it, seems weirdly out of step with our times,” and he attested that it made him feel “queasy.”  Describing the opening scene between General Butler and Lieutenant Kelly as “remarkably unfunny,” because “the playwright wastes pages of dialogue” comprising “endless back-and-forth.”  The L&S writer labeled the scene “tiresome, one of the least felicitous examples of exposition in recent memory.”  Barbour felt that “Strand never effectively makes the case that a bond exists between” Mallory and Butler and, further, the reviewer insisted that “there's a pervasive feeling that the characters are following the playwright's dictates rather than their own hearts and minds.”  He found that “the second act's clever construction and sometimes witty dialogue are undermined to the degree that they require soft-pedaling the horrors of slavery and minimizing the crimes of those who supported it.”  Barbour praised the design and production team, but had only grudging compliments for the actors and director—blaming Strand for their deficiencies.  The review-writer concluded by noting that “throughout Butler, there's a nagging question of taste.”  Observing that the “99% white” audience at the performance he attended “ate it all up with a spoon,” Barbour posited, “I suspect that a black audience wouldn't be nearly as amused.”

'Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme' (Lincoln Center Festival 2016)

Molière may be more popular with theater folk—actors and directors—than audiences, at least on this side of the Atlantic.  His plays are read in college courses, particularly French language and literature classes, and they appear on university and rep company stages around the country, but commercially, I don’t know that they sell so well.  Except for the raucous adaptation of the commedia farce Scapino in the mid-1970s, nearly all Broadway revivals of Molière plays have had very short runs.  (The non-profit Off-Broadway subscription troupes, like the regional reps, have mounted many productions, 24 since 1956, but no Off-Broadway productions were commercial runs.)

Still, Molière is the most famous theater name in France.  He is to the French stage what Calderón is to Spain, Schiller and Goethe are to Germany, or Shakespeare is to Britain.  France’s national theater, the Comédie-Française, is known as the House of Molière and the country’s national theater award, the counterpart of our Tony and the U.K.’s Olivier, is the Molière, first presented in 1987. 

As part of the 2016 Lincoln Center Festival, C.I.C.T./Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, the Paris-based international troupe, has brought its  production of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, billed as a comédie-ballet with music by Jean-Baptiste Lully, to the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (a division of the City University of New York) on West 59th Street west of Columbus Circle.  The visit from Paris provided five evening performances in French with English supertitles between 20 and 24 July; Diana, my usual theater companion, and I caught the 7 p.m. show on Thursday, 21 July.  The production débuted at C.I.C.T.’s home theater on the Boulevard de la Chapelle near the Gare du Nord in Paris’s 10th Arrondissement from 19 June to 21 July 2012 and again from 26 June to 26 July 2015. 

The Centre International de Créations Théâtrales (C.I.C.T. – International Centre for Theatre Creation), formerly known as the International Centre for Theatre Research (C.I.R.T.), was founded in 1970 by Peter Brook, British director, experimentalist, and theoretician, and Micheline Rozan.  (I posted a research paper about “Peter Brook’s International Centre of Theatre Research” on ROT on 23 August 2011.)  This multicultural and multinational company, an assembly of actors, dancers, musicians, and other performing artists, travelled widely in the Middle East and Africa in the early 1970s on a three-year quest to explore the “common stories” of world culture.  In that period, Brook’s troupe presented some very large, experimental productions around the word, such as Orghast I & II, performed in 1971 at the Shiraz Arts Festival in Iran in the Achaemenid ruins of Persepolis and Naqsh-e Rostam, and The Conference of the Birds developed in West Africa in 1972.  In 1974, C.I.C.T. took over Paris’s Bouffes du Nord theater, a derelict former music hall and variety theater, built in 1876.  In 2008, Brook announced that he would gradually hand the reins of C.I.C.T. over to Olivier Mantei, Bouffes du Nord’s head of musical programming and former deputy director of Paris’s Opéra-Comique, and Olivier Poubelle, a theater entrepreneur specializing in modern music.  Mantei and Poubelle assumed leadership of C.I.C.T.in 2011 and the company now focuses on a mixture of popular music, opera, classical music, dance, and theater.  (In September and October this year, Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne will be bringing C.I.C.T.’s Battlefield, an excerpt of Jean-Claude Carrière’s monumental stage adaptation of The Mahabharata, to the Brooklyn Acadamy of Music, where, in 1988, they staged the full nine-hour, three-part spectacular.) 

Molière, the stage name of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (1622-73), was born in Paris to an upholsterer, a prosperous member of the bourgeoisie, the French middle class.  At 21, he left the family business, abandoned the study of law and took up a career in the theater as an actor and, eventually, a playwright.  His first appearances on stage were with the Illustre Théâtre, a short-lived venture which soon went bankrupt in 1645.  After a brief stint in debtors’ prison, Molière adopted his professional name and rededicated himself to a life in the theater, spending most of the next dozen years barnstorming the French provinces with Madeleine Béjart, the Illustre’s leading lady and his mistress, and other itinerant performers, honing his skills as a comic actor and playwright (though he longed for success as a tragedian), and turning out a number of farces inspired by the Italian commedia dell’arte troupes he encountered in his travels. 

The company returned to Paris in 1658 with Molière as their manager and had a great success with his farce Les Précieuses ridicules (The Affected Young Ladies or The Pretentious Young Ladies).  Invited to perform before Louis XIV (b. 1638, reigned 1643-1715), Molière’s troupe quickly won the king’s favor, and was granted the use of the Petit Bourbon (a court theater adjacent to the Louvre) and later the Palais-Royal for their farces, character comedies, and lavish court entertainments.  In 1662, Molière married Madeleine Béjart’s younger sister (or perhaps daughter), Armande, who became a leading actress in his company, beginning with his next play, L’École des femmes (The School for Wives), which propelled the playwright into the ranks of France’s greatest dramatists.

In 1661, Molière introduced the comédies-ballets in conjunction with Les Fâcheux (The Mad), called a diversion for the King’s amusement. These ballets were one of the first steps toward musical comedy in which dialogue, music, songs, and dance were combined in a coherent whole.  (We’ll see that in the case of Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, I don’t really feel this is actually accomplished.)  Commissioned to mount both a play and a ballet in honor of Le Roi Soleil, Molière decided to combine the two.  The idea succeeded and Molière was asked to produce twelve more comédies-ballets before his death.  Molière’s collaboration with Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-87), the king’s court composer, began with Les Fâcheux, to which Lully contributed one song.  But Lully was also a dancer and choreographer and the king brought the two artists together to create more comedy ballets.  These musical theater pieces demand that the dancers and the actors both play important roles in advancing the plots.  Molière and Lully created Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, their ninth collaboration, in 1670, followed by several lesser-known pieces, but in 1672, Lully and Molière split and the playwright collaborated with composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643-1704) on the last play Molière wrote, The Imaginary Invalid.

A number of Molière’s plays were critical failures, however, and both Tartuffe ou L’Imposteur (1664) and Dom Juan ou Le Festin de pierre (Don Juan or The Feast with the Statue, 1665—usually simply called Don Juan in English) were censored despite the patronage of the Sun King.  Nonetheless, by 1665, Molière’s company was awarded regular pensions from the crown, and awarded the title of La Troupe du Roi.  Le Misanthrope ou L’Atrabilaire amoureux  (The Misanthrope, or the Cantankerous Lover, usually simply The Misanthrope in English) and Le Médecin malgré lui (The Doctor in Spite of Himself) premièred a year later, followed by L’Avare ou L’École du mensonge (The Miser—the subtitle, not used in English versions, means “The school of lying”—1668) and Les Femmes savantes (The Learned Ladies, 1672).  

Molière’s next play, Le Malade imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid, 1673), which ironically featured the playwright as a grousing hypochondriac, was to be his last: Molière, who was debilitated by tuberculosis (possibly contracted while in prison) since about 1665, collapsed on stage with a coughing fit.  The great writer insisted on finishing the performance, but died from severe hemorrhaging shortly afterwards.  He hadn’t received last rites because two priests refused to attend him (because he was an actor, an outcast profession), and a Christian burial was initially denied him.  The archbishop of Paris, however, responded to petitions from Molière’s widow and grudgingly allowed a private nighttime burial in the parish cemetery.

Just about all of Molière’s titles are well known, even if the plays themselves aren’t: The Miser, The Misanthrope, The Imaginary Invalid, Tartuffe.  Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, the writer’s farcical send-up of social-climbing and class pretentions, belongs in this category (between 1879 and 2003, only three productions of The Would-Be Gentleman were mounted on Broadway, including one in French; none have been staged Off-Broadway).  

Unlike most of Molière’s other works, though, the title of Bourgeois gentilhomme often goes untranslated because it’s a little tricky.  One common rendering, The Would-Be Gentleman, is accurate but clumsy, another, The Bourgeois Gentleman, is misleading.  The title’s meant as an oxymoron.  A brief (if grammatical) explanation, then:  the word bourgeois in the title is a noun rather than an adjective.  A bourgeois, which is what Monsieur Jourdain is called in the list of characters, is a wealthy member of the middle class—a member of the Third Estate of the French- realm.  The word gentilhomme is used adjectivally (in English grammar, it’d be called an “attributive noun”).  A gentilhomme is an aristocrat, a man of “gentle birth,” often called in the play “une personne de qualité”—a member of the Second Estate.  Neither word refers to a man’s character, discernment, or social demeanor.  It’s solely a matter of birth and lineage: a “gentleman” in France was by definition nobly born, so there couldn’t be such thing as a “bourgeois gentleman.”  The meaning of the play’s title, then, isn’t ‘the gentleman who is bourgeois,’ but ‘the bourgeois who would be a gentleman.’   

Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, commissioned by the king for performance by La Troupe du Roi at his hunting retreat at the Château of Chambord on the Loir River, satirizes attempts at social-climbing and both the bourgeois and aristocratic personality, poking fun on the one hand at the vulgar, pretentious middle-class and on the other, the vain, snobbish aristocracy.  Though Molière was always careful not to attack the monarchy itself, and the theme of Bourgeois gentilhomme is the fatuity of the bourgeois who would become a gentilhomme, it shouldn’t be lost on the spectators that the aristocrats in the play, Dorante and Dorimène, are scoundrels, liars, parasites, and dissemblers while the admirable characters, Cléonte and Madame Jourdain, are proud members of the middle class.  The members of the original audiences for Molière’s farce, all part of France’s Deuxième État, laughing at the foolishness of M. Jourdain, played by Molière, himself an actual member of the bourgeoisie, were, in fact, laughing at the mockery of their very own class.

Le Bourgeois gentilhomme takes place at Monsieur Jourdain’s house in Paris.  Jourdain (Pascal Rénéric) is a middle-aged bourgeois whose father grew rich as a cloth merchant.  The foolish Jourdain now has one aim in life: to be accepted as an aristocrat.  To this end, he orders splendid new clothes and is delighted when the tailor (Alexandre Steiger) mockingly addresses him as “Monseignieur” (“my Lord”).  He hires instructors to educate him in the gentlemanly arts of fencing (Manuel Le Lièvre), dancing (Thibault Vinçon), music (Julien Campani), and philosophy (Francis Leplay).  (Elisabeth Vincentelli, the reviewer for the New York Times, called Jourdain “the original culture vulture.”  Jerry Hochman of the website CriticalDance even suggested that in his 17th-century get-up, Vinçon resembled court dance master and Bourgeois gentilhomme choreographer Pierre Beauchamp, 1631-1705, and Campani looked like Lully—but I wouldn’t know and I wonder how may theatergoers today, even among the French audiences, would recognize these figures.)  

In pursuing his refinement, Jourdain continually manages to make a fool of himself, to the dismay of his hired teachers.  His philosophy instruction becomes a basic lesson in French elocution and language in which he’s surprised and delighted to learn that he’s been speaking prose all his life without knowing it.  (Of the elocution lesson, Vincentelli quipped that it was “a riotous scene that should haunt every American who has ever struggled with the French ‘u’ sound.”  I can relate to that, but what it called to mind more for me was distinguishing the German ü, which, when I mastered it, I felt a palpable sense of accomplishment.)

Madame Jourdain (Isabelle Candelier), the bourgeois’s down-to-earth wife, sees that he’s making a fool of himself and urges him to return to his customary middle-class life, and to forget all he’s learned.  A cash-strapped count named Dorante (Campani) has attached himself to M. Jourdain, though he secretly despises the man.  Dorante continually flatters Jourdain for, by telling the fool that he mentioned Jourdain’s name to the king at Versailles, the count can get Jourdain to pay his debts.  Jourdain’s hopes of being upper-class go higher and higher.  He dreams, for instance, of wooing a Marquise, Dorimène (Bénédicte Guilbert), and having his daughter, Lucille (Elodie Huber), marry a nobleman.  But Lucile’s in love with the middle-class Cléonte (Vinçon), a former soldier, while Cléonte’s valet, Covielle (Steiger), is in love with Lucile’s maid, Nicole (Manon Combes).  Of course, M. Jourdain refuses his permission for Lucile to marry Cléonte.

To hoodwink Jourdain into letting his daughter follow her heart, Cléonte, assisted by Covielle  and Mme. Jourdain, disguises himself as the son of the Sultan of Turkey and presents himself to Jourdain to ask for Lucile’s hand.  Jourdain, thrilled to have his daughter marry royalty, is taken in.  He’s even more delighted when “Son Altesse Turque” (‘His Turkish Highness’) informs him that, as father of the bride, he, too, will be officially elevated to the noble rank of Mamamouchi (a nonsense title) at a special ceremony.

Jourdain is invested in la cérémonie turque, an absurd Orientalist masque of dervishes, turbans, and carpets in a sequence that was especially requested by Louis XIV to travesty the snobbish behavior of the Ottoman envoy to the French court a few months earlier.  (These scenes proceed with the “Turks” speaking Sabir, a kind of pidgin used by sailors and traders around the Mediterranean basin from the 11th to the 19th centuries.  Based on various Italian and Iberian dialects of the late middle ages and early Renaissance, it borrowed also from North African languages and Turkish, French, Greek, and Arabic.  Sabir would have been intelligible to French-speakers, but translation is difficult, so English renditions often use Pidgin English for the comic effect.)  The play ends with this absurd ceremony, the “Ballet des Nations,” with much singing, chanting, and dancing.  (Denis Podalydès’s staging significantly truncates this intermède apparently.)

(A note about the travesty of Turkish and Muslim rites: my companion wondered how such obvious ridicule went unanswered by France’s often volatile Middle-Eastern populace.  The cérémonie turque and Le Ballet des Nations were certainly meant to be insulting—that’s what Louis XIV had wanted, after all—and Molière’s script even called for a Koran to be used as a comic prop, a bit that the Bouffes du Nord wisely cut.  As far as I know, no French reviewer made any mention of this cultural misstep, but also, no group or individual protested this aspect of the play.  This was apparently so even though I understand that the 10th Arrondissement, Bouffes du Nord’s home district, is heavily Muslim in population.)

A five-act comédie-ballet written mostly in prose, unlike Tartuffe and Le Misanthrope, the language of Bourgeois gentilhomme is very simple and its structure is almost elementary.  (It was good I still remember the play from reading it many years ago because the supertitles were useless.  One reviewer made this same complaint.)  It’s often criticized as comprising three acts of comedy, the first two of which are a nearly plotless series of lazzi, and two of extraneous comic buffoonery.  Diana called the play “vacuous nonsense,” but that’s just a (negative) take on Molière.  The playwright’s farces, unlike the high wit and comedy of manners of the next century, were founded on the low physical comedy of the Italian-style commedia dell’arte that was still popular when Molière was touring the provinces.  Molière had refined the comic clowning and humanized the stock characters of commedia into recognizable denizens of 17th-century French society, but his plays aren’t deep or intellectually challenging.  Diana’s response is a critic’s response—especially a literary critic’s.  Molière knew how to please an audience, however, and his plays, whatever their excesses, work.

Bouffes du Nord’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme, however, was interesting, but loooong (three hours and 15 minutes with one intermission).  The music (directed by Christophe Coin) and dance (choreographed by Kaori Ito)—which for this production wasn’t conceived as period-appropriate—for the most part were attenuating rather than enhancing.  (In addition to Lully’s compositions for the original Bourgeois gentilhomme, Denis Podalydès and Coin added music by other composers.)  The exception was the opening intermède (‘interlude’) which is M. Jourdain’s music and dancing lesson and he interacts with the singers, dancers, and musicians.  (This also sets the tone for Jourdain’s buffoonish grasp of the refinements of the Deuxième État.)  The performances, however, were excellent—especially the Jourdain of Rénéric, who’s a brilliant physical comedian.  (The marvelous ensemble cast, in fact, is clearly superbly trained and experienced in physical acting, far more than we Americans are for the most part.)  The company was Peter Brook’s former troupe (he relinquished the directorship in 2011), but director Podalydès, is from the Comédie-Française.

While Podalydès, in collaboration with choreographer Ito and musical director Coin, evoked the world of 17th-century France as parodied by Molière, they created an interpretation that was modern in both movement and behavior.  Set designer Éric Ruf lined the back wall of the upstage area with bolts of fabric on vertical racks, revealing the reality of Jourdain’s life as a tradesman (a fact he desperately denies).  For the most part, though, this is the entire pictorial environment of Bourgeois Gentilhomme, with the exception of occasional chairs, rugs, or other props added and removed as needed.  There was no further period décor.  The large cutting table, which is moved about on casters, became all kinds of platforms for one activity or another. 

At stage left were the instruments of Coin’s musical ensemble (L’Ensemble la Révérence): cello, flute, oboe, violin, and harpsichord.  Costume designer Christian Lacroix used rich fabrics to suggest the excesses of the costumes used in the Sun King’s court's sumptuous entertainments (which Financial Times reviewer Max McGuinness labeled “Versailles-era bling”), and M. Jourdain’s absurd attire was a spot-on visual read-out of his ridiculous efforts to purchase good taste.

As a general rule, I find that seeing a play performed by a company from the culture—French actors doing Molière, Russians doing Chekov, Norwegians doing Ibsen—provides a special pleasure.  Obviously, that’s a generalization, but somehow they just get it in a way that foreign casts simply don’t.  It’s not just the language or the plot elements or even the characters, it’s the whole theatrical milieu endemic to the script.  The Brits, for instance, used to be terrible at doing Tennessee Williams or Neil Simon (they’ve gotten better somehow).  It was always slightly artificial, like Americans doing Restoration Comedy or even Oscar Wilde.  (When I was in Berlin in the army, our theater group got friendly with the Brit amateur troupe.  They came over to our place at Tempelhof and did a reading of some comedy—I don’t remember what it was anymore, but I think it was a modern play rather than a classic, maybe something Noel Cowardy—and they just nailed the style as if it were simply natural for them.  I recall being especially impressed with how expertly they handled throw-away lines.  Remember, these were amateurs: British soldiers and dependents.)  

Classic French comedy demands a style of its own: the slapstick hijinks and frenetic movement and speech are an acquired taste for non-Francophile spectators.  Podalydès’s cast pulled off the style so effortlessly that seeing Bouffes du Nord present Bourgeois Gentilhomme was a true revelation—and that right there was more than worth the price of admission.

Lincoln Center Festival performances have such short stage lives that few papers and websites cover them.  The New York Times is usually there (‘the paper of record”) and a few other review platforms publish notices, but the pickings are often slim.  (For Bouffes du Nord’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, not even Show-Score covered the show and surveyed its reviews so there’s no average score for me to report.)  There are, of course, reviews of the Paris performances, a few of them in English (notably a review by Catherine Young in the Theatre Journal of May 2013), available on line, but I generally stick to local notices when I have the choice.

The Financial Times’ McGuinness, praising “the consummate physicality of classically trained French actors,” declared, “Under Denis Podalydès’s brisk direction, every smirk, grimace, cocked eyebrow and pratfall has a method to it in this touring production.”  McGuinness asserted that “the performances are so wittily demonstrative that we always grasp what’s going on, even without understanding French or reading the surtitles,” giving ample credit to “Kaori Ito’s simple yet elegant choreography and a clear-voiced troupe of singers.”  The FT review-writer also complimented the acting of Rénéric as Jourdain for managing “to seem wretchedly pleased with himself and totally awkward in a comic tour de force reminiscent of Jacques Tati” at the same time, and Isabelle Candelier as Mme. Jourdain for “providing an earthy yet charming foil to her grotesquely deluded husband.”  He dubbed Lacroix’s costumes, “which bring the central theme of material extravagance to sumptuous life,” the “other star of the show.”  With the production’s “sense of pure riotous theatricality,” McGuinness said that “Le Bourgeois remains as weird and wonderful as when it was first performed.”

In the Times, Vincentelli dubbed “the giddy production” at the Lynch, “a grin-inducing delight.”  The production, “opting . . . for a refreshing unfussiness,” boasts an “energetic” director in Podalydès and “sumptuous periodish costumes” by Lacroix, “perfectly suited to Sun King-style ostentation.”  Rénéric, Vincentelli reported, “is a marvel of breathless comedic invention.”  

CriticalDance’s Jerry Hochman declared, “Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme was a hit in its initial run in 17th century Paris. It’s a hit again.”  The CD reviewer wrote, “It’s an effervescent production that spares no comic expense, overflows with dry (and not so dry) wit, and is as bright and sparkly as champagne (French of course).”  Expecting a recreation of the 1670 staging the audiences at Louis XIV’s court saw, especially the choreography of Pierre Beauchamp, but finding that “the production is an ‘update,’” Hochman saw “how quality contemporary sensibility grafted onto a 17th century form can make the piece work for today’s audiences.”  He found that “in a lot of ways the staging of this production makes it appear spiritually closer, aside from the costumes, to contemporary farce productions” such as Noises Off (Michael Frayn’s 1982 back-stage farce that played on Broadway in 1983-1985).  “From the opening moments,” noted Hochman, “the pace rarely slows.”   With kudos for Manon Combes’s Nicole and Alexandre Steiger’s Covielle, the CD reviewer felt that Rénéric’s M. Jourdain is “the glue that holds the play together.”

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.]

*  *  *  *

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.