THEATER
I got the horse right here! sing (L-R) Spencer Moses as Rusty Charlie, Titus Burgess as Nicely-Nicely Johnson and Steven Rosen as Benny Southstreet, sing Fugue for Tinhorns. Photos: Carol Rosegg
“A poi-son can develop a cold,” laments Adelaide, played by Lauren Graham.
“So please forgive this helpless haze I’m in. I’ve really never been in love before,” sing Craig Bierko as Sky Masterson and Kate Jennings Grant as Sarah Brown.
“Or the devil will drag you under by the sharp lapel of your checkered coat,” sings Nicely–Nicely at the Salvation Army meeting hall.
Guys and Dolls
Nederlander
208 W. 41st St.
212-921-8000
Let me begin by saying that Craig Bierko is the best Sky Masterson I’ve ever seen or heard. And I have seen (in chronological order) Robert Alda who defined the role back in 1950. Though Alda could not sing a lick he was tough as nails, yet charismatic, funny and tender. Alda’s rendition of My Time of Day is a haunting, triumphant anthem of the city we all love, New York, with its lyrics pure poetry,
proving once and for all, Loesser is More.
My time of day is the dark time
A couple of deals before dawn
When the street belongs to the cop
And the janitor with the mop
And the grocery clerks are all gone.
When the smell of the rain-washed pavement
Comes up clean, and fresh, and cold
And the street lamplight turns the gutter to gold.
That’s my time of day, my time of day
And you’re the only doll I ever wanted to share it
With … me.
And the streetlamp light
Fills the gutter with gold"
After Alda, I saw such other Skys as, would you believe, Alan Jones of Donkey Serenade fame and Peter Gallagher of the 1992 revival who was damned good. As for Brando in the movie version, fuhgettabout it. Sinatra should have been Sky, not Nathan Detroit. It’s unthinkable that Sam Goldwyn and his sycophants eliminated these songs from the movie version, the self-same My Time of Day, the gorgeous love duet I've Never Been In Love Before, the affectionate lullaby-like More I Cannot Wish You and the comic songs A Bushel and a Peck and Marry the Man Today. In 1950 or thereabouts I watched a TV show with my parents, on their black and white 10” RCA Victor that was devoted to soliciting very modest investments (as little as 50 cents a share) in prospective Broadway shows from the “angels” in the viewing audience. One evening we watched a group of performers on the small screen doing an eminently forgettable number from a fledgling musical. I look back with the kind of regret that I have for selling Volume One Number One of the Superman DC comic book for a nickel. The show of course was Guys and Dolls, which in my view is the greatest of all comedy-musicals, thanks to the genius of composer/lyricist Loesser, to writer Abe Burrows and his muse Damon Runyon, to Sam Levene and Vivian Blaine as Nathan Detroit and Adelaide, to Isabel Bigley and Alda as Miss Sarah and Masterson, to Stubby Kaye as Nicely-Nicely, Tom Pedi as Harry the Horse, Johnny Silver as Benny Southstreet and the nightclub comic B.S. Pully with the gravelly voice as Big Jule who made Lenny Bruce seem like Emily Post. And finally the Hot Box Girls, the chorus line who backed up Miss Adelaide in A Bushel and a Peck and Take Back that Mink. The last of the Hot Box girls, is my sister’s high school friend Marcia Maier. Without researching I would venture to say, that Marcia is the last of the cast. If anyone reading this disagrees, write me. As to the present cast, everyone nails his or her part. The two leading ladies, Kate Jennings Grant as Sarah and Lauren Graham as Adelaide are terrific, and Tituss Burgess as Nicely-Nicely Johnson brings down the house with Sit Down You’re Rocking the Boat which until now only Stubby Kaye “owned.” Glenn Fleshler is a sanitized, pasteurized Big Jule without the industrial strength coarseness of Pulley. No one could ever hope to approach the Sue Me of Sammy. I speak of Sam Levene as Nathan Detroit, who when he says to Adelaide:
All right already, so call a policeman,
all right already it’s true, so nu, so sue me
sue me, shoot bullets troo me, I love you.
Sam Levene invaded the stage with his chuzpah and a voice that sounded like he gargled with chicken fat. Oliver Pratt, technically an accomplished actor, phumphers his way through it. The only other misstep is opening the show by injecting an actor who is ostensibly Damon Runyon pecking his way on a Remington with the show’s title on a big screen. It’s followed by an innocuous dance number and then – finally – with the Morning Line in their hot little hands, Fugue for Tinhorns:
Equipoise, Epitaph, Paul Revere,
I got the horse right here! .
What a musical. See it once, see it twice, and be sure to take the grandkids.
Eileen (Dearbhla Molloy) and Kate (Marie Mullen) are the funny and endearing sisters in The Cripple of Inishmaan. Photo: Keith Pattison.
The Cripple of Inishmaan
Atlantic Theater Company
Linda Gross Theater
326 W. 20th St.
212-279-4200
Final Performance March 15.
No fewer than five formidable Irish actors from the Druid Theater in Galway (out of nine performers) were given permission to act in this revival of the 1997 tragicomedy written by Martin McDonagh, he of The Beauty Queen of Leenane and most recently, The Lieutenant of Inishmore.. The action takes place in 1934 on the sparsely populated Island of Inishmaan near Inishmore, where the famed American documentary film maker Robert Flaherty who did the Nanook of the North silent film in 1921, was set to direct a “docufiction” using local town characters, and what characters! The two I was taken with instantaneously were the spinsters Eileen (Dearbhla Molloy) and Kate (Marie Mullen), proprietors of a tidy, yet understocked country store. They reminded me of the endearing, yet homicidal Brewster sisters of Arsenic and Old Lace played, deliciously by Josephine Hull and Jean Adair. Perhaps by the second act, I thought to myself, we’d learn there would be a gaggle of gentlemen callers under the floorboards of the store, having sipped of the sisters’ lethal elderberry wine. No such luck. Despite their eccentricities, the two were as pure as the driven snow, and in fact they took in their nephew, known pejoratively as Cripple Billy, whom they raised after the joint suicides of his parents directly after the poor creature was born. Frankly I was more disturbed by the wheezing, spastic all-too-realistic embodiment of Billy by Aaron Monahan than I was by all the blood-letting in the sanguinary black comedy, The Lieutenant of Inishmore. Others have likened The Cripple of Inishmaan to a more hard-edged Dickensian A Christmas Carol, with Billy as Tiny Tim. I noted vestiges of Stones in His Pockets in it, which also involved a visiting American film crew and the proboscis-driven Cyrano yearning for Roxanne or for that matter, Belle, the Beauty and the Beast. One of the most amusing characters in the play is the diminutive town gossip, played by David Pearse as JohnnyPateenMike (this is not an email moniker). The only way I can describe this self-styled town crier of Inishmaan is that he’s a cross between a vonce and a yenta.
Jane Fonda as Katherine Brandt and Zach Grenier in the background as Ludwig van Beethoven, in 33 Variations. Photo: Joan Marcus
33 Variations
Eugene O’Neill Theater
230 w. 49th St.
212-239-6200
Through May 24.
Jane Fonda returns to the Broadway stage after 46 years and she is sterling as the musicologist Dr. Katherine Brandt who tackles what I found to be a fascinating premise by the playwright/director Moisés Kaufman,to wit: that Ludwig van Beethoven (along with other composer luminaries of the time – circa 1819), were asked by their publisher Anton Diabelli, to do a variation of an admittedly mundane waltz Diabelli had written for an anthology he was planning. A truly imaginative bit of stage ploy has Diabelli (Don Amendolia) shocked and awed by the notion that the great maestro (Zach Grenier) through his aide-de-camp Anton Schindler (Erik Steele) not only agreed to do a variation, but for some unfathomable reason proceeded to do a total of 33 variations, snatches of which are performed throughout the evening by the pianist/musical director Diane Walsh. To solve the puzzle that propelled Beethoven to devote quality time to such a seemingly inconsequential project while becoming progressively deaf , Brandt travels to Bonn, where she is given access to Beethoven’s scores and notes by the keeper of the archives Dr. Gertrude Ladenburger, who is played smartly and drolly by Susan Kellerman.. Underscoring the whole business is the incipient progression of ALS on Brandt, and her tenuous relationship with her daughter, Clara, (played by Samantha Mathis). As a classical music aficionado, I would position 33 Variations in the rarefied company of Terrence McNally’s masterful Master Class with Zoe Caldwell and his amusing The Stendahl Syndrome with Richard Thomas.
Angela Lansbury (center) as Madame Arcati initiates a spiritual journey with her all-too- willing participants, (clockwise) Deborah Rush as Mrs. Bradman, Rupert Everett as Charles, Jayne Atkinson as Ruth and Simon Jones as Dr. Bradman. Photo: Robert J. Saferstein
Blithe Spirit
Schubert Theater
225 W. 44th St.
212-239-6200
Noël Coward directed his first production of Blithe Spirit at the Savoy Theatre in London during the Blitz. Among the main cast members was the great Margaret Rutherford as the ditzy medium Madame Arcati. I remember her most fondly as the personification of Mrs. Malaprop which co-starred Sir Ralph Richardson in a London Production I saw in the early ‘60s of The Rivals at the Haymarket Theater. It was clear to me she was off her game, blowing a line here and there. In short order she had to leave the show with the onset of Alzheimer’s. Until this revival I had never seen a stage version of Blithe Spirit, but I did see an undistiguished musical version called High Spirits in 1964, notable only for the great Bea Lillie as Madame Arcati and Tammy Grimes as Elvira in 1964. Lillie of course did her well-documented centifugal-defying, oversized pearl necklace routine which she twirled around her neck with a bob of the head. Lillie, at age 94, also died of Alzheimer’s. Angela Lansbury as Madame Arcati is more than inspired casting. It would be unthinkable for any one in theaterdom other than Lansbury to play her. With a raised eyebrow here, a drooping mouth there, you are convinced that this irrepressible, martini-swilling, Irving Berlin-adoring minx has occult powers. To insinuate that she is a mere party-game trickster as the stiff-upper-lip Cowardian novelist Charles Condomine – played impeccably by Rupert Everett - does, goes beyond the pale. A post-prandial séance that Charles arranges as research for a murder mystery he’s developing, includes his second wife Ruth and their invited guests the Bradmans (Simon Jones and Deborah Rush). Charles is stupefied by Arcati’s miscalculated conjuring of his dead first wife Elvira who materializes in a ghostly white ensemble. She is seen and heard only by Charles and we in the audience. Though under the guiding hand of Tony-winning Michael Blakemore, she is played by Christine Ebersole without a scintilla of nuance, in stark contrast to the diverting performance of Jayne Atkinson as Ruth who in looks and class, conjures up intimations of of Kitty Carlisle Hart.
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