IT’S a strange thing, but around last weekend you could, within the course of a few days, have seen the Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical – or at least convenient bookends to such a saga – and remained in the same West 55th Street building.
City Center started off its ”Encores! Great American Musicals in Concert” season with Rodgers and Hart’s 1937 classic ”Babes in Arms,” while in the basement of that same structure, the Manhattan Theater Club opened the brand-new ”Captains Courageous: The Musical.”
You can’t see ”Babes in Arms” – that’s over, so wait for the CD – but you can still see ”Captains Courageous.”
If you ever needed a neat demonstration that the old-time Broadway musical is as dead as the Viennese operetta, these two shows demonstrate it as desperately as someone trying to sell a vacuum cleaner to a Fuller brush salesman.
It is not that something has not started to replace the traditional Broadway musical – there is Stephen Sondheim and fine music dramas like this season’s short-shrifted ”Parade” – but the time is over when men like Richard Rodgers and Larry Hart could sit down and rustle up ”Babes in Arms.”
Here was a show with at least three or four numbers destined to become standards, and a book so negligible that its premise – kids saying ”let’s put on a show in the barn” – became an instant cliche, even before Mickey and Judy took up the cry two years later in the oddly demusicalized movie version.
Kathleen Marshall superbly handled this latest ”Encores” non-staging staging, and was also responsible for the lively and imaginative choreography. The cast, lesser known than is the series custom, was absolutely top-notch.
But the book … A telephone directory, with a few laugh-lines added, might have served almost as well. Not so with ”Captains Courageous: The Musical.” This one had book enough to stock a library. Patrick Cook’s book and lyrics take their careful cue from the 1937 screenplay – by Marc Connelly among others – starring Spencer Tracy.
As is the practice with musicals these days, ”Captains Courageous” has been thoroughly workshopped around, but nothing short of the musical equivalent of lobotomy could have come close to solving the show’s problem – Frederick Freyer’s score, which finds new dimensions in tedium.
Despite the efforts of Jonathan Tunick’s orchestration, the music soon gets waterlogged and sinks – worse than ”Titanic!” It deserves to be called ”Captains Courageous: The UnMusical.”
It was not a particularly good theme for a musical in the first place. The sea and ships are difficult to convey on stage, particularly after people have been to the movies.
Lynne Meadows’ staging proves gallant but dull – the ship’s deck goes round and round rather than up and down, and the show’s visual and dramatic details scarcely match those of its cinematic predecessor. So why try to improve on something that doesn’t lend itself to improvement?
The performances are good – especially, I suspect, if your memory of the cast of the movie is nicely hazy. But Treat Williams is quite wonderful as the avuncular Portuguese fisherman (he has less trouble with the accent than Tracy) and, although my views on child actors are usually encompassed by those of W.C. Fields, I must admit that Brandon Espinoza, as the awful little rich brat taught his lesson by the sea, was remarkably fine.
*
Martin Crimp’s new version of Moliere’s ”The Misanthrope,” for the Classic Stage Company, exhibits precisely the modishness that Moliere’s puritanical hero (so rudely abducted by Crimp) would have deplored.
Crimp has cramped Moliere into contemporary London, endowed him with rhyming doggerel (some of the rhymes, however, do have a Sondheim-like cleverness to them), and tried to universalize the old fellow by trivializing him. If Crimp had Moliere’s talent he wouldn’t be in need of a paint-by-numbers play pattern, and Moliere certainly doesn’t need Crimping.
Actually, the play is quite amenable to modern dress – the last time it played Broadway, with Alec McCowen and Diana Rigg, it was transposed to De Gaulle’s Fifth Republic, as it had been in a Comedie Francaise version, but such productions maintained Moliere’s tone and manner.
Crimp primps it up unavailingly and vulgarly, making a sow’s ear out of a silk purse. Barry Edelstein’s staging does its best, Narelle Sissons’ setting does its worst, and the costumes by Martin Pakledinaz and the acting fall in between.
Uma Thurman playing Jennifer – Crimp’s version of Celemene as a promiscuous, shocking-pink Hollywood superstar new to the stage – exaggerates its difficulties but looks delicious. Roger Rees’ Alceste is played throughout in a bellowingly aggrieved monotone of self-justification. But among the supporting players, Nicholas Wyman, as a critic who peddles his own piddling plays, and Mary Lou Rosato, as a carping drama coach, do, in the circumstances, stylishly well.
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Jonathan Harvey’s coming-of-age and coming-out 1993 play ”Beautiful Thing,” about two blue-collar teen-agers in South London discovering their gay sexuality, has arrived at the Cherry Lane Theater in a shabby Chicago production.
There are five actors in search of a dialect coach set against a setting in search of anyone who has looked at photographs of a South London housing development.
Acting ranges from the modestly assured downward – and the appeal of the present production will probably be primarily to the gay audience vociferously identifying with the theme rather than the production.
If you have seen the exquisitely calibrated 1996 movie version of ”Beautiful Thing,” directed by Hattie MacDonald from Harvey’s own screen adaptation, then you can give this a miss. If you haven’t seen the movie – better just rent it.