Theater News

Critic’s Choices

Filichia shares his thoughts on some of the many shows and books that have been occupying his time.

After my pal Paul Roberts and I got out of the worthy 8 by Tenn at Hartford Stage Company, he fumed a bit about the city itself. “Look at this place!” he moaned, with a sweeping hand at its now modest downtown. “That’s where a department store named G. Fox used to be. And that’s where another one, Sage-Allen, once was. Gone! All gone! You know what’s wrong with the world today? We just don’t have as many choices as we used to.”

Sometimes, I think that Sondheim wrote the lyric “Nothing’s the way that it was; I want it the way that it was” just for Paul. Ever the optimist, I started arguing that we have many more choices today. When I was a kid, Coke made Coke. Now Coke makes Coke, Diet Coke, Caffeine-Free Coke, Caffeine-Free Diet Coke, Cherry Coke, Diet Cherry Coke, Vanilla Coke — well, I could go on, and I haven’t even considered the company’s Sprite and Fanta lines. Of course, I eventually started to wonder if we have more or fewer choices today when it comes to theater. On the surface, it would seem that we have fewer. In the year I was born, Broadway productions graced the Adelphi, Center, Fulton, International, New Century, Playhouse, and Princess theaters. They’ve all since been razed. On the other hand, we aggregately have more theater today, given that Off-Broadway, Off-Off Broadway, institutional, and regional theaters were largely or totally unknown in those days.

Aren’t we glad we have them all now? Recently. I attended the Peccadillo Theatre Company’s splendid revival of Jane, S.N. Behrman’s delectable 1952 comedy about some WASPs living in London in the late ’30s. All of the characters — save Jane — are so amusingly upper crust. I savored such lines as “I find that extraordinarily irritating,” “Lord Frobisher says he’ll be unable to dine,” and “Well, dad, you’re looking grand. How was Africa?” It’s a play wherein a daughter calls her father “Darling” and her mother uses the grammatically recommended “I’m sure I shall” rather than “I’m sure I will.” I also smiled when plain Jane, upon her arrival, complained that her train was 20 minutes late. Today, we’d feel that’s virtually on time. But, in those days, people didn’t have as many transportation choices as we do now.

Then I went to the Ground Floor Theatre to see Closet Chronicles by Eric R. Pfeffinger. It’s the story of a young man who, at Thanksgiving dinner, tells his parents and sister that he’s gay — to the astonishment of his mother, the surprise of his sister, and the denial of his father. So for Christmas, the parents give their son a gift certificate to Gay-No-More Counseling. Does 2003 sound a little late for a play like this? Maybe, though Ben Hodges’s production is pin-point perfect and makes it all seem fresh. I couldn’t help noting that the play’s hero has a choice of being himself in a way that guys couldn’t in the era when department stores were flourishing in Hartford.

I’m glad that A.R. Gurney keeps giving us so many choices by writing so many plays. He’s 73 now, an age when many of his contemporaries are long retired, but he just keeps going and going. Perhaps that’s because he didn’t start writing plays and getting them produced until he was in his 40s (and there’s a lesson in that for all of us), but here he is with Strictly Academic, two one-acters at Primary Stages. I’ll the first to admit that they’re not top-notch Gurney, but you can’t hit a homer every time at bat. The first play, The Problem, is essentially his variation on the theme that Pinter introduced in The Lovers 40 years ago: that married people need to role-play in order to keep wedlock interesting. The second, The Guest Lecturer, involves a speaker who finds he just may be killed for sport by the people who hired him. So he grabs a gun, rushes down the center aisle, and points it at an audience member. I was much amused that, at the matinee I saw, Remy Auberjonois, who played the lecturer, pointed the gun right at the notorious New York Post columnist Michael Riedel. Granted, Primary Stages occupies a small space (it will be moving to its new, larger one for its next show), but still, Auberjonois had many choices at whom to point that gun, so I’m wondering if he purposely chose Riedel.

Michael Riedel (left) with Adam Pascal, oneof the many friends he's made coveringBroadway for The New York Post(Photo © Michael Portantiere)
Michael Riedel (left) with Adam Pascal, one
of the many friends he’s made covering
Broadway for The New York Post
(Photo © Michael Portantiere)

Speaking of Michael: I ran into him the next night at five minutes to eight. “Going to The Retreat from Moscow?” he asked, and after I said yes, I asked to which show he was going. “Oh,” he replied, “I’m having dinner with my parents tonight. They’re in from out of town.” I suddenly thought of all that Michael has accomplished for himself, and said — sincerely — “They must be very proud of you.” He took a moment before answering with a shy smile, “Oh, I don’t know if anyone could be proud of what I do.”

By the way, to say that The Retreat from Moscow is the best play of the season doesn’t say enough. After all, the season is pretty young. So I’ll say that The Retreat from Moscow is the best play of the year, given that 2003 is now 89% over. Okay, this drama is “just” about a couple getting divorced, but as the ol’ song taught us, “‘T’aint what you do, it’s the way that you do it.” William Nicholson has done it superbly; ditto the work by Eileen Atkins, John Lithgow, and Ben Chaplin, who’s most eloquent in a speech where he says that people listen to the six o’clock news to hear other people’s problems so that they can feel better about themselves. Of course, when I heard this, “Schadenfreude” from Avenue Q suddenly popped into my head.

Hey! That’s another area in which we have more choices than in the old days: cast albums! When G. Fox and Sage-Allen were selling records, there weren’t nearly as many as we have now. (I’ve had to pry Avenue Q from my CD player so that I could listen to two new ones: Zanna, Don’t, which has the thoroughly intoxicating “I Think We Got Love,” and My Life With Albertine, easily Ricky Ian Gordon’s most accessible and lovely score.)

Similarly, when those department stores were selling books, they didn’t carry as many as we have today. Right now, I find myself simultaneously reading three. First, there’s Margot Peters’s Design for Living, her gripping biography of Broadway stars Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. They were married for 55 years and spent most of that time either performing or rehearsing. In fact, Peters reports that, a newspaper once printed that they were breaking up because one of its reporters had been strolling down the sidewalk, heard a bitter and raucous quarrel coming from the open window of a cab, and saw Lunt and Fontanne going at it inside. He went back to the office and wrote it up, unaware that they were just rehearsing for their next show.

I’m also reading Colored Lights. The book consists of transcripts that Greg Lawrence made of conversations between John Kander and Fred Ebb, who’ve been writing together almost as long as Lunt and Fontanne were married. Ebb tells of his pre-Kander days, when he showed a piece of his special material to Carol Channing — who, he says, laughed so hard that she wet herself. What was the song? It was called “I Love Roz” and it was Ethel Merman’s disingenuous take on Rosalind Russell getting her role in the movie of Gypsy. (Wonder if Channing would have laughed as hard if Ebb had written “I Love Babs” as her disingenuous take on Streisand getting her role in the movie of Hello, Dolly!) Ebb also recalls that, when Judy Garland saw her daughter Liza Minnelli in the Kander and Ebb show Flora, the Red Menace, she took issue with one of the lyrics sung directly to Minnelli: “You are not Myrna Loy; Myrna Loy is Myrna Loy.” Garland wanted him to change it to “You are not Judy Garland; Judy Garland is Judy Garland.” Ebb also says that 70, Girls, 70, the pair’s 1971 flop, represents “one of the only times that Stephen Sondheim complimented me.” And who knew that the song they put into the London production of that show — the delectable “I Can’t Do That Anymore” — was a piece of special material written by the team for Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly to do in a TV special, but Sinatra flatly refused to do it?

Are you trying to seduce him, Miss Turner?
Are you trying to seduce him, Miss Turner?

I’m also reading Are You Trying to Seduce Me, Miss Turner?, a collection of nifty interviews by Richard Ouzounian, the terrific Toronto Star critic. Miss Turner is a page turner; Bea Arthur, Betty Buckley, Stockard Channing, Dame Edna, and Gwen Verdon are just some of the luminaries Richard tackles, but I do wish that he had found room to put in a story about himself that he once told me. Seems that, when he was at university, he was approached by three fellow students who had science and history down pat. They were representing the school in some sort of College Bowl-like TV competition and they needed his knowledge of the arts to complement what they knew. Yet on the day of the broadcast, when one science-oriented question came their way, it was Richard who buzzed in and got the correct answer. His three colleagues looked at him askance, astonished that he and not they could answer, “Who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1934 for discovering heavy hydrogen?” Richard knew full well that it was Harold Urey because, Broadway musical lover that he is, he remembered the song “Revenge” from It’s a Bird…It’s a Plane…It’s Superman!. That’s the song in which mad scientist Abner Sedgwick says that what put him in a fury is that they gave the prize to Harold Urey, even though “my heavy hydrogen was heavier than his.” That’s choice, Richard — real choice.

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[To contact Peter Filichia directly, e-mail him at pfilichia@aol.com]