Mini Music Hall

Manhattan's longest-running repertory theater and light-opera company, as well as its most exclusive, is located just off a modest brick courtyard west of Central Park. Its stage is the home of the gifted Standwells, whose repertory troupe combines high-comedy acting with stylish singing and sheer charm. They all sing, they all play the piano, and they all perform in everything from Shakespeare and Wilde to Viennese operetta and musical comedies. This month they began their eleventh consecutive season.

Leader and founder of the troupe is Isabelle Standwell, an Englishwoman whose aristocratic manners seem oddly appropriate both to Lady Macbeth and Wilde's Lady Bracknell She also lends her dowager tones to Schubert lieder and such trifles as Nevermore from Noel Coward's Conversation Piece. Her brother Sicnarf, having lived in America, has acquired a Southern accent as well as a rowdy taste in music and poetry; he does the genial turns.

Romantic leads go to Jonathan Smythe, a mustached Englishman who clips his words and stands as if he had swallowed a swagger stick. Glamour is provided by Mademoiselle Garonce, a Viennese-educated vision in chiffon with a husky voice that sounds as if it might burst into flame at any moment. The fifth member of the troupe is Elsie Lump (pronounced Loomp), a grumpy ex-London music-hall harpy with sullen manners, a cockney accent and hair the color of smoked salmon.

Mash Notes. They are all puppets. Manipulated and animated by two men, Francis Peschka and Gordon Murdock, both 50, they have been attracting enchanted, totally devoted audiences at the 24-seat Little Players cheater for over a decade. To most of their fans, the Standwells are far more real than the cardboard actors of Broadway. Mail comes addressed to the puppets: mash notes to Mademoiselle, formal thank-yous to Isabelle, extravagant fan letters to Elsie. Bette Davis used to telephone the theater regularly for reservations, asking for "Miss Lump, please."

Puppeteers Peschka and Murdock first teamed up in 1952, after migrating to New York from Ohio. The Standwells began as a joint hobby--they were first shown to an audience of eight in the living room of Peschka's apartment--and gradually came to dominate both men's lives and careers. Now the Little Players company is a full-time operation. To help keep ;ntact the illusion of a family "at home," no money ever changes hands at the door; all reservations are handled by telephone and check. Season subscriptions, which cost $40, entitle holders to attend each production (this season will have three) as well as the privilege of bringing as many guests as they want at $5 a person. Paying customers, however, bring in only 25% of the theater's operating costs. The balance, about $10,000 a year, is made up by a cultural foundation that insists upon anonymity.

The puppet voices--as well as the piano accompaniment for the Stand-wells' singing--come from Peschka. He vocalizes every day to keep his five voices in shape, "otherwise they'll collapse into just one nondescript baritone." A complicated system of tape recordings permits him to sing and play duets with himself. Because Murdock is busy backstage with lights, sound and scenery, only two characters at the same time can appear on the stage. When one exits, Peschka keeps acting with one hand while Murdock hastily strips one puppet off his outstretched hand, puts on another.

Bowles Ballad. It is the extraordinary timing and creation of emotion through character that make Peschka's puppets unique. Explaining his preference for hand-operated puppets over those using strings ("marionettes"), Peschka says, "How on earth can you make emotion travel down a string!" The mannerisms of voice and style and the personalities of the five Standwells are all clearly delineated. Their individual quirks of voice, accent and mannerism permeate whatever characters they portray. Whether portraying a cocotte in a worldly Molnar one-act or chanting a lovelorn ballad in a piece by Jane and Paul Bowles, nobody can flounce quite like Mile. Garonce. Isabelle's gentility never wavers--not even when Sicnarf tries to teach her to play a boogie-woogie bass at a family musicale or when someone makes an unsettling remark about sex.

The music-hall format in which the Standwells excel has attracted a number of well-known admirers, among them Conductor Leonard Bernstein, Duo-pianists Gold and Fizdale, and Sir John Gielgud. Perhaps the highest professional compliment the Standwells ever received was from Director-Choreographer Jerome Robbins. While experimenting with repertory theater in 1967, Robbins bought out the theater one night and invited his cast. He had been impressed by a puppet performance of a scene from Romeo and Juliet; that evening, he asked Peschka and Murdock to repeat the scene, leaving out the words but explaining their puppets' actions and thoughts. When they had finished, Robbins turned and exclaimed to his cast: "That is exactly what I've been trying to get across to you people for months!"

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