The Fabulous Invalid's New Symptoms
A THEATER season is spoken of as an entity, but it nourishes some 100 unique possibilities, not excluding a happening like Jesus Christ Superstar. Here are some of the other 99 that will make up the 1971-72 record.
MUSICALS: The musical is peculiarly evocative of the U.S. spirit. With the popular yearning for a simpler past, the appetite for nostalgia came into being. It is represented this year by the revival of the 1944 show On the Town, with book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, music by Leonard Bernstein. No one can guess how anyone will react to the lyrics: "New York, New York, it's a wonderful town!"
David Merrick will weigh in with Nobody's Perfect, an adaptation of the Billy Wilder movie, Some Like It Hot, in which Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe costarred. Elaine Joyce will play the Monroe part and Bobby Morse will fill the Lemmon role. Jule Styne supplies the music, Bob Merrill the lyrics, and Gower Champion will direct. The team that put together Stop the World --I Want to Get Off, Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley, will be back with another marquee-macerating title, It's a Funny Old World We Live In, but the World's Not Entirely to Blame. Newley will play Everyman, as is his wont. Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death is a musical "of the street with street people" that takes an all-black look at the Promised Land called America.
From the original Promised Land this week comes the first Israeli musical, To Live Another Summer--To Pass Another Winter, a lighthearted treatment of the generation gap as well as the struggle with the Arabs. The forthcoming F. Jasmine Addams is Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding set to music, and Truman Capote's The Grass Harp will come twanging back on the scene with Barbara Cook as the star. Still another musical revival is Candide, of 1956 vintage, with music by Leonard Bernstein and the totally ingenuous hero courtesy of Voltaire.
DRAMA: This is not a time of powerful playwrights with bold convictions. Audiences must settle for privacy of vision and a distinctively personal voice. England's Harold Pinter has both. His famous pauses are elusive in meaning and menacing in their silence, which perhaps befits an age of uncertainty. In Old Times, he returns to his favorite human geometry, the triangle (in this case, two women and a man), and examines the tricks that life plays on memory and memory plays on itself. The trio will be acted by Robert Shaw, Mary Ure and Rosemary Harris. From the front rank of American playwrights, only Arthur Miller is currently scheduled for production, with a new work titled The Creation of the World and Other Business. Miller calls it a "catastrophic comedy." He also has a revival coming up when the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center does The Crucible, the parable of the Joe McCarthy era told in terms of the Salem witch hunts.
The Edwardian wit, critic, dandy, caricaturist, and paragon of prose stylists, Max Beerbohm, will take the stage in The Incomparable Max. Clive Revill will be Sir Max, and two of the characters from Beerbohm's stories will be portrayed by Richard Kiley. In the realm of polemical speculation. Murderous Angels, by Conor Cruise O'Brien, suggests that the U.N.'s Dag Hammarskjold may have been a complicitous agent in the death of the Congo's Patrice Lumumba and that his own death may also have been planned. Jean-Pierre Aumont takes the role of Hammarskjold, and Louis Gossett is cast as Lumumba.
Novelist Philip Roth (Portnoy's Complaint) will be represented by Unlikely Heroes: 3 Philip Roth Stories--stage adaptations by Larry Arrick of Epstein, Defender of the Faith and Eli, the Fanatic. Just short of a quarter-century after it was published, Truman Capote's very first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, is being readied for its stage debut. The writer of the book for Company, George Furth, will make his reentry on Broadway with Twigs, a play concerned with generational changes in the U.S. Four families are visited on Thanksgiving eve, and in the kitchens are women ranging from 40 to 80. They will all be played by Sada Thompson, who won last year's Variety poll of the New York drama critics as best off-Broadway actress.
For the rest, there will be plays in plenty from groups that stay together on sealing wax, Scotch tape, the heaven-sent foundation grant, steely determination and the glue of an abiding love for the theater. As just one example, Joseph Papp's Public Theater sends its Shakespeare Festival musical production of 2 Gentlemen of Verona to Broadway, while keeping its four Greenwich Village stages humming with titles that entice the experimental palate: Slaughterhouse Play, The Black Terror, Sticks and Bones and Brecht's In the Jungle of Cities. When you realize that this blizzard of dramatic activity is going on in a building that came within decimal points of being lopped off the New York City budget last year, it is easier to understand why the theater is the invalid known as fabulous.
COMEDIES: At the risk of violating the antitrust laws, Neil Simon has written his annual play, The Prisoner of Second Avenue. Mike Nichols directs, and Peter Falk plays a 47-year-old Manhattan executive forced to cope with unanticipated unemployment. Absent from Broadway since Jimmy Shine opened in 1969, Murray Schisgal returns with The Box Step, a play about "people who go through life getting nowhere." Added Schisgal topics: Women's (and men's) Lib. Fun City (irony intended) is about a couple whose wedding plans are frustrated by life in New York. It will be the debut of Comedienne Joan Rivers as playwright and actress. The French genius of high-and-low farce, Georges Feydeau, will be represented by Chemin de Fer, and Brian Bedford, of last season's School for Wives, will star in it.
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.