A Coney Island of the Mind

By RICHARD CORLISS

THE RINK Music by John Kander

Lyrics by Fred Ebb; Book by Terrence McNally

I gotta love me.

It's a dirty job but somebody in this wonderful sewer of a town's gotta do it.

Well they can hold the meat grinder of life up to my face and push me through it.

And when I come out I'm gonna stand on these gorgeous gams and shout, "Screw it!"

The show-biz ego--stark, aggressive, manipulative, wheedling, insatiable--has found no more assiduous celebrators than the songwriting team of John Kander and Fred Ebb. In Cabaret, Chicago, Woman of the Year and the movie New York, New York, they have composed dozens of brassy ballads for gutsy ladies staking out their parcel of asphalt turf. No raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens for these guys. Kander's tunes have the catchy dissonance of a Broadway traffic snarl just before show time; violins cower mutely in the pit while the percussion sets a tempo of edgy energy and the horns bleat like Kurt Weill's orphaned children. Ebb never wrote a lyric as clawing as the imaginary one cited above, but he revels in devising anthems of urban indomitability. Everything that outsiders hate about New York City--its grime and pace, its inhabitants' steamroller pugnacity--Ebb sees as fodder for his romantic cynicism. If a Kander-Ebb song rarely reveals deeper moods or meanings the second time around, it certainly holds the moment onstage, by intimidating the audience into forming a beleaguered, defiant community of New York chauvinists.

The Rink, the Kander-Ebb musical that opened last week on Broadway, is set on the ragged fringe of the New York show-biz world: in a Coney Island of the mind where Anna Antonelli's roller-skating rink is about to be demolished, and with it Anna's sour memories of life with her runaway Lothario of a husband and her painfully shy daughter Angel. Terrence McNally's script might suggest a domestic minidrama swathed in poignancy--A Tree Grows in Brooklyn mixed with Terms of Endearment. But from the moment the curtain rises on Peter Larkin's cathedral of a roller rink, the spectator knows he is in for 2 1/2 hours of big themes and outsize emotions. By the end of the first act, Anna has re-enacted her gang rape by a trio of punks; at the end of the second and final act, Angel releases a cascade of personal traumas involving her father, her dead boyfriend and a surprise-package daughter. The rink that was to be razed is literally raised: the set disappears into the flies to reveal a beckoning Atlantic sun, toward which three generations of womankind can now proceed as one.

The show's casting is even grander than its ambitions. Chita Rivera (Anna) is about as small-time as Radio City Music Hall. Packing 30 years of Broadway savvy into the frame of a vivacious teenager, the 51-year-old entertainer could by now sell a song to the deaf; she commands the audience like a lion tamer with a whip snap in her walk; and, by the forces of magnetism and sheer will, she eats co-stars for breakfast. Thus it is partly noblesse oblige and partly the instinct for survival that keeps Liza Minnelli (Angel), the bigger box-office attraction, out of Chita's way. Minnelli steps to center stage only to belt out three or four of Kander and Ebb's snazzier songs, while the rest of The Rink skates along on the momentum of uninspired professionalism. But Chita Rivera's high-voltage presence and performance act as saving shock therapy for a catatonic show-biz form. --By Richard Corliss