THE MIRACLE WORKER A REVUE

I am one of the few people that never thought that William Gibson's 1959 drama THE MIRACLE WORKER was a great play, but the flaws it had [mostly in play construction] were more or less covered over by a classic final scene, memorable performances by Anne Bancroft, young Patty Duke and an amazing cast,and stunning direction by Arthur Penn.

The relationship of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan [the teacher who taught Ms. Keller to communicate in the real world] is one of the worlds' most inspiring stories and does not need rehashing here, but this first Broadway revival is misconceived, underdirected, and somewhat blandly acted.

The big [and I think fatal] mistake was doing it in the round with the spectators surrounding the stage. This presented a huge and maybe unsolvable problem for a director. How do you engage an audience in something that requires constant eye contact with the actors? Director Kate Whoriskey [who did a superb job with the play "Ruined" last year] hasn't been able to solve that problem so the actors spend part of the evening with their back to the audience. At todays prices that is not a good deal.

To be honest, the final scene [where teacher finally breaks thru to student] still packs an emotional punch and the two leads, Allison Pill and young Abigail Breslin give good, and sometimes fine accounts of themselves and the rest of the cast is o-k if not great,but being good is not enough to hide the fact that 50 years later THE MIRACLE WORKER is a flawed and sometimes dull play.

At THE CIRCLE IN THE SQUARE THEATRE 1633 BROADWAY N.Y.C.

HAMLET-------------THE OPERA-----------A THOUGHT

Shakespear's HAMLET is considered by many to be the greatest play ever written in the English language, so I was looking forward to seeing the opera the 19th century composer Ambroise Thomas made from it at the Met this afternoon. It was for the most part worth seeing except for one thing. It wasn't very good.
Composed in 1868, it was last seen at the Met in1897 and it's not hard to see why.The music sounds like Verdi or Puccini on an off day, and the transformation from play to opera is clumsy and unsatisfying. To make matters worse, the production[directed by two gentlemen from France ,Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser] is ill-conceived and poorly designed.
The opera is generally well sung and very well conducted byLouis Langree,but instead of being truly transformed, this greatest of all plays has been forced into a medium that is not a great fit for it.
In short HAMLET as an opera does not work.

THE NOSE A THOUGHT

The Met continues it's successful policy of being new and different with the American premiere of Dmitri Shostakovich's opera THE NOSE.
Based on a story by Nikolai Gogol and composed in 1928,it deals with a man who wakes up one morning, finds his nose missing and his attempt to find it.
Working from Shostakovich's facinating, atonal , and well orchestrated score, director William Kentridge has devised a smashing production mixing live actors with stunning video effects and coming up with a concept so stunning that the audience I saw it with gave it an ovation at the end that seldom greets an unorthodox work like this.
To be sure, this will not be to everyone's taste, and is sure to have some people wondering what the Met is coming to, but to those willing to take a chance on a new, nontraditional work; THE NOSE provides a facinating and rewarding evening at the opera.
At THE METROPOLITAN OPERA HOUSE LINCOLN CENTER N.Y.C.

ATTILA A THOUGHT

There is nothing better than the joy of discovery and last night I discovered a gem of an opera in one of Verdi's little known works. His early. obscure work ATTILA had it's debut at the Met and was an interesting and sometimes rousing work.
This 1846 opera deals with civilzation's encounter with barbarism and has rousing choral interludes and first rate singing.
Riccardo Muti[in his Met debut conducts with expert verve,and Pierre Audi's stage direction is full of snap.
All in all a fine, and most unusual evening at the opera.
AT THE METROPOLITAN OPERA HOUSE LINCOLN CENTER N.Y.C

HARD TIMES A THOUGHT

I have always found the works of Charles Dickens to be a good source for stage adaptation[Nicholas Nickelby, A Christmas Carol], and now the Pearl Theatre Co. is presenting a beautiful version of another classic Dickens novel HARD TIMES. Dickens' long novel about the colorful characters of Coketown England has been wonderfully well adapted by Stephen Jeffreys and is acted with superb relish by a talanted cast of six under the expert staging of J. R. Sullivan.
The Pearl Theatre Company is one of off Broadway's treasures, and they are to be highly commended for providing this theatre season with a gem of a play.
I had a great time at HARD TIMES. Go see it.
At THE N.Y. CITY CENTER STAGE 2 131 WEST 55th STREET N.Y.C. THRU MARCH 28th.

CLOTHES FOR A SUMMER HOTEL A REVIEW

There is no doubt that Tennessee Williams has always been considered a giant among American playrights, but most of his great works were created in the 1940s and 1950s. After The Night Of The Iguana in 1961 Williams started a decline so severe that none of his plays [after Iguana] fared well, and some of them were outright disasters.

For the last couple of years the excellent White Horse Theater Company has been revisiting some of his rarely seen works. What they are up to at the moment is an evocative and sometimes wonderful revival of Mr. Williams' last Broadway attempt CLOTHES FOR A SUMMER HOTEL, and I wish that the play was nearly as good as the production it is getting now.

This is Mr. Williams' self described "ghost play" in which he imagines a final meeting between F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda at the gates of the asylum where she was institutionalized until her death in 1948, but even with two larger than life characters at it's center the play seemed [to me] a fascinating but cloudy, murky and unsatisfying work.

Still,there are good things here,starting with the remarkably fluid staging of Cyndy A. Marion. Ms. Marion is one of the better directors working in New York at the moment. She really under stands Williams' plays and has managed to make even this dark, dour play more animated and palateble than it has any right to be, and she has gotten fine performances from a first rate cast.

The production values are beyond excellent, and the set by John C. Scheffler and Randall Parsons is one of the best designed and executed sets that I have seen all season.

CLOTHES FOR A SUMMER HOTEL closed after only 15 performances in 1980 after a severe critical bashing. I did not see that production so I have no idea if the bashing was deserved. This revised version doesen't work either, but it is worth looking at again and the superior production values and Ms. Marion's expert staging may make it up to you.
At THE HUDSON GUILD THEATRE 441 WEST 26th STREET N.Y.C. THRU FEB. 21ST.

FANNY A REVIEW

One of New York's happiest events is Encores presentations of Broadway musicals in concert, focusing on scores that are rarely heard,or not heard often enough. For the second show of it's fifteenth season this vital organization is presenting an excellent production of FANNY, and it is a joy to hear Harold Rome's truly fine score sung as well as it is here.
When it first opened in 1954 it was a long run hit [ 888 performances] despite the fact that it was a simple story involving four people that was overproduced and sometimes overpopulated. As a stagestruck 11 year old, I loved it, and the performances of Ezio Pinza and Walter Slezak in the leading roles have stayed with me ever since that time.
In adapting Marcel Pagnol's trilogy of plays S. N. Behrman and Joshua Logan created a book that seemed heavy handed and ponderous. Most of this has been eliminated in the the skillful concert adaptation by David Ives, so now the emphasis is on Harold Rome's soaring music and skillful lyrics, and they sound as fresh as ever in Phillip J. Lang's original orchestrations, and the great Encores orchestra is conducted expertly by Rob Berman.
The singing is beyond first rate and Marc Bruni's staging is top notch.
Many thanks to Encores for reviving FANNY and bringing back one of the 1950s most underrated scores.
At the N.Y. CITY CENTER 131 WEST 55th STREET N.Y.C. Feb 4th thru Feb 7th.