Theatre
Minority again
Kenneth Hurren
A Chorus Line (Drury Lane) The Circle (Chichester Festival) Banana Ridge (Savoy) The night I saw A Chorus Line—which was the second night of its .run at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, a run that will very likely continue for several years—the customers at the end gave it everything short of a standing ovation. It has that sort of dazzling, Pandemonium-inciting finale. A stage that, for the previous two and a quarter hours, has had only backing-mirrors for decor and has been bare of anything more ambitious than a follow-spot (albeit an expertly handled follow-spot and, indeed, craftily deployed mirrors) and has offered no costumes more elaborate than casual rehearsal clothes, is on the instant transformed into an old-time Broadway scena that is a folly of Flo Ziegfeld, a scandal of George White and a vanity of Earl Carroll rolled into one: the mirrors swing round to Show opulently where some of the show's reputed £250,000 production costs went, and a long chorus line of fast-stepping, high-stepping dancers sweeps across the stage, the individual personalities they have earlier exhibited melting into the anonymity of gold suits and top hats, high-precision Choreography and fixed smiles. The number is a stunner, the magical showbiz razzmatazz that brings palms together fast and hard. My own hands, I confess, were doing their bit, though an hour or so earlier I had been seriously wondering whether I could take Much more of A Chorus Line without retching.
This, as you may guess, is a prelude to saying that a reluctant perversity has triumphed again and that, finale or no finale, I am not among those who have been sensationally carried away by a show that arrives from Broadway loaded with 'Tony' awards, magazine awards, critics' award, a Pulitzer Prize and the ultimate accolade of the Praise of Clive (*something to sing about for years') Barnes himself: The idea of the show—an audition session in which eight Chorus dancers are selected, by a process of elimination, from twenty-six applicants—is really quite touchingly winsome in its conviction that struggling dancers are somehow more interesting people in their aspirations than struggling insurance salesmen. (The theatre will stop being the theatre When it gets over its love affair with itself.) And although, to be sure, I tend to recoil
from musicals which are billed as having been 'conceived' (this one is 'conceived, choreographed and directed' by the clearly gifted Michael Bennett), I am not much bothered by the spuriousness of the show's
pretensions in purporting to assault the ratrace values of show business while celebrating, with bells on, the ethos of Broadway.
What bothers me is partly the intimidating phoneyness of the set-up in which the director conducting the audition has the wretched dancers step one by one out of the line to tell him about themselves in the fashion of sinners, slimmers and alcoholics in a public confessional, and partly the triteness and tastelessness of the stories with which the writers, James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante, have equipped them. Insistently and pruriently, the voice of the director, amplified from the back of the auditorium, goads the hapless applicants into exposing not only the basis of their involvement in the theatre but, rather less relevantly, their sexual attitudes and proclivities and the depressing ordinariness of their early-teen experiences. I thought that if just one more of them came forward and talked about such elevating matters as the experimental gropes and nocturnal emissions of adolescence I would crawl under the seat and quietly die; but not, perhaps, before writing a kindly note to Kirkwood and Dante advising them that getting laughs in 1976 by the use of a four-letter synonym for sexual congress bespeaks a certain lack of sophistication, not to say an excess of desperation, and that it is no news that some dancers are homosexual, a condition in which some are happy and some are not.
I'm not sure whether the dancers' rubbishy potted autobiographies are the result of juvenile naïveté or ruthlessly calculated commercialism. I'm not sure either for exactly how long this part of the show goes on: at the time it seemed interminable, but it does terminate and it is fair to say that there are also some smart and witty lines (most of which are in the hands, or on the tongue, of a tall and nicely structured girl named Jane Summerhays, who delivers them with the sardonic splendour of a young Elaine Stritch), that there is one illuminatingly relevant story about a girl whose career has fallen lucklessly into a sort of no-work-land between the chorus she has grown out of and the stardom she hasn't attained (told, sung and danced to marvellous effect by a girl named Sandy Roveta), and that there is blessedly time for a great deal of efficient and exhilarating dancing by the entire company, most of whom are so good that the choice of the final eight who get jobs seems indecently arbitrary. The lyrics by Edward Kleban are serviceable and sometimes sharply funny, and I suspect that Marvin Hamlisch's inventive, driving score is precisely what Bennett's 'conception' demanded.
The 'straight' theatre last week offered two entertaining revivals, Somerset Maugham's The Circle and Ben Travers's Banana Ridge. The former, its discussion of the relative values of adulterous love and marital duty embellished by Maugham's epigrammatic wit at its most diverting, is splendidly acted by Googie Withers, Bill Fraser, Susan Hampshire, Clive Francis, Martin Jarvis and John McCallum; having restored respectability to the wilting standards of Chichester, it will certainly come into the West End in the autumn. The Ben Travers farce, which features Robert Morley and George Cole as a pair of well-matured and firmly married businessmen, is a briskly constructed item from what might be called its author's middle period (the late 'thirties): its comic devices struck me as being essentially funnier and more durable than those of the earlier Plunder, and if it is not quite so uncompromisingly frank as the later The Bed Before Yesterday, its blithely farcical treatment of such matters as blackmail, promiscuity and putative incest has an endearing audacity.
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