Theatre
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (Richard Rodgers, Broadway) London Suite (Union Square, New York) Death Defying Acts (Variety Arts, New York)
Trans-Atlantic dreams
Sheridan Morley
Unlike the West End, where it was abandoned years ago, the Broadway the- atre still clings to the notion of 'the season': it ends, abruptly, in June with the annual Tony-award stocktaking. Those shows pre- viously thought shaky which can muster enough prizes sometimes stagger on through the summer; otherwise New York is left to the tourists and Cats and Phantom and Les Mis, while nobody even thinks of opening anything new until late October.
And sometimes not even then: as with the Oscars, the theory has developed that award judges now suffer creeping amnesia, so that likely winners are always those pro- ductions which open just as the nomina- tions are closing somewhere around April. A show which opens six months earlier is reckoned to have a much tougher time staying in contention.
Nevertheless, it does unusually look as though there will be a few first nights along the Great White Way this Fall: Julie Andrews making a long-awaited return to Broadway in lector/Victoria, a so-so movie which she made some 12 years ago, while Tommy Tune is back with Buskers which real late-night movie addicts may recall as St Martin's Lane, the film that in 1939 had the rare distinction of starring the leg- endary stage director Tyrone Guthrie alongside Vivien Leigh and Charles Laughton.
All of which would suggest that the Broadway musical is still deeply hooked on old talking pictures, despite the recent dis- asters of The Red Shoes and Nick and Nora and countless other hamfisted attempts to make over movies and capitalise on their perceived ready-made audience appeal, a theory which takes no note at all of the fact that some of the greatest movie musicals ever (Gigi and High Society to name but two) have been catastrophic on stage.
But then on the other hand there's Sun- set Boulevard, which this year had the dis- tinction, unique in Broadway history, of winning in several categories not just on merit but also by default, since there were literally no other contestants. As a result, the Tonys themselves were somewhat anti- climatic: there was Sunset Boulevard, and then there was Sunset Boulevard, and then we had Sunset Boulevard.
One or two other prize-winners did sur- face in the best-revival category however, notably Matthew Broderick who is starring in a wondrous revival of Frank Loesser's How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. This too is a 30-year old movie, but at least it was a stage show before that, and hitherto always played by the curiously charmless Bobby Morse. Broderick by con- toast brings to one of the greatest of all post-war Broadway scores the coltish charm of a young Ray Bolger, and the result is a briskly funny satire on the Amer- ican big-business ethic with a series of Loesser numbers some greater even than his Guys & Dolls.
As usual however, the most interesting New York theatre is off-Broadway and therefore, ludicriously enough, not in Tony contention. There is, it would seem, a rebirth of the one-act play: down at Union Square, Neil Simon has a successor to his Plaza Suite and California Suite in London Suite, four short plays all set in the same hotel bedroom, one looking very much as though it belongs to the Connaught.
One of these plays is a fragile bedroom farce, one a kind of revenge thriller, one a rather touching account of a mother and daughter in search of love; but by far the best takes up two of the characters from California Suite, the gay actor and bigger- star wife as played in the film version by Michael Caine and Maggie Smith. Now however, as brought back by Paxton White- head and Carole Shelley, they are 20 years older and he is dying; Simon is always at his best when writing already familiar char- acters, and this one is just wonderful.
But the others are possibly too fragile for an Atlantic crossing, though I'd be sur- prised if we didn't see somewhere like Hampstead Death Defying Acts, another evening of short plays but these by David Mamet, Woody Allen and Elaine May as directed by Michael Blakemore. The Mamet turns out to be a Pinteresque duo- logue by sinister men in suits, and the Woody Allen is another characteristic study of Central Park neurosis: but Elaine May's comedy about, implausibly, a sui- cide-guidance telephone service is both hilarious and very touching. Shorter can sometimes mean better.
Previous page
