Intermission Talk
“Newsies” Report That
“The Best Man” Causes
“Death of a Salesman”
by Tony Vellela
Arthur Miller once told me that his favorite portrayal of Willy Loman was by Hoffman – not the current Philip Seymour H., but Dustin H., in the Volker Schlondorff-helmed 1985 made-for-TV movie. I’d bet, were he still alive to see the revival now at the Barrymore, that he’d expand his opinion to include both. And while the reasons may be different, I agree.
For Arthur, the physical as well as the dramatic came into his assessment – he felt that Dustin H. resembled his own father Isidore Miller, the strongest model for Willy, making his unimposing stature one of his constant obstacles. The convention of casting a portly man came from the original Broadway actor, Lee J. Cobb, who was chosen for talent, not girth. In the 1951 film, Frederic March was less stocky.
Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Andrew Garfield (rear)
For me, it’s based on the Life of the salesman as much as his Death. To grasp where he is when we meet him in the late 1940s, struggling with his samples cases as he wearily approaches the humble two-story clapboard house now crowded in by new high-rises, we need to know how he got that way. It is in the flashback scenes with his wife Linda [a circumspect Linda Emond] and sons Happy [a naturally charismatic Finn Whitlock] and Biff [an angular, compellingly bitter Andrew Garfield] that Willy comes ‘alive.’ In the pivotal Boston hotel scenes, Stephanie Janssen’s impeccably played lascivious department store buyer brings out in Willy his fantasy image of himself as an ever-young man who lives like he’s in control of his destiny. These back-story vignettes show us how the man’s optimism brims and sparks, igniting an unbridled hopefulness in his sons. This misplaced confidence in the value of personality over talent, charm over learning, smiles over skills, leads to their eventual downfall, and to his own. And Philip Seymour H. delivers that all-important contrast. We see that who he is now is a product of who he was then.
And the current production of this acclaimed, Pulitzer Prize-winning play is based on what it was back then, when director Elia Kazan and set designer Jo Mielziner sharpened our perceptions of this tragedy by minimizing its environment. Director Mike Nichols has recreated that original skeletal Mielziner set, and he’s also sensitively invoked Alex
North’s original music. North also composed underscores for the film version, and for other Miller film transfers “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “The Rose Tattoo,” as well as “The Misfits,” written for the screen. Nichols seems to have both honored and drawn from Kazan’s directorial approach. [Despite their long-running split over politics, Kazan told me that the rift did not reduce how much he admired Miller’s epic drama.] What is unfolding eight times a week is a priceless opportunity to soak in not just a re-creation, but a living, talking, clashing, loving and dying epic of a salesman. And for those who have taken issue with Philip Seymour H.’s age [he’s 44 – Arthur makes him sixty in his stage directions], first, the man’s exhaustion exudes from every pore of PSH’s beaten-down frame; second, Cobb was only 38 when the play premiered, and third, it makes oh-so-clear that a dream can die at any age.
The ultimate American dream goes like this: a smart, handsome, clever and personable young man gives up personal goals to serve his country, which rewards him with a desk in the Oval Office. Gore Vidal’s “The Best Man,” more than even in its last revival in 2000, sings about this iconic myth beautifully, with all its discordant strains and absent harmony.
The time is 1960, the place: a large hotel in Philadelphia, during the final days of the national convention to choose the Presidential candidate for one of the two major parties [we’re not told which, but Vidal hints that it resembles the Democrats]. Fifty-plus years ago, before almost every adult in the country was wired for sound half a dozen ways, the pace was slower, information had to be disseminated through the three television networks and the major newspapers, and any attempt to convey dirt on an opponent meant printing up thousands of copies of the non-encomium and getting them hand-delivered to those with the power to decide. Second-thoughts were possible.
James Earl Jones
Yet, in its time, “The Best Man” gave us a potential candidate [Senator Joe Cantwell] ruthless beyond quantifying, a master of Mad Men phrase-making, self-assured that his blind ambition entitles him to prevail and despite being virtually devoid of compassion or empathy, basking in the support of a large segment of the masses. It also gave us his opponent [Secretary of State William Russell], a man wary of gamesmanship as a method of selecting a possible president, learned in world affairs as well as literature and philosophy, a statesman not well-suited to politics, and – a recognized philanderer.
Eric McCormack’s Cantwell oozes disingenuous platitudes effortlessly, one of this actor’s strong suits. John Larroquette, as Russell, keeps his familiar bravura neatly in cheque, a performance more restrained than expected. Their polar opposite wives show who they were at the beginning of their public life more than who they’ve become. Mrs. Mabel Cantwell [a Playboy perfect Kerry Butler] purrs and gurgles, a Southern carnal kitten who seems as dim about the world as most of her husband’s constituency, and as smart as his calculating staff. It is Candace Bergen, however, as Mrs. Alice Russell, who delivers the break-out performance of the play.
Angela Lansbury (L) and Candace Bergen (R)
More familiar to audiences of a certain age as TV’s “Murphy Brown,” Bergen shows, in the most positive sense, how ‘more is less’ acting gives a character room to breathe. Mrs. Russell has endured years of neglect and the artifice of a happy political marriage of shared interests, and has still held onto the image, the memory of the man whose idealism and goodness won her heart, and gave her a place for her wry sense of humor. It is an utterly believable characterization.
Those less enthralled with the machinations of high-stakes presidential king-making will find relief in the two most energized performances, ironically both from actors who’ve grown comfortably into their eighties, Angela Lansbury and James Earl Jones. As a Southern party operative with her dainty hands squarely measuring the pulse of the women’s vote, so pretty in pink, Lansbury pulls focus in the few short scenes she’s in, just the way a polished hostess would, who’s also capable of spiking the tea with hemlock. As the party’s most recent past president, Jones imparts his street-fighter old pol with that bluster and sputter and growl and grin that he does better than anyone – the best man for it, as it were. And the wildly incongruous color-blind casting in this role can be forgiven when it results in our getting another chance to revel in the creation of a genuine theatrical aficionado, who, like Lansbury, has chosen to tread the boards nearly every recent season.
Story lines about politics are not common. They tend to be talky, cryptic or melodramatic, none of which lends themselves to the craft of fashioning three-dimensional characters. “The Best Man” falls guilty of some of this, and this production benefits from having such consummate pros as James Lescene and Jefferson Mays in supporting roles that approach caricature. The best depiction of this world in that time period remains the 1958 Spencer Tracy, John Ford-directed picture “The Last Hurrah,” about the final campaign of an old-school Boston mayor. Still, this production deserves attention, because it makes its central premise so vital. The pious Russell declares to the opportunistic Cantwell ‘…you have no sense of responsibility toward anybody or anything and that is a tragedy in a man and it is a disaster in a president!’ It’s plain talk that we’d all love to hear again in this campaign season.
Okay, so not every eager, enterprising young lad can become a president. But in the new Walt Disney musical “Newsies,” helmed by Jeff Calhoun, they are definitely Kings. Based on the 1992 film musical of the same name, this family-friendly production gets everything right. [How often have you read that line in this column?] The story springs from the real-life confrontation between newspaper barons William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer – yeah, THAT Pulitzer – and the street urchins who sold papers on the street for a few pennies’ profit per. However, they had to buy their papers first, and if they weren’t sold, the kids had to eat the loss. This saga unfolded in Lower Manhattan during the summer of 1899, and when about 5,000 lads banded together and went on strike, the city went without news, features, editorials, and to some the most egregious consequence, without the comic strips. The impact on circulation revenue, advertising dollars lost and scarred prestige was so devastating, it could not be measured
Jeremy Jordan
And the journey this property took from movie flop to limited-run musical created to be a licensing musical for high schools, to its spectacular transfer from New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse to Broadway mimics the real story’s fantastic saga. When the Disney folks saw the glowing notices the show received, moving it into Manhattan was a no-brainer. One of the reasons the stage musical tops the film is the reworked book by Harvey Fierstein, who has injected a sweet love-interest for the strikers’ leader, Jack Kelly. He’s now enamored with Pulitzer’s daughter, who is determined to ‘strike out’ on her own, as a hard-news reporter instead of a society page sob sister. And Kelly has gained another skill besides the charismatic personality and grit that kick-started the rebellion: he draws [remember ‘Titanic?’]. The Kelly role has handed young Jeremy Jordan another Cinderella storyline. He originated the role at the Paper Mill, was then cast as the macho half of the ‘Bonnie & Clyde’ ill-fated tuner earlier this season when negotiations were purring along for the NJ to NYC transfer, and then, “B & C” closed! He was offered the chance to re-inhabit Jack Kelly, took it, and delivers one of the best young-male musical theatre performances in recent memory. Look for Jordan, the classic triple threat, to emerge in leading revival roles a decade or so down the line, in maybe “Carousel” or ‘Oklahoma!” Kara Lindsay pumps up the role of Jack’s reluctant squeeze, since it’s been drawn not entirely as a three-dimensional young woman – maybe half a dimension shy. And sadly, despite his mega-brain power, she’s been named Katherine, the go-to moniker for every independent girl and woman character for the last seven decades, thanks to its association with la Hepburn. Sometimes they’re called Kate or Katie. Can’t these gals ever be named Natalie, or Susie, Daisy or Anna Mae?
The Newsies
Another reason to celebrate this production is Christopher Gattelli’s choreography, which weds acrobatics to ballet, as if these Dead End Kids spent a summer studying in Moscow at the Bolshoi. Don’t count me among those who have criticized the way Gattelli’s Bowery Boys leap higher and more frequently than a gaggle of gazelles. There’s a kind of youthful majesty in their flight, symbolizing the risk-taking they’ve undertaken to challenge the ‘gravity’ of defying the country’s unelected king-makers. And speaking of kings, Alan Menken [music] and Jack Feldman [lyrics] created one of musical theatre’s greatest show-stoppers, the Act Two rousing opening number “King of New York,” a tune that attaches itself to your unconscious with the same tenacity these newsboys had, and sprawls across the stage of the Nederlander with the same audacity, precision and style seen in “The Waiter’s Gallup,” in Dolly Levi’s Harmonia Gardens.
Afterpieces
Superlatives attached themselves to Judy Garland since before she was Judy. As the pre-teen Frances Ethel Gumm, the littlest of the singing act the Gumm Sisters, she landed in one of the musical shorts Metro cranked out, to run alongside the travelogues, newsreels, B movies, coming attractions and cartoons in the thirties. What followed was one of entertainment’s greatest explosions of talent, determination, devotion to craft and personal heartbreak.
Tracie Bennett
In Peter Quilter’s “End of the Rainbow,” directed with a hands-off approach by Terry Johnson, Britain’s Tracie Bennett captures a few of the mega-star’s final days and nights, during her bumpy stay in London’s Ritz Hotel, in December, 1968. It was meant to launch yet another vaunted comeback, to replenish her empty coffers, drained by others’ bad management and her own good intentions, all fueled by high octane alcohol. The script allows fans and insiders plenty of opportunities to nod in recognition of obscure show biz references. But this is not a lightweight movie-of-the-week version of someone’s tragic final days. Real blood and guts are spilled all over the unpaid-for hotel suite’s rugs. And you’ll feel like some of them are yours.
While any random group of people may have different entries on their lists of superstars that outrank Judy, it’s a good bet that Jesus Christ would make everyone’s roster. The lists of their choices for this season’s most compelling revivals, however, is not likely to include the current one of Andrew Lloyd Webber & Tim Rice’s familiar faux rock opera “Jesus Christ Superstar.” Encased in a moving set of steel bleachers and dominated by a streaming news ticker running across the back wall of the stage, the Des McAnuff-directed attempt at spectacle unspools like a well-worn red carpet – smoothly, but with no interest in where it’s going or how it will end. We know.
Josh Young
One redeeming element worth mentioning, though, is the performance of Stratford Festival regular Josh Young, who originated the role of Judas when this package premiered there last year, and moved to La Jolla. It’s his Broadway debut, and maybe nothing else will bring him to Broadway. If something does, catch him. We don’t know how Josh’s career will end, but it’s a sure bet it will be an exciting one.
On Book
If you don’t get to see the revival of Gore Vidal’s “The Best Man,” you could do worse than reading his play script, either in various collections, or the Dramatists Play Service version. The wit and cleverness of the writing comes off the page with great impact. You can let your mind mimic the voices of the current cast, or anyone else you feel fits the character descriptions. You will laugh out loud.
And Mike Nichols’ homage to the magnificent director Elia Kazan’s original visions for Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” are worth digging into, if you’re a budding director, playwright, actor or theatre lover. That project is only one of dozens Kazan wrote about in his invaluable guidebook to his remarkable career, “Kazan on Directing,” from Vintage Books, with a foreword by John Lahr and a preface by Martin Scorsese.
While “End of the Road” catches Judy at the end of her Russian roulette life and times, there was one ‘constant’ that began when she was barely out of her teens – a lifelong romantic, sexual and passionate affair with the master songwriter Johnny Mercer. He wrote the lyrics for the Garland starrer “The Harvey Girls,” and even though they were both married when it began, and others broke it up shortly after it erupted, they both seemed wedded to the romance and sensitivity of the other’s nature. Mercer wrote his classic “I Remember You” to and for her. To take in the full measure of Mercer’s genius, a comprehensive and fascinating compilation from Knopf, “The Complete Lyrics of Johnny Mercer,” gently pulls you through decades of musical memories – how one man’s skill with words can chart the moods and emotions of generations.
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TONY VELLELA wrote and produced the PBS documentary series about theatre, “Character Studies.” His Best Play Award-winning “Admissions,” at the NYC International Fringe Festival, is published by Playscripts. He’s written several other plays, musicals and revues, as well as three books, numerous magazine and newspaper articles, and the CableACE Award-winning documentary for Lifetime Television “The Test of Time.” He also conducts small classes in understanding plays and musicals from the inside, as well as private coaching sessions – info from tvellela@nyc.rr.com.