Jack L. B. Gohn - Page 10

The Last 5 Years is a treasure of the American musical theater, the quintessential chamber musical. Jason Robert Brown's mini-masterpiece boasts but two performers, a small musical ensemble, a challenging but moving score, and a simple but powerful structure designed to maintain dramatic equilibrium and balance between the characters from start to finish. Not surprisingly, it is often produced (34 productions announced this year - not to mention a film version).

The vulnerability of Witt's recreated Illyria makes the joy in the show shine all the brighter. There will never be a definitive production of any Shakespeare play, but this is one of the truly special ones.

So, after trashing Mormonism, and by implication most other faiths (since most have foundational myths about as likely-sounding as the LDS ones, and taboos that are no less but also no more sensible than those which restrain the Mormons), there are two natural places to end up. One would be in some kind of existential humanism, the other in some kind of existential despair. But the creators don't want to go either place. So they have to fudge it, with a huge spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down and a philosophically confused but dramatically permissible twist. There is some kind of reason for the whole cast and the audience to be exultant at the end.

Something happened involving those two and Mrs. K's deceased husband. We may think we know, but I suspect most guesses will be wrong. We know the play is going in a dark direction, but we may well not guess how dark.

There's nonsense delivered in true Cantabridgian style, i.e. with insane argumentative rigor. There are dazzling scantily-clad showgirls and showboys. There are songs that are wonderfully self-referential and songs that push the limits of taste. And there are lots of tag-lines and tropes for Monty Python fans - and who isn't? Hard to quarrel with an assemblage of attractions like that.

You may know it as Here's Love. You may know it as It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas. (The show has been produced under both titles.) Currently the 1963 Meredith Willson musical based on the film Miracle on 34th Street goes under the name of its source material, the 1947 classic movie, and Toby's Columbia is presenting it in a very impressive revival.

This is probably the preeminent jukebox musical, beautifully presented. And if you can't visit the New York mother ship, this will do nicely.

The point of von Mahlsdorf was that she survived, and in doing so permitted her collection and the world it evoked to survive as well. As she tells the audience at the end: "You must save everything and you must show it as is. It is a record of life." Everything, in this case, including accounts that cannot entirely be reconciled with the documentary history. It is all, in some sense, true, all, in some sense, a record of life.

I cannot honestly report I saw much profundity in what was said here. We learn next to nothing about Oscar's need to walk out the door, where it came from, why he yields to it so willingly and thoughtlessly, why he is so stubbornly resistant to his family's promptings to man up, stick around, and step up to the plate on occasion.

This is poetry, poetry for the mind to sink into and be overwhelmed. To paraphrase Mae West, goodness has nothing to do with it. Nor does badness. It comes from some amoral place in Wilde's psyche and appeals to that place in ours.

I am not sure what Shepard is doing in Shepherdstown. The Contemporary American Theater Festival held there is dedicated to performing 'new American plays.' There's nothing new to me about Sam Shepard's play Heartless; it seems distinctly old hat. I went back to a review I wrote of one of his plays for my college newspaper in 1970, and a number of the things I wrote about that play (The Holy Ghostly) could be said about Heartless. I commented how characters migrate into each other, how they become composites of various characters, how there is no predictable logic to their interactions, and how the drama loses the sense of being story-telling about distinct persons. I compared what Shepard did to abstract painting. And, on the evidence of Heartless, it's still true.

'Every good story's a war story,' says a character in Scott and Hem in the Garden of Allah, premiering at the Contemporary American Theater Festival. That certainly seems to be playwright Mark St. Germain's approach in imagining a 1937 encounter between writers F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.

All of them, then, have one foot in Muslim culture and one in the Western culture Muslim terrorists affect to despise, and that is part of the point author Jon Kern is making about them. Whether they like it or not, they are dual citizens. What enrages them is also a part of them, and it means that in waging war on Americans, they are also waging war on themselves.

H2O will leave you dealing not only with your feelings about the characters, but also reconsidering art, life, and The Meaning of It All.

If George Bernard Shaw had taken it into his head to write a sequel to Arthur Miller's The Crucible, with an assist from William Shakespeare, he might have come up with something much like Liz Duffy Adams's A Discourse on the Wonders of the Invisible World.

In The Heights is not standard Maryland dinner theater fare, concerning, as it does, the residents of a largely Dominican and Puerto Rican barrio at the northern end (and highest part) of Manhattan. The lyrics are often in Spanish, often delivered in rap monologue, and largely assume a kind of cultural literacy not common among Maryland dinner theater patrons: knowing, for instance, what it means for someone to say she comes from La Vibora or from Vega Alta (things I had to look up after the fact) or what kind of comestible a mamey might be (ditto), or what it means to yell 'Wepa!' (ditto again). This is probably a good thing; all of us should constantly be looking to broaden our horizons, especially in our theatergoing. At the same time, as much help as possible should be extended to make the proceedings as comprehensible as possible for us Anglo newbies. And sadly, barring a half-page insert of explanation in the program, that kind of help was in scant evidence in Toby's new production.

This was an undergraduate audience, clearly, and they were rapt and engaged. Yet it was a knowing engagement. By that, I do not mean that the kids came in knowing the tunes and humming along, in fact it was obvious from the laughs and the gasps when funny or shocking things occurred that a large part of the contingent on hand had no idea what was coming. What I mean is, the viewers got it, they understood it on both intellectual and instinctive levels, agreed and approved; the raucous curtain calls demonstrated this, and the audience's identification with what they were seeing.

A first-rate production of a second-rate show. The astonishing cast delivers song after song that sails out of the park.

We have not only laughed our heads off, not only witnessed the fulfillment, however temporary, of transgressive bachelor-in-paradise fantasies, but also been treated to something rarer: a visual reimmersion in the colors and sights of the most carefree part of an era: the coordinated uniforms and flight bags, the electric blue paint on the wall, the miniskirts, the smoking-jacket-and-ascot, not to mention the final payoff: a curtain-call that will remind viewers of the way singing groups used to present on television before rock videos and MTV.

The star in question is the in her own words "deliciously disgraceful" actress and celebrity Tallulah Bankhead, channeled, in a very interesting bit of casting, by Stefanie Powers. Stefanie Powers was actually herself part of the event being dramatized, having co-starred with Bankhead in the very movie in question, and given that Powers has of late distinguished herself as another faded and dotty star, namely Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, she is an utter natural for the role.