By Scott Baldinger
As a funny sage once remarked, eighty percent of success is just showing up. In the case of the theater, this comment could be amended to say that, while showing up certainly helps, half of success is picking the right material for the moment. In the last week alone, Shakespeare & Company and Barrington Stage Company proved their cagey sophistication about this matter, the former with a intimate Tom Stoppard play, Heroes, directed by Kevin G. Coleman, and the latter with a large-scale revival of the 1944 musical On The Town, the first created by those masters of the urbane: composer Leonard Bernstein and lyricists/book writers Betty Comden and Adolph Green. Both productions are smash successes, hilarious, thrilling to watch, and deeply satisfying mountings of tough-to-tackle works, and although very different in form, have more than a little in common in terms of their underlying subject: the effects of war or, even more deeply, the prospect of imminent mortality itself. To audiences today, On The Town, about three World War II soldiers on a 24-hour leave in New York City, might seem like just a very clever and successful version of a conventional musical, which, both at the time of its debut in 1944 and even today, it is not. Stoppard’s Heroes, a completely Stoppard-esque translation of a French play by Gerald Sibleyras, concerns three World War I veterans whiling away the remainder of their days in a rural rest home in 1959. With hideous wars on multiple fronts having just ended or in the (endless) process of winding down, the subject of war's effects on the psyche is far from irrelevant today, even if the dramatic treatment of the subject requires these rather sideways approaches to make it palatable to audiences.
That Stoppard happens to deal with the core reality at hand in this manner (a current throughout his oeuvre) is a key to his mordant charm as a playwright. From Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Real Inspector Hound, and Travesties, to the current Heroes, performed to touching, fully embodied perfection by Jonathan Epstein, Malcolm Ingram, and Robert Lohbauer, Stoppard’s dazzling lingual acrobatics are always mitigated (and made ironically funny) by the thing poet Phillip Larkin was referring to when he wrote, “Most things may never happen, this one will." The underlying daze behind the ultracivilized, super entertaining banter is what makes the words and the plays themselves so funny, and these actors have that down beautifully, as they muse aimlessly about just about everything but. In the wonderful musical On The Town, directed this time around by John Rando, the preoccupation is the opposite — life, in the form of the oversexed vitality of New York City during WWII. But even here, reality (getting back on a boat that will lead them to a very possible end) is the unspoken load-bearing structure of the work. (This is one of the elements that make ballads such as “Some Other Time" so moving.) Whenever one watches a successful version of the show, such as this 28-plus cast Barrington Stage production certainly is, one can only wonder how these guys did it. And not just the sailors about to return to war — but its creators, who to this writer at least, were as much a highlight of the Greatest Generation as any fighter.
“They don’t make 'em like that anymore" was the kind of remark overheard after a performance at the Boyd-Quinson Mainstage in Pittsfield this weekend. The fact, I kept thinking, is that they hardly ever made them like that back then either. What Bernstein, Comden and Green, and choreographer Jerome Robbins accomplished was something new and extraordinary. While Richard Rodgers’ and Oscar Hammerstein’s reaction to the war was to become seriously wholesome, organic, and all-American (Oklahoma, 1943, with ballets by Agnes De Mille), Bernstein, Robbins, and Comden and Green decided to bring reality in by embracing the genuine sexual preoccupations of the dwellers of the city they both lived in and loved, New York, and reflect it with a whole new form of modern dance, comic banter, and almost unbearably exciting music, part jazz pastiche/part Stravinsky, but all brilliant. On The Town was a spicy, jivey, irreverent dose of reality to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s exalted patriotic escapism, but just as important an artistic innovation for the stage. The Barrington Stage production, their most expensive to date, captures that energy, most particularly in the dances choreographed by Joshua Bergasse, who has jettisoned the gimmicky lasciviousness of his work on the television series Smash for something truly expressive of that time and place. And unlike other productions I’ve seen of this show, it's the dancing of the three soldiers themselves, magnificently executed by Clyde Alves, Jay Armstrong Johnson, and Tony Yazbeck, that takes proper central place. Each one of their numbers leaves the audience almost breathless with excitement. Which is exactly as it should be; after all, they're playing the characters who have the most to lose when the 24 hours of fun and games come to an end. Heroes Now - September 1 Shakespeare & Company’s Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre, Lenox. On The TownNow - July 13 Barrington Stage Company's Boyd-Quinson Mainstage, Pittsfield.
