Jerry Herman, who built his reputation as the composer and lyricist of Hello, Dolly and Mame, argues that in the theater, “the strongest single force you could have is a larger-than-life lady on the stage.” That chivalric premise is supported by two current Broadway delights, Bernadette Peters’ act-long vocal solo in Song & Dance and Lily Tomlin’s one-woman show, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. The same nothing-like-a-dame thinking underlies Jerry’s Girls, a retrospective pastiche of Herman’s work, featuring Dorothy Loudon, Leslie Uggams, Chita Rivera and eight chorines, which opened on Broadway last week. It also applies to two compelling new performances in plays, both by old hands: Rosemary Harris as a coy, manipulative grande dame of the stage in Noel Coward’s astringent farce Hay Fever and Uta Hagen, the original Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, as a practical and amoral urchin turned madam in George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession.
Herman’s dictum proves regrettably true as an assessment of his own work. Although Girls offers raucous pleasures, they derive more from the skill and exuberance of the leading ladies, all past Tony winners, than from the melodies and lyrics, which are burdened with cliche-ridden predictability, relentless optimism and, worst, a prevailing sameness. Uggams’ torchy numbers seem too much alike because the songs do. Loudon’s comedy, almost all based on self-mockery for being plump and presumably over the hill, eventually becomes distasteful. Rivera, who could dance the telephone book entertainingly, more or less does just that in some tired, ordinary routines. For those who like Las Vegas spectaculars or TV variety hours, Girls may prove entertaining. But when compared with the 1977 Side by Side by Sondheim, a revue by another Broadway stalwart, Stephen Sondheim, it lacks texture, narrative and perception of human nature.
In Hay Fever, by contrast, there are depths beneath the glittering surface. Harris and a gifted supporting cast manage to suggest most of them despite Director Brian Murray’s heavy-handed style, which emphasizes pandemonium rather than character study. The slender plot depicts the artsy Bliss family at play in their country home. Their main amusement is the calculated tormenting of four hapless weekend visitors, each of whom winds up enmeshed by some member of the family in a less than blissful, indeed heartlessly feigned, romance.
Harris plays the phoniest, deadliest and most seductive figure in the clan, fluttering her eyelashes and flinging her hands up in merry confusion every time she gives another derailing shove to the rules of common courtesy. Her monstrous misbehavior is accompanied by an elfin, confessional grin calculated to excuse a multitude of sins. As her novelist husband, Roy Dotrice uses dottiness as an excuse for complete indifference to those around him: at teatime he fills and sips from cup after cup until he is surrounded by soiled china, then passes tea and edibles to each member of his family while every guest sits forlorn. Of the outsiders, sad-faced Charles Kimbrough and crack- voiced Deborah Rush are hilarious as strangers shriveling in discomfort at the effort of making small talk with the loony Blisses and each other.
Charm, ingratiation and candid confession of past sins are also part of the persuasive skills of the title character in Mrs. Warren’s Profession, a woman who has everything she wants except the respect of her newly adult daughter. Born in poverty but blessed with good looks and a raffish appeal, Kitty Warren went into prostitution and then brothel keeping. She proved to have a genius for recruiting talent and earning a steep profit, and grew to love the challenges of being a businesswoman. The role, the best Shaw ever wrote for a woman, centers on the scenes in which the mother tries to explain her life to a daughter who has always been sheltered from it, away at school. It brilliantly balances two themes: Warren’s social-reformist contention that she was forced onto the streets by lack of alternatives; and her blunt admission that she never felt any shame or yearning for “respectable” work.
Hagen, 66, an actress’s actress and a renowned teacher who is too infrequently seen in major productions, is really too old for the vibrantly sensual, fiftyish Warren. But she handles the confrontations stunningly. In the most striking moment, she wheels on her daughter, drops her posh accent and snarls a question in the gutter Cockney she spoke as a girl, revealing a whole lost life in the intonation of a few syllables. Outsize in energy but subtle in her thinking, Hagen remains among the strongest single forces on the American stage.
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