"Purlie" is no longer a musical that has enough social relevance to overcome its shaky construction and slender narrative, but the Geld-Udell-Rose tuner, based on Ossie Davis’s play "Purlie Victorious", proved among the kinds of thing the staged-reading-style Encores! concerts are about at their best: the shedding of light on shows whose time to be produced, or re-created in mainstream revival, may have passed—or at least become highly debatable—but made enough of a mark in their time to be worth re-examination by way of limited special event.
The play was intended as a satire on race relations, which requires the stereotypes be delivered with a kind of jump-off-the-cliff gusto that director Sheldon Epps and his cast largely sidestepped; and David Ives’s concert adaptation reduced the already slight story to an abstract. And, in typical Geld-Udell fashion, the score was of what Ken Mandelbaum has dubbed the "chop and drop" variety—numbers with only the flimsiest connection to narrative are wedged in at moments that do little to heighten character or theme or advance the tale.
But these the songs for this 1970s musical are gospel, R&B and soul, and—as almost always, bewilderingly to those of us who revere structural niceties of craft—that kind of thing, performed expertly is often sufficient to win over and even wow an audience that’s content if the singers know how to wail. (Which explains the success of special interest tripe like "Mama, I Want to Sing".) And the surrounding story—about a rootin-tootin "new fangled preacher man" (Blair Underwood) and his loving disciple/girlfriend (Anika Noni Rose) getting the best of the bigoted Ol’ Captain who runs the plantation (John Cullum) proved enough of an excuse to make at least the musical part of the occasion joyous to most of the audience, if not downright infectious.
At the Manhattan Theatre Club, "Moonlight and Magnolias" by Ron Hutchinson offers an interesting, if entirely off-the-wall conceit. In the guise of a behind-the-scenes, what-really-happened showbiz story, it’s actually a near-total sendup, extrapolated from the historical facts that will support it. The premise is, what if one of Hollywood’s most lauded, classiest, most romantic period epics, the civil war era Gone With the Wind, were created by the Three Stooges? Oh, not really the Three Stooges, but David O. Selznick (Douglas Sills) cracking the whip over his creative team of choice, held captive while he feeds them only bananas and peanuts? The team are director Victor Fleming (David Rasche), not quite finished with The Wizard of Oz, and Hollywood’s best rewrite man, Ben Hecht (Matthew Arkin), who has never read Margaret Mitchell’s novel. Fleming thinks it’s just another gig, potboiler trash, and thinks Hecht is a hack. Hecht things the Mitchell story is worse than that: an affront to liberalism that romanticizes slavery and the politics of the south. And he thinks Fleming is a big ol’ roll-the-cameras slut-ho.
The mix of philosophical debate and slapstick is not unamusing, but it’s uneasy, and though the three lead actors, and director Lynne Meadow, have a certain sense of comedy and comic physicality, they’re not organically funny enough to make the conceit truly fly. I hasten to add, they’re not laboring hopelessly either, wheezing and puffing and forcing to a dead house. No, they’re hip enough to understand the game and keep an audience comfortably engaged and amused. But that thin line between a sense of comedy and all out funny separates two entirely different worlds.
On MTC’s Second Stage space, there’s Jeffrey Hatcher’s "A Picasso" is a minor yet mildly bracing little two-hander set in a huge Paris storage vault in 1941. We’re in Nazi-occupied France. Miss Fischer (Jill Eikenberry) is a German interrogator, sent to interrogate Pablo Picasso (Dennis Boutsikaris) in the matter of whether or not any of three drawings in their possession, attributed to him, are indeed authentic. It’s difficult to reveal much more than that without resorting to spoilers (the play isn’t that much of an intrigue, but when all you have is two people exchanging dialogue, it’s best if the places where the dialogue heads are not robbed of whatever capacity to surprise they may have); but I will say this much. It is very important to Miss Fischer that at least one of the drawings be deemed authentic. Hence the singular article of the title. All she needs is a Picasso.
Essentially, the play is a game of cat and mouse in which the two take turns at being the dominant animal. Miss Fischer is a wily interrogator, Picasso is an unabashedly manipulative subject, and though the dance is a little over-long, and contains a few confessional moments for which you must suspend disbelief, it’s fun (I think it means to be controversial or at least provocative, but no, and fun is not so bad) and, as several of Mr. Hatcher’s plays do, it finishes with the impact of a really well-wrought short story—which, in a way, it is, delivering a twist worthy of John Collier, Roald Dahl or Harlan Ellison.
With actors the caliber of Boutsikaris and Eikenberry one can’t go far wrong, and director John Tillinger has the sense to guide them without getting in the way. And it’s all on a nicely atmospheric set by Allen Moyer.
At Theatre Three, United Stages is presenting "Murder in the First", Dan Gordon’s stage adaptation of his own film script, in which a public defender (John Stanisci) gets behind a man presented to him as the archetypal hopeless client (Gene Silvers) and in spite of all odds, advice and risk to his career, decides to go the distance. Yes, Henry Davidson argues, client Henry Moore did indeed kill his fellow inmate, but only because he had been so abused and neglected after three years in dark, solitary confinement, with no light and only 30 minutes of outdoor exercise per year, that upon his release he was a disoriented, ticking time bomb. The prison is Alcatraz. The year is 1940.
I saw the film quite by coincidence on cable several months ago, when I turned on the tube for company while straightening up my apartment. I’m glad I did—decent flick—but I wish, in a way, I hadn’t, because the stage production begs for comparison. And if you have the basis, you make them.
And for me, "Murder in the First" felt diminished by incomplete characterizations from a cast that was variously ill-equipped to deliver fully fleshed performances (Mr. Stanisci among them), or wholly equipped yet under-directed by Michael Parva (Mr. Silvers among those).
Various internet postings and a few emails sent my way seem to indicate nonetheless that audiences are responding favorably and viscerally to the production—but I think that’s more indicative of the material’s ability to tap into our universal desire for justice and free-thinking (in the manner of other great agit-prop trial dramas such as "Judgment at Nuremberg", "The Andersonville Trial", "Inherit the Wind" etc.) than any true accomplishment of the only-competent production itself.
Finally, at Second Stage, there’s "Privilege" by Paul Weitz. Set in the mid-80s, at the height of the junk-bond scandals, the play is about two boys who are brothers—16-year-old Porter (Harry Zittel) and 12-year-old Charlie (Conor Donovan)—and also children of privilege. As the song goes, dad (Bob Saget) is rich and Mom (Carolyn McCormick) is good-lookin’…but then dad gets in trouble with the law. He claims innocence of the charges, and the boys believe him, but we in the audience sortakinda know better. And when the government puts a freeze on his assets while they investigate allegations of insider trading, the boys have to adjust to a whole different standard of living—and thinking about living.
It’s an interesting idea, and generally a well-acted comedy-drama under the direction of Peter Askin (Florencia Lozano as the pragmatic but sympathetic family house servant is also delightful), but there’s a vaguely artificial sitcom gloss to the dialogue and—speaking at least for myself and my companion of the evening—structure wise, we were ahead of it, nearly every step of the way. Mr. Weitz’s writing is wholly professional, but facile and a little neat…and maybe that’s the thing that most works against a play in which we are meant to believe that the quality of neatness has been confiscated…