“Roza,” which opened last week at the Royale Theatre, is a perfectly harmless and pleasantly diverting musical based on Romain Gary’s 1975 novel “La Vie Devant Soi.” It has songs by Gilbert Bécaud and Julian More and is directed by Harold Prince. It passes the time admirably, and if it leaves you without a single memorable image or impression it is certainly no worse than some of the other musicals that become hits on Broadway—“Annie,” say, or “Cats,” or “La Cage aux Folles.” What “Roza” has going against it is a book (by Mr. More) that consists mostly of song cues (or gaps where song cues should be) and never gets much beyond exposition, inadequate choreography (by Patricia Birch), and a fiercely tilting set (by Alexander Okun), one corner of which keeps embarrassing everybody by moving up and down. What the show has going for it is a star turn by Georgia Brown as Mme. Roza, an aging former prostitute and concentration-camp survivor who takes care of the children of other women who ply the trade.
In the early sixties, of course, Miss Brown created the role of Nancy in Lionel Bart’s “Oliver!,” and for my money she’s the only Nancy there will ever be, as I’m sure she must be for anyone who saw her or grew up on that particular recording of the show. As Roza she is Nancy and Fagin rolled into one—a Jewish Mrs. Sikes, forty years on. It’s a bravura performance, raucous, bawdy, and irresistible, utterly unlike the character played by Simone Signoret in the 1977 film version of Gary’s novel. Where Signoret’s Roza was a real person—a pathetic wreck of a woman, failing in mind and body, who couldn’t remember from one minute to the next whether she was trying to raise a fourteen-year-old boy or waiting for the Gestapo—the character that Miss Brown has been asked to play is essentially a stage Jew, all gestures and speech mannerisms, with a heart full of gruff Broadway love. That she manages to make this figure halfway believable is a tour de force.
And Roza is not the only implausible character in the show: there’s also Lola (Bob Gunton), a Brazilian prizefighter-turned-transvestite, working the Bois de Boulogne in order to pay for a sex-change operation; a couple of happy hookers (Yamil Borges and Michelle Mais); and Dr. Katz (Jerry Matz), an Orthodox Jew who has been caught performing illegal abortions. Then, there are all the children—five of them, not including the teen-agers that Young Momo and Young Moise grow into (Alex Paez and Joey McKneely, respectively). There are two blacks, one Oriental, an Arab, and a Jew: they’re not required to do much except stand around and evoke their ethnic stereotypes, but then “Roza” is only “Oliver!” for the “Fame” generation—the generation you don’t have to do much to impress. It’s one of those shows that seem to come into existence more because certain things can suddenly be mentioned on the musical stage—male prostitution, say, or the death camps—than because anyone has anything to say about them.
A woman who runs a boarding house for the children of prostitutes sounds like a great premise for a musical. Actually, one of the problems with “Roza” is that its premise is self-fulfilling: as presented by the show’s creators, there’s nothing interesting about the central figure beyond the idea that she could be the subject of a musical. Once the situation in “Roza” has been established and everybody has been introduced, there’s really nowhere for the show to go, nothing to happen except for Roza to die. This she takes an unconscionably long time doing. She falls, comes to, is stricken again, revives, and has another fit. Most of the production numbers are constructed around these various collapses and resuscitations, and the rest are either derivative or, like everything else, buried in the morass of the set.
That set is perhaps “Roza”’s greatest liability, after the book: it fails utterly to evoke the feeling of a Paris tenement or any tenement anywhere, for that matter. With its wide-open spaces and confusing system of balconies and fire escapes, it seems to liken French urban blight to life in a Tennessee Williams play; by requiring actors to step down in order to ascend to Mme Roza’s upstairs apartment, it leaves the audience at a loss as to where anybody lives in relation to anybody else. Also, it doesn’t leave the actors much room to move around in, which means that there isn’t much dancing. And “derivative” is a polite word for what the songs are: there’s an “I Feel Pretty” number (“Get the Lady Dressed”) and a “Good Night Ladies” number (where the contrapuntal gossiping of women degenerates into gibberish), and when a trio of street musicians suddenly appears out of nowhere and Georgia Brown asks them to play, you half expect her to launch into a chorus of “It’s a Fine Life.”
Miss Brown’s presence is both an asset and a problem. Because she was Nancy, you can’t help comparing “Roza” with “Oliver!”—and with a whole host of other, better musicals, with or without books and children. For, of course, there have been “bookless” musicals before. “The Pajama Game” has a perfectly awful book. So does “Oliver!,” for that matter. And the English version of the “Les Misérables” libretto is a work of trailblazing vacuity: not only can you predict each rhyme as it comes up—you can predict the whole next line. But “The Pajama Game” had “Steam Heat” going for it, and “Hey There.” “Oliver!” had all those lively, show-stopping numbers, and “Les Misérables” has those great Royal Shakespeare Company production values—the choral anthems and shafts of light. The trouble is that in the twenty-five years or so since “Oliver!” a new sort of bookless musical has grown up, in which, instead of clever songs or production numbers to make up for a clumsy script, a highly visual, non-literal style of staging renders words superfluous. The dialogue in Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park with George” or Michael Bennett’s “Dreamgirls” may cause one to blush, but it doesn’t matter: the book resides in what you see moving around onstage—in the pasteboard figures that come up out of the floor or in the whirling scaffolding.
The advent of a more sophisticated and innately theatrical style of musical is part of what makes “Roza” seem such a throwback. But the real problem with the show is its hypocrisy. “Roza” stands in the same relation to “Oliver!” that “Les Misérables” does. Where “Oliver!” romanticized poverty, “Les Misérables” romanticizes the idea of not romanticizing poverty: it sends us out feeling that we’ve done our bit for the wretched of the earth by weeping for the boys on the barricades. “Roza” isn’t as insidious as “Les Misérables,” but it does pride itself on not romanticizing the figure of the dispossessed child—although that’s precisely what it does do. The novel the musical is based on—like the movie it inspired—was a distressingly dark and grim study of the relationship between Roza and a particular child, a severely withdrawn and unhappy fourteen-year-old boy. I’m not convinced that it would be impossible to create a “dark” musical based on Gary’s novel—something along the lines of “Pal Joey” or “Cabaret” (which Mr. Prince is reviving later this month). But by musical-comedy-izing everything in “Le Vie Devant Soi,” by making what is individual and specific formulaic and generic, Mr. Prince and his collaborators have removed from the story of Roza anything that might be of interest to us, and left us with only a memory of sweet Georgia Brown.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, October 12, 1987