Oscar Wilde, John Lahr reminds us, thought that “Salomé” was his best play: he thought it enlarged the artistic horizon of its time. If you want your artistic horizon enlarged—or, at any rate, altered—you should head over to the Circle in the Square, where Ted Mann seems to be having a little fun with his board members by reviving this camp classic in a production that stars Al Pacino as Herod, Suzanne Bertish as Herodias, and, in the title role, Sheryl Lee, the young lady whose performance as the murdered teenager Laura Palmer, in “Twin Peaks,” caused such a calm. At least, one assumes that Ted Mann is being jocund. The production, which has been conceived as a benefit for Circle in the Square—it’s running in rotation with “Chinese Coffee,” a new two-character play by Ira Lewis, which features Mr. Pacino and Charles Cioffi—is good fun up to a point, as would be any production of “Salomé” that begins with the Cappadocian blowing the Second Soldier and ends with Salomé doing unspeakable things with the head of the Prophet Jokanaan. You’re shielding your eyes and fighting off the impulse to laugh whenever one of the half-naked men onstage opens his mouth (the director, Robert Allan Ackerman, has seen to it that no one here talks in a normal accent or tone of voice), but you’re having a good time, all the same.
Unfortunately, the presence of Mr. Pacino adds a kind of seriousness to the proceedings, and I mean that in the friendliest possible way. When he launches into his light-in-the-loafers Herod, you find yourself caring about how he’s getting along. You care that the particular shtick he’s doing wears out its welcome after about five minutes, and that the incessant monotony of his inflection, with its emphasis on every word or sometimes every other word, but always on the already important word and the already accented syllable (“I have a collar of pearls, set in four rows. They are like unto moons chained with rays of silver”), begins to seem less like artistic choice than artistic limitation. You can’t help noticing that Pacino’s Herod isn’t that different from his Mark Antony. Most of all, you mind that this charming and generous performer has allowed himself to be seduced into this sort of self-servingness and self-indulgence—what other explanation can there be for a staging that keeps Salomé’s back to the audience throughout the scene in which Herod makes his pitch to her, so that we can’t see what effect his words are having?
Well, I suppose one other explanation might be Miss Lee, whose view of acting seems founded, on the one hand, by the concept of the reaction shot (shaping her mouth into an emblematic O of wonderment or surprise) and, on the other, by a roaring whisper that is clearly meant to lace emotion with a touch of classicism. As for Miss Bertish—the divine Miss Bertish, who played Fanny Squeers (and countless other roles) in “Nicholas Nickleby”—she spends the evening sporting an unfortunate headdress and splaying her legs in a camp approximation of female licentiousness.
And what of Miss Lee’s dance, the evenings pièce de résistance? Conceived by Lar Lubovich, it draws on a variety of sources: there’s a little Duncan, a little Graham, a little Robbins (Tim, not Jerome), a little Gene Kelly and Agnes de Mille, a little Lamaze, a little Joe Cocker, a little Eulalie Shinn, a little of Jane Fonda’s Lower Body Solution, and a whole lot of Robin Byrd—all deeply felt, I’m sure, and all dutifully executed by Miss Lee. It’s a case of too much, too late.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, July 6, 1992