That Raul Julia and Sheena Easton are appearing at the Marquis in a road-show revival of “Man of La Mancha” may not sound like cause for rejoicing, but it certainly seemed to thrill the crowd of people who turned out for the press preview I attended. There was an element of fanfare to the event even before the show started, as the P.A. system came alive and a man announced with the air of one bringing great good news that the composer himself, a Mr. Mitch Leigh, would be conducting that evening. In fact, Mr. Leigh not only led the orchestra but conducted the overture from a brightly lit spot upstage center. (Funnily enough, the primary producing organization behind the revival is the Mitch Leigh Company.) Even so, it’s the stars that people are going to be curious about. Specifically, they’ll want to know if Miss Easton, who is making her Broadway debut, is, as the young man in the television commercial asserts, a babe (the answer is yes, but not in that wig) and how she fares in the role of Aldonza, the lusty whore whom Don Quixote mistakes for Dulcinea (to me she seemed a little refined, but what do I know?). She’s not the most expressive actress in the world, but then Mr. Julia is not the most accomplished singer; they’re well matched in that regard. Miss Easton has a tendency to act with her eyebrows, and Mr. Julia has a tendency to sing with his. (It’s a curious singing style, in which you leave the audience in a certain amount of suspense about whether you’ll manage to hit or hold a particular note, but some people like it.)
The real question this revival raises is what the producers have on Raul Julia that they can get him to perform the show night after night. He can’t be doing it for the money (no amount of money would be worth it), and it’s not as though the role of Don Quixote had anything to offer an actor of his stature. Neither is “Man of La Mancha” of any sentimental or historical interest in the context of American musical theater—the way “The Fantasticks” is, for instance. (One can see Mr. Julia consenting to play El Gallo for a lark.) “Man of La Mancha” has no interest, no charm whatever. First produced in 1965, it dates from the precise moment when ersatz drama, ersatz music, and ersatz emotion began to replace whatever cleverness and style had previously been the Broadway musical’s chief ingredients. With its rambling, intermissionless structure (Cervantes, thrown into prison by the Inquisition, acts out the story of Don Quixote to keep his follow-inmates from stealing his manuscript), a score that seems mostly strung together from Marlboro commercials, and a script in which lines like “Facts are the enemy of truth” and “There’s a remedy for everything but death” pass for irony and wit, “Man of La Mancha” is the granddaddy of all junk musicals. It’s where the British got the idea for Andrew Lloyd Webber.
The current revival is in every respect adequate to the occasion. It has floor-miking that plays merry hell with Mr. Leigh’s score, and a Sancho (Tony Martinez) who is the cutest thing since Yoda. Mr. Martinez, according to a program note, recently celebrated his two-thousandth performance in the role, and it shows. The program boasts, “Entire Production Staged by Albert Marre.” (He directed the original version.) The directorial touches that impressed me most were the choreographed gang-rape sequence, which is particularly tasteful, and the “Moorish” dance, which gives the audience something sexy to look at while Don Quixote is nattering on about beauty and truth.
I’ve never understood the appeal of William Finn’s “Marvin” trilogy, about a childish, self-absorbed man who leaves his wife and son for his not very nice male lover. It has a chronology as complicated as the Oedipus cycle and a dramatic sensibility akin to that of the Oresteia. To me, though, it has always seemed like banality set to music.
“Falsettos,” at the John Golden, is a chance to see two of the shows—“March of the Falsettos” and “Falsettoland”—back to back, in a production staged by their original director, James Lapine, and it is strictly for those who care. The first half, the “March of the Falsettos” portion—in which Michael Rupert, Stephen Bogardus, and Chip Zien reprise the roles they created—is the one where Marvin runs off with Whizzer, and Trina hooks up with Marvin’s analyst, Mendel, and everybody worries a lot about Marvin and Trina’s precocious son, Jason. The second half of the show, the “Falsettoland” portion, is the one where Jason is getting bar mitzvahed, and Whizzer is getting sick, and everybody decides to have the ceremony in the hospital room.
“March of the Falsettos” was first produced in 1981, at the very start of the AIDS epidemic—a time when it must have seemed knowing and hip to acknowledge that the wife and son of a man who was coming out might have feelings about the situation, and when to acknowledge this in a through-sung musical must have seemed very daring indeed. In 1992, Mr. Finn’s “Falsettos” pieces seem like an orgy of self-indulgence: shallow, unlikable people expressing themselves in shallow, unlikable songs. One need only remove the homosexual element from “March of the Falsettos”—imagine Marvin leaving his wife and son for another woman—to realize the show’s banality. Similarly, one need only imagine “Falsettoland”—which was first produced in 1990 but is set in 1981—taking place a year before or a year later to appreciate how bogus it is and how shamelessly Mr. Finn is exploiting the topicality of AIDS. It’s situation-chic—a sort of upper-echelon comedy-melodrama in which no more is required of the characters than that they present a white, upper-middle-class audience with a familiar predicament, and that audience gets to respond knowingly in a kind of performance of its own. “Homosexuals,” Chip Zien sings in utter darkness after the intermission. It’s the very first word of the second act, and—totally out of context, hurled into the void—it stops the show.
You can get just as much out of “March of the Falsettos” by listening to the original-cast recording as by seeing it in a theatre—if you can stomach the score, that is. It’s strangely bullying music, which dictates to the performers exactly how a song must be sung, and leaves no room for expression, interpretation, or restraint. The current cast does very well under the circumstances—especially Barbara Walsh, who plays the wife and is always likable, and young Jonathan Kaplan, who plays Jason and can’t be having much fun. Mr. Bogardus whose character says things like “Winning is everything to me—except sex and money” and is supposed to be redeemed by premature death, acquits himself fairly well, while Mr. Rupert, who has some of the worse songs to put over, does what he can with Marvin—a man who can’t relinquish center stage even when his lover is dying.
There’s not really much difference between “Man of La Mancha” and Mr. Finn’s amorphous, intermissionless musicals. Both shows are about offering an audience a pleasing image of itself. “Falsettos” is just appealing to a more sophisticated audience, perpetuating a more sophisticated sort of hypocrisy—the idea that shallow, unlikeable people become interesting or noble through knowing someone who has died of AIDS.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, May 11, 1992