The Nation’s Stages Are Filled with Plays about the Past
The New York theater world is home to a bevy of historical plays this fall, in addition to Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and The Way to Heaven. There are shows about racism, pro football, British mine workers, New Orleans in 1803 and a unique production of Noel Coward’s The Fallen in 1930 radio play format.
The most intriguing is Gatz. The drama’s title, as most literature wonks know, is the real last name of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s complex fictional character Jay Gatsby, the hero of The Great Gatsby, often voted the finest novel ever written by an American. Gatz is, believe it or not, a play in which the entire dialogue is a reading of the 47,000 word novel itself, performed by a small cast. The play runs a full six and a half hours and requires two intermissions and a dinner break. Theatergoers and history lovers liken it to the similarly all-day-long, dinner-break nineteenth-century play Nicolas Nickleby, produced on Broadway back in the 1970s. Gatz, produced by the New York Public Theater, should be a gem for history lovers. The story of the mysterious Gatsby, a bootlegger and gangster, took place in the middle of the Roaring Twenties and involved not only his lust for old girlfriend Daisy, lavish mansions, big, bawdy cars, raucous parties and piles of money, but an unfulfilled search for the American Dream.
The play is staged by the Elevator Theater Company and its founder, John Collins, for the Public Theater. The producer has experimented with different theater forms over the years, from stages built in incredibly odd spaces to shows developed around a huge cardboard box. He got the idea for Gatz from 1970s oddball comic, Andy Kaufman, star of the Taxi television series. As a joke, Kaufman would read lengthy passages of The Great Gatsby when he performed in front of college audiences. Many would hoot at him, but others were intrigued by the readings. Collins thought that if several characters could read the book, and do so in a theatrical way, it might work as a play. It did. The drama was staged at the American Repertory Theater, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, last year and succeeded. Its entire run at the Public Theater is already sold out and there is every reason to believe that it will move to a Broadway theater next spring.
The Public Theater has had great success recently with history plays. It produced Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson last spring, now has Gatz and in December will stage a history of Afghanistan in a trilogy, plus a play about the diary of Anne Frank. Last summer, it reached all the way back to the first days of the 1600s to produce Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, starring Al Pacino, in Central Park. It was a huge hit and re-opens soon on Broadway.
The New York metro area is the home to not one, but two NFL football teams, the Giants and the Jets, with two colorful coaches in Tom Coughlin (Giants) and Rex Ryan (Jets). Around the NFL there are other much publicized coaches such as Bill Belichek of New England, Andy Reid of Philadelphia and Wade Phillips of Dallas. All of them together, though, do not amount to half the star power enjoyed by perhaps the NFL’s greatest coach, Vince Lombardi, who led the Green Bay Packers to football glory in the 1950s and 1960s. The gruff, roly-poly coach, loved by all, is the subject of a new show, Lombardi, the Broadway Play, at the Circle in the Square Theater, starring theater veteran and television star Dan Lauria as Lombardi. The play, that opens October 21, should offer a nostalgic new look at the giant of the gridiron, the man whose work, more than any other’s, made pro football such a huge American sport.
One of the historical old chestnuts revived with great frequency around the United States is the musical Cabaret, with music and lyrics by John Kander and Fred Ebb. The musical debuted in 1966 and became a highly praised movie starring Liza Minnelli in 1972. Regional theater companies have staged revivals of it ever since. A gripping new staging was produced in New York several years ago at Studio 54. The musical, the love story between British cabaret singer Sally Bowles and a young American man, and his man, was set in 1931 Berlin, just as the Nazis were growing in power. It features a biting plot and some memorable songs, such as the often performed title song Cabaret. The latest version of the historical musical is running through October 24 at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater.
Ironically, the sad tale told in Cabaret is running in rep at Milwaukee with a funny new play about the 1930s comics Laurel and Hardy, who made comic masterpieces on film at about the same time the plot of Cabaret unfolded in Europe. Laurel and Hardy takes readers back to the Great Depression as Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy bring the audience along on their own journey through film history. The movies that the daffy duo made (Sons of the Desert is my favorite) run on television endlessly. At the time they were screened in the ‘30s, the string of hilarious films provided needed escapism from the horrors of the Depression for the people. Laurel and Hardy runs through November 14.
The Laguna Playhouse, in Laguna Beach, California, is showcasing another comic. They are staging I Loved Lucy, about Lucille Ball, by Lee Tannen, a friend of hers. It’s an insider’s look into the world of Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, their hit television show and their family life. It will try to explain why, somewhere in the world at any moment of the day, some television station is running I Love Lucy. The LaJolla playhouse, near San Diego, is producing another play about a comic legend, silent film star Charlie Chaplin. Their play is Limelight. The devilish “little tramp” actor, star of The Gold Rush and other sensational films, has always been an American favorite in books and movies and now his story has been put on stage. It should be a big success in the area where he became a movie star and flourished for so long.