The Big Picture and the Closeup

Revivals pose a unique set of challenges to those who stage them, and a unique set of questions to be considered by a contemporary audience. But great shows get invited back.

The songbook of Jerry Leiber (1933-2011) and Mike Stoller (1933- ) is a natural for jukebox musical treatment, because it encompasses such variety that it requires little by way of setting to stay interesting. You don’t need a plot, you don’t need performers to talk or act, all you need is a band, some choreography and costumes, and some great singer/dancers, and you’re there.

A youthful cast, showcasing a number of talents from Morgan State University, brings out Waller’s exuberance and his ambivalence.

Rodgers and Hammerstein designed the ending to reduce you to tears, and they knew what they were doing. Resist, even at this excellent revival,and think about the conundrums of race, class and gender that that lie just beneath the surface.

As playwright Michael Weller intelligently conveys, except in the most empty marriages, no matter what the parties may have done to each other, there are still ties of love holding them together. In living through these crises, then, both forces, the centripetal and the centrifugal, must have a part. To the observer, it might seem laughably incoherent, but actually it is just the way things are at such moments.

If that day taught me a lesson, it concerned the occasional moments of grace that drop into our lives, days where downtime unexpectedly becomes time out from one’s cares. For one gorgeous, sunny day I was forced to stare out the window of a cozy two-car train at some of the prettiest creation Pennsylvania has to offer.

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The musical Age of Gold in which I had grown up was just about over. Whatever the merits of whatever was coming next, it wouldn’t be the gold I still wanted. Wanted so badly, in fact, that I was willing to squint extra hard to see it in all the new vinyl that came sluicing into our house. But of course when you squint, you are apt to see things that aren’t, strictly speaking, uh, there.

If I knew that my contributions would only finance food, clothing, shelter, health care and child care and not drugs, I’d be much more inclined to be generous. But how can I know? When the panhandler approaches, there’s no grant application and no time for due diligence.

These are small-timers, and what makes their souls as small as their business, I think, is America itself, a place where there is no state religion nor any religion or code of ethics at all which anyone is required to internalize. Here you are free to be a scheming psychopath while talking a blue streak; no one will stop you. And while Mamet is clearly pointing out how amusing people who do this can be, I do not see much evidence he thinks we can learn much from them; the encounter is all. Fortunately, it is enough.