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| Lee Guilliatt and cast of Joani. |
JOAN [Musical/Law/Politics/Prison/Religion/Youth]
B/M/LY/D: Al Carmines; S/L: Earl Rodman; C: Ira Siff, Joan Kilpatrick; CH: Gus
Solomons, Jr.; P: Circle in the Square; T: Circle in the Square (OB);
6/19/72-8/13/72 (64)
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| Margaret Wright, Lee Guilliatt. |
Al Carmines, pastor of Greenwich Village’s Judson Memorial
Church and prolific composer-writer of tuneful, energetic, campy Off-Off
Broadway musicals, wrote, directed, composed, and played piano for this
Off-Broadway transfer of his updated Joan of Arc musical.
The Joan of the title (Lee Guilliatt) is based on the
medieval Maid of Orleans, but Carmines transmogrifies her into a mannish East
Village, jeans and sneaker-clad, bomb-throwing radical, raised in the Midwest
in a mixed Jewish and Presbyterian family. She lives in an Avenue B flat with
two unkempt male roommates, one of them a junky (Ira Siff). Wandering the East
Village streets she meets the tacky, platinum-blonde, miniskirted Virgin Mary (Essie
Borden), which leads Joan to find her personal brand of religious faith.
She is betrayed by the junky and ends up in the Women’s
House of Detention on Sixth Avenue where, following the orgasmic release of
masturbation, and accompanied by a Hallelujah gospel chorus, she is taken away
to be executed. This turn of events turns her mother (Emily Adams) into a
revolutionary. Along the way, fun is poked at organized religion, psychiatry,
politics, radical lawyers, morality, the penal system, and other institutions.
Critical reactions were strikingly mixed, but most leaned
toward favoring the show. Edith Oliver called it a completely successful fusion
of Carmine’s musical, emotional, comedic, inventive talents, “and above all,
his rebellious, emboldened spirit.” Douglas Watt, however, was less admiring of
Carmines’s musical quality: “He really can’t write music, has no talent for it
nor the slightest trace of originality.” Even those who liked the show berated
its weak book, amateurish acting, and sophomoric humor. John Simon simply burned the show at the stake as a “self-serving, . . . melodically derivative
and barren, pseudo-religious, but genuinely polymorphous-perverse
musicalization of the” old legend.
Interestingly, a production in Boston not long afterward, directed by Larry Loonin, received glowing reviews.