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| Cliff Gorman. |
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| Paul Lieber, Warren Meyers, Robert Weil, Joe Silver, Jane House, James Wigfall. |
This play based on the life and career of the late standup comic Lenny Bruce was heavily assaulted by the critics, but the actor in the title role, Cliff Gorman, shot to stardom—albeit not long-lived—for his stunningly energetic portrayal. Bruce had lived a tortured existence in his last years, suffering from constant legal harassment because of his, for the times, extraordinarily outspoken language and radical ideas.
The shift in social values from the time, only a few years earlier, when his publicly-spoken obscenities were likely to land him in jail, to 1971, when a hit Broadway show could dramatize his troubles and use the very same routines that contributed to his downfall, was amazing, and not without a heavy dose of irony. Unfortunately, the structure of Julian Barry’s biodrama was considered negligible, and the depiction of Bruce himself was thought prurient, sensationalistic, tiresome, overlong, and shallow.
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| Cliff Gorman, Jane House. |
Richard Watts called Lenny “a very dull show that did nothing to explain [Bruce] or justify all the furor he caused. . . . [H]is monologues no longer appear witty or relevant,” a thought some who have seen the recreation of Bruce’s routines on TV’s “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” might share. To Martin Gottfried, “good intentions do not make good theatre,” especially when the subject was historically close in time to the production about him. Jack Kroll added that the play’s portrait of Bruce was “incomplete,” and that it was “interesting and ultimately unsuccessful.”
On the other critical hand, Clive Barnes’s positive notice was instrumental in helping the show succeed commercially. This, he said, was “a dynamite shtick of theatre,” a powerful work that would offend some but—despite a “whitewashing” of Bruce’s character—remained totally compelling
Cliff Gorman’s raves reached a plateau he never again achieved. Walter Kerr wrote, “Mr. Gorman, in the demanding and virtually exhausting title role, wasn’t truly a shtick man; he was no master of swiftly slipped in Yiddish or Irish. But he was surely an actor of range and intelligence; he was himself likable; and, in one of the rare moments when we were able to see Bruce at a loss, he was moving. Fumbling with his prepared defense brief, then losing himself in a terrible tangle of recording tapes as he knelt in bewilderment on the floor, he suggested the play that might have been.”
Tom O’Horgan’s hyperbolic staging competed for attention with Gorman’s acting. The consensus was that O’Horgan had travestied the material. In Kerr’s words: “Mr. O’Horgan’s work was visually more disciplined than usual; stage compositions were sharp, movement was generally well focused. But intellectually the director was bent on pandering, pouring gratuities and question-begging devices over the stage with a lavish, leering hand. Ceiling-high puppets of Orphan Annie, the Lone Ranger, Dracula, and John Kennedy dangled in space to no great purpose; the granite heads of four recent presidents loomed in Mount Rushmore solidity to less. . . . When Mr. O’Horgan offered a nude Jesus and a nude Moses at the end of Act One . . . the effect was merely naïve.”
The director’s camped-up, ritualistic methods, using huge effigies, gross images, and lots of flesh, did nothing but call attention to themselves without in the least aiding the script. Still, Barnes loved the “phantasmagoric style,” and its vision of “an American nightmare.”
The large cast, in which many actors played multiple roles, included Jane House as Rusty, Joe Silver in seven roles, Erica Yohn as Sally Marr, Lenny's mother. Sandy Baron succeeded Gorman as Lenny during the run.
It should be added that the show almost failed to open because of a variety of lawsuits brought against it by a number of litigants claiming the rights to the Bruce material.
Gorman won the Tony for Best Actor, Play, and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Performance. Joe Silver was nominated for a Supporting Actor Tony. O’Horgan managed to get a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Direction, while Robin Wagner won one as Outstanding Scene Designer.
Postscript: My friend, theatre writer Ron Fassler, author of the charming Up in the Cheap Seats, about his teenage theatregoing, when he wrote reviews of 200 shows that he kept in a journal, saw Lenny with both Gorman and Baron. His carefully preserved comments note how enormously taken he was by Gorman, but also how surprised he was at Baron's portrayal, especially now that he knew and understood the script better. It actually came as something of a big surprise, as he had thought Gorman's performance "unmatchable." "Here it was--matched! True, Baron may have seen Gorman and mimicked a little. . . . But Baron had all the power that Gorman had and I was very impressed."
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