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| Rita Moreno, Jerry Stiller, Jack Weston. |
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| Paul B. Price, Jack Weston. |
A zealously brisk black farce about an obese Cleveland
garbage man named Proclo (Jack Weston) who, for vaguely defined reasons, is the
target of his Mafioso brother-in-law Carmine (Jerry Stiller). He hides in a gay
men’s steambath in New York to escape Carmine’s single-minded ferocity.
The spectacle of the frightened, overweight, heterosexual
Proclo mingling with an array of comically, if stereotypically, gay men as he
seeks refuge from a “hit” offered a few good belly laughs. Even more amusing
was the subplot about a Puerto Rican entertainer named Googie Gomez (Rita
Moreno) whose consuming ambition is to make it as a Bette Midler-type
songstress by playing to the queer crowd at the baths.
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| Tony DeSantis, Ruth Jaroslaw, Jerry Stiller, Stephen Collins, F. Murray Abraham, Steve Scott. |
Moreno’s intense comic gifts, her sexy Latin good looks, and
her character’s energetic pursuit of stardom practically stole the show from
the otherwise gifted cast, most of whom had to run around the three-tiered
setting in towels for much of the evening. Moreno was repaid for her efforts
with a Tony for Best Supporting Actress, Play.
Although it ran for a year, a couple of critics
shared Martin Gottfried’s opinion that The
Ritz was “A boring, bad, one-joke comedy,” with conventionally malicious
camp wit that Gottfried found “trite.” Clive Barnes, however, thought McNally
had “a great way with the lacingly bitchy remark.” Barnes enjoyed most of the
show as “a lot of naughtily innocent farce,” but Douglas Watt trashed it as “the shrill
and tiresome exploitation of a fatuous subject.” He added that it was disjointedly written and “fairly unfunny” for trying too
hard not to be offensive about material that was bound to upset some people.
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| Jerry Stiller, Jack Weston. |
In addition to Weston, Stiller, and Moreno, there were fine
performances from F. Murray Abraham as a love-starved, middle-aged queen;
Stephen Collins as a handsome detective with a falsetto voice; and Ruth
Jaroslaw as Proclo’s wife.
Before coming to New York, The Ritz had been titled The
Tubs, and was produced at the Yale Repertory Theatre. Possible confusion
with another gay steambath play, Tubstrip,
led to the name change. A slightly earlier play, Steambath (1970), to be covered later in this series, had no such problem.
