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| David Ogden Stiers, Patti LuPone. |
The School for Scandal was revived in repertory with five other plays by the youthful Acting Company in their first professional season. The overall quality of their work bore a fragrance of talented amateurism, but the troupe, not long after being trained at Juilliard, succeeded in offering considerable promise, which many company members fulfilled.
David Ogden Stiers represented the evening’s strongest work in the role of Joseph Surface, and there were good notices for what T.E. Kalem called Patti LuPone’s performance as Lady Teazle, the “interesting,” Lady Sneerwell of Mary Lou Rosato, as John Simon put it, and, in Clive Barnes’s words, the “bluffly likable" Charles of Kevin Kline. (Rosato was commended by the Drama Desk as Most Promising Performer.)The church-theatre venue was uncomfortable, though, and the thrust stage served little purpose when no seats were able to surround it.
Gerald Freedman’s staging of the heavily cut 1777 comedy of manners was spirited, but needed more eye-catching movement patterns. On the whole, the actors were still far from commanding the sense of period demanded, and the result for many, as for Walter Kerr, smacked too strongly of “a graduation exercise.”
