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| John Wardwell, Steven Keats, Raina Barrett, J.R. Marks, James Doerr. (Photo: Bert Andrews.) |
An idiosyncratic
revival of Joseph Heller’s respected but unsuccessful 1968 satire about the
toll of human life taken by war, and the difficulty of media-viewing audiences
in recognizing the tragic dimensions of what they routinely see on their
screens.
Taking its hint from
the author’s Pirandellian equation of the stage of drama with the stage of
life, this production went overboard in pointing up the metaphorical connection
and offered “a grievous insult to the play,” growled Clive Barnes. Heavily
stylized, lacking in Heller’s parodic tone, poorly acted, and consistently emphasizing
rather than disguising the play’s weaknesses, the show bombed in Greenwich
Village, closing in one night, and seems never to have been revived locally
again.
Among the 14 names in the cast were James Doerr, Richard Kline, Gary Springer, J.R Marks, and Raina Barrett, the latter perhaps the best known because of her being in the original cast of Oh! Calcutta!
Note: Because of a problem with the
original manuscript, the alphabetical sequence of entries was disrupted and the
titles jumped from the U’s to the W’s, omitting the V’s. The correct
alphabetical sequence will resume with the next entry.
Do you enjoy Theatre’s Leiter Side? As you may know,
since New York’s theatres were forced into hibernation by Covid-19, this blog
has provided daily posts on the hundreds of shows that opened in the city, Off
and on Broadway, between 1970 and 1975. These have been drawn from an
unpublished manuscript that would have been part of my multivolume Encyclopedia of
the New York Stage series,
which covers every show, of every type, from 1920 through 1950. Unfortunately,
the publisher, Greenwood Press, decided it was too expensive to continue the
project beyond 1950.
Before I began offering these 1970-1975 entries, however, Theatre’s
Leiter Side posted over 1,600 of my actual reviews for shows from 2012
through 2020. The first two years of that experience were published in separate
volumes for 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 (the latter split into two volumes). The
2012-2013 edition also includes a memoir in which I describe how, when I was
72, I used the opportunity of suddenly being granted free access to every New
York show to begin writing reviews of everything I saw. Interested readers can
find these collections on Amazon.com by
clicking here.
Next up: Veronica’s Room.
