Outtakes

There were a number of slow moments in The Solid Gold Cadillac, perhaps the slowest of which was the extended pantomime of amateur acting delivered by Michael Goodwin for his character Edward McKeever. This self-indulgent set piece adds nothing to the story and could easily be dispensed with. And yet to do so would be to strip the play of some of its most charming qualities - the ability to poke fun at the theater and point out the vanity of the character - and best acting. Mr. Goodwin's exuberant attempts to "put over the speech" are highly polished. Like Jack Benny's violin playing, it takes a master to make something this bad look almost good. I don't think I can watch another actor or singer sell his or her part or song without thinking about Mr. Goodwin's hilarious homage to the inner performer in all of us. Bravo!

Most theater companies strive to clean-up racial and ethnic epithets contained in their scripts. The Pittsburgh Public Theater company was no exception in their recent production of The Little Foxes. The written play is loaded with N-bombs and other nasty diatribes, coming principally from the character of Oscar Hubbard, but you could detect no more than a whiff of condescension or perhaps just Hubbard orneriness in the performance. This seems to be a good choice: today the shock value would add nothing to the understanding of character and place, and might be guilty dramaturgically of piling on. But to Ms. Hellman's audience - where not so much had changed between the turn-of-the-century south and the late 1930s - the language served a useful purpose. Nowadays we can see the corrupting influence of the individual on society and vice versa without the verbal hammer blows.

Adaptations like biographies are a thankless task. No matter how you approach them, you're bound to displease someone. If you are too faithful to the story or individual (Jane Eyre, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Native Son), you're accused of lacking discipline and/or imagination; while if you have a take (Crime and Punishment) or a bracket on the action or motivation, the tag of "missed the big picture" will come to everyone's lips. And God help you if you do a riff (The Picture of Dorian Gray); the only thing worse than modifying a canonical work (at least in some people's eyes) is creatively playing with it. So it'll either be complex - for the academy - or too simplistic - dumbing down the audience. And if it's too extreme - a travesty! Tie-ins are nice, but beware of riding someone's coattails!!

How much baggage do we as critics or members of the audience bring to a performance? Who really cares about previous productions or interpretations when the one we're writing about or observing is the only one that counts for most of the theater- or concert-going public? It's all interesting, of course, to know the performance history of a play or composition or creative life-cycle of a work of art, but there is just one word to describe individuals who cannot look at a piece through fresh (and neutral) eyes or ears and tell us what they think about the work in front of them: BIASED. Don't let the past become part of your prologue.