Theatre in the ‘Big Apple is hardly rosy red

Press, 14 June 1984, Page 21

Theatre in the ‘Big Apple is hardly rosy red

ELRIC HOOPER,

the artistic director

at the Court Theatre, has returned to Christchurch after a six-month leave to study theatre in Europe and the United States. During his travels he wrote a series of articles for “The Press” on his impressions of the theatre in Sydney, Athens, Rome, London, France, and West Germany. In the final article he writes on New York and San Francisco.

For the past decade or so, we have constantly been told that the "Big Apple" is rotten at the core. New York has come to mean crime, mugging, drug traffic, civic bankruptcy, poverty, and grubbiness. What we don’t hear is that it is still the most electric city in the world, full of invention, high culture. craziness, and humour. New York has more eccentrics per mile than any other city I know. There is something about New York air, be it the bracing cold of winter or the soggy heat of summer, that always challenges and wakens.

It is this aspect of New York that the city fathers have been trying to promote for the last decade. Tee-shirts saying “I love New York” are on sale everywhere. But the work is not confined to propaganda. Practical steps are being made to lure Americans and travellers back to the central city areas so blighted by porn, crime, and decav.

An enormous urban renewal programme is in progress. Whole blocks of sordid tenements in the central area have disappeared, awaiting another glittering pile of offices and apartments. There are even signs of hope for Times Square. But it may come too late to save the New York theatre. Once one of the great theatre capitals because of the variety and excellence of the fare. New York can claim supremacy in one field only — the musical. These are the only form which can generate enough money to pay the costs of staging a work in New York.

Ticket prices, always as lofty as the skyscrapers, are now stellar. It is $45 'for most of the hit musicals. One is advised to buy the best seats because New York theatres on the whole are so poorly designed for sight-lines that anything cheaper may have one viewing the chorus through the lacquer of the lady in

front. For a straight play to have any success on Broadway — and. of course, straight plays because of their very nature have to be mounted in smaller theatres than musicals — it is necessary to have a blockbuster star. The only successful straight plays on Broadway at present are “Death of a Salesman” with Dustin Hoffman and “The Real Thing,” whose attractions are a star actor, Jeremy Irons, a star author, Tom Stoppard, and a star director, Mike Nichols. One other ploy is to stage a straight play in the style of a musical. I saw a new Arthur Kopit play “The End of the World” directed by Hal Prince, the creator of “Evita” and “Cabaret.” He had hoped to win the public to this rather uneven but serious work about the nuclear threat by staging it in the scenic style of a Sondheim musical. It was dazzling but the critics did not bite. The New York critics are as potent as ever. If you are going to make the capital’ outlay that is necessary for a New York theatre ticket, then the equivalent to your stock broker is the newspaper critic. If Clive Barnes says "No,”

then forget it. This is tragic for. as everywhere else, the critics are as often wrong as right. The only way for the ardent theatre-goer to' experiment and test a play for himself is to line up at three in the afternoon at the Times Square booth and buy a halfprice ticket. You can imagine where I was at three each NewYork afternoon. So popular has this become that some say the practice has forced up the price of the tickets obtainable at the theatre itself to compensate. Of course, one has to pay the full price for the smash hits, because unsold seats for "La Cage aux Folles” or “Cats,” the two sell-out shows in New York, will not be on sale at the half-price booth. "La Cage aux Folles" is a brilliant musical version of the immensely successful French film comedy about a transvestite club and is part of what one witty critic described as the current fashion for "homoexoticism." It is wonderful to see the busloads of steel-haired matrons roaring with laughter at doings that even 10 years ago would have been considered disgusting and unrespectable. The costumes, lighting.

dancing, performance, and precision is of a standard that is achieved nowhere else in the world. In musicals the New Yorkers are still the masters — despite the recent British challenge. This fact is brought home time and again; by Twiggy and TommyTune in “My One and Only,” perhaps the silliest and most devastatingly charming musical in years, by “Dream Girls,” the harsh and glittering story of the rise of a group very like Diana Ross and the Supremes. and by the dazzling revival of Rodgers and Hart’s “On Your Toes” -- 50 years old, but with still the best lyrics and tunes on Broadway. Well, any show with "There's a Small Hotel” in it must be a winner.

But where are the straight plays? The answer is, in small halls. One of the side effects of the urban renewal programme has been the creation of tiny theatres in what were once stables or warehouses, buildings which because of their architectural interest have been preserved while all else around has been flattered. Of course, the old off-Broadway theatres of Greenwich Village still operate, but the most exciting work I saw was being done in these newly refurbished boxes that seat about 100 or so people. Here they can afford to stage serious drama. Here you can see works like “Night Mother" or at last "Terra Nova."

(It was gratifying to see the front page of the "New York Times" refer indirectly to the Court Theatre o production of Ted Tally's play about Scott of the Antarctic "Terra Nova." when they pointed out that this fine work had been done in New Zealand long

before it was seen in New York.) It is here you see that New York's reputation for fine acting is maintained. So often in the musicals I thought that the secondstring actors were so much inferior to the stars but here in these small theatres you can see world-class performances. One show, “Laughing Stock," has been so successful that it is to transfer to Broadway in the autumn. On the other coast, San Francisco has always seemed more like a European theatre town. It has a remarkable central repertory company which operates like the State theatres of Europe and presents a cycle of classic and contemporary plays. They were running a Rattigan play and a new play about incest called “The Dolly” while I was there.

There is nothing like this in NewYork which, in fact, is beginning to feed off the provincial theatres of America in much the same way London is feeding off the provinces, where some of the most exciting work is done. The overheads are not so great and the critical opinion not so arrogant. I must say I have been much more taken with American than British writing on this journey. In the plays of David Mamet. Romulus Linney (“Laughing Stock”) or Marsha Norman (“Night Mother"), there is a vigour and iconoclastic energy that is lacking in much modern English writing for the stage. In the past six months I calculated I have seen more than 80 performances. No generalisation is possible. The theatre is like malaria, incurable but not fatal. It will lie dormant for a long time, then spring to unexpected life again. The theatre is the longest living invalid m the world, always on the point of death and yet capable from time to time of hectic, dazzling life.