How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (45 page)

 

By contrast, the perfectly nice Sibyl and Victor have no “usual stories”—indeed, have no stories at all: the extent of their fantasy is the awful little nicknames they've given their new spouses (“Elli” and “Mandy”). It's this lack of imaginative élan that makes them losers in Coward's eyes. If what distinguishes the exchanges between Amanda
and Elyot is the way in which they so readily pick up each other's cues, what alerts us to the unsuitability of Sibyl and Victor to their respective mates is their flat-footed inability to recognize good cues when they see them. At the beginning of Elyot's first-act spat with Sibyl—he's just caught sight of Amanda on the next balcony, and desperately tries to convince his new wife that they should leave the hotel at once—Elyot roars at his uncomprehending young bride that “if there's one thing in the world that infuriates me, it's sheer wanton stubbornness.” Then, the characteristic, deliciously deadpan Cowardian gearshift: “I should like to cut off your head with a meat axe.” To which Sibyl can only respond, “How dare you talk to me like that, on our honeymoon night.” This is clearly not a marriage made in Coward heaven.

 

The marriage between Noël Coward and Howard Davies, the director of the new Broadway
Private Lives
, isn't so great either. Davies's problem is that he doesn't trust Coward's belief in the fundamental seriousness of play; instead, he just goes for seriousness. The result is about as interesting as Sibyl.

The irony is that Davies's heart is in the right place. Too often,
Private Lives
has been the vehicle for some good-natured camping on the part of middle-aged actresses eager for an adorable vehicle. (The last major Broadway revival was in 1992, featuring Joan Collins; before that, it was Elizabeth Taylor, in 1982, and long before that, Tallulah Bank-head, in 1948.) Coward himself deplored this approach to his work. As early as 1949, he expressed dismay at a revival of
Fallen Angels
(1925) that was done as camp self-parody, and he elsewhere denounced a production of
Present Laughter
in which the lead role, a famous, Cowardesque actor, was portrayed as being vicious. And a young actress performing Amanda in what she thought was the approved Coward style he dismissed as “too piss-elegant by half.”

It's easy to see why he was so annoyed. Such interpretations fail to see that there are feelings in Coward's work; they miss the side of
Coward that the playwright himself cherished as “the romantic quality, tender and alluring,” which Gertrude Lawrence brought to Amanda. They make impossible anything like what Coward's close friend and biographer Cole Lesley records in his description of Coward and Lawrence's original performance of the play: “They played the balcony scene so magically, lightly, tenderly that one was for those fleeting moments brought near to tears by the underlying vulnerability, the evanescence of their love.”

But in his quest to get the feeling back into
Private Lives
, Davies has grossly miscalculated; he fails to understand just where the feelings are. No doubt there was a superficial allure to the idea of reuniting Lindsay Duncan and Alan Rickman, the stars of the 1987
Dangerous Liaisons
that he'd directed, as his Amanda and Elyot: the vicious, big-cat murderousness of the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont is a distant ancestor of what Coward's leads, “biting and scratching like panthers,” do to each other. Yet Davies doesn't even let his actors have that feline fun, because he's too busy having them emote—stretching out their lines, and the spaces between them, with long pauses, giving each other burning glances, and in every other way apparently trying to get behind the characters' witty repartee and excavate their true feelings.

In an interview with
The New York Times
, Rickman and Duncan revealed why. Davies, who'd never read the play until he got this job, wanted them to say the lines “without any of the usual stuff that comes with Noël Coward”—to “make these people real.” The problem is that there's nothing “real” about them. In the stagey worlds of Coward's comedies, the witty repartee isn't a cover for feelings, as Davies seems to have felt; it
is
the feelings, or rather the vehicle for expressing them. In their recordings of
Private Lives
, Coward and Lawrence delight in their dialogue as if it were a tennis match, speaking briskly, each capping the other's lines; Rickman and Duncan, by contrast, took so much time delivering their volleys that it sometimes seemed as if they were hoping a “message” would pop up in the pauses, if they could only make them big enough.

One result was to throw the play's delicate dynamics off-kilter. By making Amanda and Elyot comparatively normal (well, neurotically normal), their mates come off looking like morons, whereas they're just
nice people unlucky enough to have drawn too close to the leopards' cage. (Preparing to revive the play, John Gielgud hoped to find a Sibyl and Victor as
nice
as Adrianne Allan and Laurence Olivier, who'd created the roles.) What should fascinate us is the leopards: their danger, their beauty, the way they're lethal to others but necessary to each other.

The other result was what must be the longest
Private Lives
on record: Act One alone took nearly an hour. No wonder people asked Duncan if the play had been rewritten.

Deprived of Coward's fizzy pacing,
Private Lives
does just what an early reviewer of the play, for whom it “hardly mov[ed] farther below the surface than a paper boat in a bathtub,” feared it all too easily could do: become “a shapeless, sodden mass.” (That, incidentally, is a good way to describe Louise, the hapless French maid to whom Davies, presumably out of desperation, gives a distracting series of vulgar pratfalls, as if to compensate for the lack of laughs elsewhere.) Part of the way in which Coward kept his little boats afloat was, in fact, to juxtapose, with giddy hilarity, his characters' fantasy with soggy everyday “reality” (which is what Davies is interested in). There's a wonderful moment in the play, during the extended second-act love interlude, when Elyot starts getting frisky and Amanda rebuffs his advances on the grounds that it's “so soon after dinner.” Angrily, Elyot accuses Amanda of having “no sense of glamour, no sense of glamour at all.” For all its ravishing décor, this
Private Lives
is devoid of glamour; it's so suspicious of camp style that it ends up having no style at all. “I see you're determined to make me serious, whether I like it or not,” Amanda sulks at Victor toward the end of the play. It's a line Coward might well address to Davies, if only he were here. That he isn't is all too obvious.

 

If Davies's Coward is rather stodgy and Victorish, the world première performance of
Long Island Sound
, based on an early short story called “What Mad Pursuit?,” reminds you of no one so much as poor, slapstick Louise. After his friends gave a reading of the new farce a cool reception, Coward had the good sense not to try to get it produced. No
wonder: the story of a debonair English writer's hapless visit to a Long Island country house peopled by vulgar American nouveaux riches and their famous friends is all situation and no plot, and—not least because it assigns all the eccentricities to the frenetic Americans in order to make its victimized British hero, Evan Lorrimer, the “good guy”—inverts the normal and usually successful structure of Coward's best comedies. (The writer's own home life was surprisingly domestic and, as his longtime companion Graham Payn recalled, “simple”: but that simplicity, like the “reality” that Davies wants, isn't a fruitful object of Coward's dramatic sensibility.) Even so, the play surely deserves better than the crude treatment it gets from Scot Alan Evans, whose idea of Coward style is to have men's faces shoved into women's bosoms and to allow the actor playing Don Lucas, Evan's temporary roommate, to flounce around in a dressing gown emitting high-pitched laughs—and giving a nonplussed Evan a kiss on the mouth.

In response to the first production of
Private Lives
in 1930, Ivor Brown surmised that “within a few years, the student of drama will be sitting in complete bewilderment before the text of
Private Lives
, wondering what on earth these fellows in 1930 saw in so flimsy a trifle.” Stagings such as Davies's and Evans's, alas, produce just that sense of bewilderment. They remind us in an unfortunate way just how much Coward's texts were fragile armatures for a very specific sensibility, and in the absence of an appreciation for that sensibility, the student of drama cannot be blamed for wondering what everyone saw in Coward—why we thought him so damned amusing.

Assuming, that is, that the student of drama even knows who he is; and how should he? “Even the youngest of us will know, in fifty years' time, exactly what we mean by ‘a very Noël Coward sort of person,'” Kenneth Tynan confidently predicted in 1953. Fifty years later, I asked a student of mine what he thought “a very Noël Coward person” was. The student, a Princeton undergraduate who's very involved in campus theatricals as both a performer and writer, cocked his head and gave it some thought. “Wait,” he said. “Noël Coward—weren't there two of him? And one was a songwriter?” Talk about bittersweet.

—The New York Review of Books, June 27, 2002

A
t the climax of Mel Brooks's 1968 comedy cult classic movie
The Producers
—the opening night of an intentionally awful musical about the Third Reich called
Springtime for Hitler
—the show's grandiose producer, Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel), tries to alienate the
Times
theater critic by ostentatiously offering him a bribe: he hands the prim man a complimentary ticket wrapped in a $100 bill. As even those who haven't seen the film are likely to know by now, Bialystock wants the play to bomb so that he and his partner, a timid accountant named Leopold Bloom, can abscond with the backers' money. Figuring the play will close after its first performance, they've sold 25,000 percent of the show, never dreaming they'll have to pay the investors back. Naturally, the show's a hit.

In the case of the phenomenally successful new musical based on the film, the ticket itself would make a far more tempting bribe. The day after it opened last month to ecstatic reviews, the producers of
The Producers
raised the top ticket price to $100 (a Broadway record); but for the present, tickets are much harder to find than hundred-dollar bills. “That beloved Broadway phenomenon: the unobtainable seat,” the editors of the real-life
Times
were moved to gush in one of two editorial-
page comments devoted to the musical's huge success. By the Sunday after opening night, $50,000 worth of tickets were being sold every ten minutes, according to one of its producers; nearly $3 million in tickets were sold on a single day. (Another record.) When the Tony Award nominations were announced on May 7, the fact that
The Producers
received fifteen of them (another record) seemed like a foregone conclusion—as if recognition of a musical's actual qualities ought to follow naturally from its box office success, rather than the other way around. A Bialystockian view of things if ever there was one.

Inevitably, the phenomenal success of
The Producers
has spawned a cottage industry in ruminations about its appeal. Attempts to explain what one critic, writing for a British audience, calls the “cultural repercussions” of the musical's success have appeared in print from London to the East Village. Many of these writers attribute the show's popularity to its refreshing refusal to abide by “politically correct” standards: it mocks, with gleeful evenhandedness, Nazis, Jews, dumb blondes, gays, lesbians, blacks, Irishmen, old people, and (lovingly) theater people. “For a show that is attracting family audiences,” the
Times
's former theater critic and current Op-Ed page columnist Frank Rich wrote three weeks after the play's première, “this one is about as un-Disney as you can get…. It hasn't been pre-tested with focus groups but insists on speaking only in the singular voice of Mel Brooks.”

But precisely what's interesting is the fact that, although it's based on Brooks's most famous movie (a critical failure for which he nonetheless won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1968), and boasts seventeen new songs, with music and lyrics all by Brooks (in addition to the memorable “Springtime for Hitler” production number and the finale “Prisoners of Love,” which he wrote for the movie), the new
Producers
doesn't sound like Brooks at all. For the seventy-five-year-old Brooks, the show's success represents the highly satisfying culmination of a sixty-six-year-old dream: in an article that appeared in the
Times
Arts & Leisure section the Sunday before his play opened, the writer, comedian, and director reminisced about being a stage-struck boy in Brooklyn during the Depression and being taken to his first show. And yet there's another victory evident here. Despite its ostentatiously Brooksian manner, the un-PC trappings, the show represents not so
much the defeat of what Rich calls the “show-business corporate-think” that creates “bland pop culture” as—subtly—its triumph.

 

The Producers
began its life forty years ago as an idea for a novel. Brooks, who'd been a well-paid writer for Sid Caesar's
Your Show of Shows
, claimed that he'd never considered himself to be a writer, but instead thought of himself as a funny “talker.” Nonetheless, he found himself thinking about a novel based on the kind of scenario that only someone who'd spent a significant number of years in analysis, as he and Caesar both had done, would find irresistible: what happens when someone with a highly overdeveloped superego—the Bloom character, “a little man who salutes whatever society teaches him to salute,” as Brooks recalled in a
New Yorker
profile by Kenneth Tynan that appeared in 1978—runs headfirst into someone who's a walking, talking Id. “Bite, kiss, take, grab, lavish, urinate—whatever you can do that's physical, [Bialystock] will do,” he told Tynan. The novel was to focus on a dynamic point that barely survived in the movie: how the two vastly different men would end up influencing each other, with Bloom instilling in the grandiose, greedy Bialystock “the first sparks of decency and humanity” and Bialystock breathing some life into gray little Bloom. As Brooks worked on his book, however, he realized that nearly everything he was writing was dialogue. “Oh, shit, it's turning into a play,” he recalled thinking.

His instincts were right. The film version is, essentially, a three-act play. In the first act, Bialystock, who raises money for his disastrous productions by providing sexual thrills to little old ladies, and Bloom (played by Gene Wilder in his second film role—the first was as a victim of Bonnie and Clyde) form their unlikely partnership one day while Bloom is doing Bialystock's books and suddenly realizes that they could, theoretically, make more money with a flop than with a hit. In the second act, the two mismatched partners set about finding the most appalling script they can get their hands on (“Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva in Berchtesgaden,” composed by an ex-Nazi who raises pigeons on the roof of a Greenwich Village tenement); the most inept director (the ultra-queeny Roger DeBris, who “never knew the Third Reich meant Germany” until he read the script—“it's drenched with historical goodies like that!”); and the most incompe
tent lead actor, a burned-out hippie named L.S.D. (The pair also spend some of the old ladies' money on a buxom Swedish secretary named Ulla, who gyrates around the office dancing whenever Max tells her to get to work.)

The climax of the second act is what Brooks referred to as a “big neo-Nazi musical number right in the middle”: a fully staged performance of the show's opening number, “Springtime for Hitler,” which DeBris turns into a Busby Berkeley spectacular, complete with chorines goose-stepping in swastika formation. Initially appalled, the opening-night audience ultimately finds the play hilarious: when it becomes clear that the show will be a hit, Bialystock and Bloom realize that they're ruined. In the haphazard dénouement that is the third act—Brooks likes his MacGuffins, but tends to lose interest in his endings—the two desperately decide to blow up the theater, are caught, tried, and convicted (“incredibly guilty” is the jury's verdict), and end up in prison. The film closes with the two men producing a musical called
Prisoners of Love
, excessive percentages of which they sell to their fellow prisoners—and to the warden.

 

The Producers
was the first film that Brooks wrote and directed. He'd go on to make others, some of which, like the sublime horror-movie parody
Young Frankenstein
(“that's Frahn-ken-
steen
,” the baron's embarrassed grandson keeps telling people), would be more polished and better put-together than his debut. But the deliciously anarchic, gleefully grotesque energies you get in
The Producers
, which find expression in the many repellent close-ups of Zero Mostel and in the choppy, hectic pacing and camera work, were to become hallmarks of Brooks's directorial style, such as it was. (“Almost prehistoric” was the verdict of the distinguished film editor Ralph Rosenblum, who worked on
The Producers
and reminisced none too flatteringly about his sole collaboration with Brooks in his memoir,
When the Shooting Stops…The Cutting Begins
.) Even in the funniest Brooks movies there's an improvisatory feel; in Brooks the director you always sense the presence of Brooks the onetime Borscht Belt comic—he started working the Catskills hotels while still in his teens—frenetically firing off whatever gags he has at hand, whatever would work.

This seemingly ad hoc style was less noticeable when the comic and parodic energy had a consistent object. This is why Brooks's best films are the tetralogy of genre parodies:
Young Frankenstein
(horror),
Blazing Saddles
(westerns),
High Anxiety
(Hitchcock),
Silent Movie
(silents). But in the least successful movies, precariously thin plotlines—a billionaire makes a bet that he can survive in the streets of L.A., for example, which is the donnée of the 1991 film
Life Stinks
—are clearly little more than excuses for stringing together gags (jokes about bums, say), some of which, as in any stand-up routine, are better than others. Other films, like
History of the World
,
Part I
, which zips merrily from the Stone Age through the seventeenth century (“It's good to be the King,” Brooks, as a particularly goatish Louis XIV, keeps saying as he shuffles around Versailles, goosing buxom courtiers), are transparently little more than revues.

And, like a stand-up, Brooks likes to reuse successful material. In
Young Frankenstein
, the humpbacked Igor's hump keeps moving from one side of his back to the other; in
Robin Hood: Men in Tights
, it's King John's mole that switches from left to right, to the strangulated dismay of his associates. The hoary “walk this way” gag appears not only in the original
The Producers
and in
Young Frankenstein
but in the new musical as well, where the mincing walk of Carmen Ghia, Roger DeBris's fey assistant, comes in for predictable mockery. (Effeminate gay men are particular targets for Brooks's humor, and nowhere more so than in the new musical. In this context it's worth noting the striking frequency with which jokes and stories about “fags” come up in the Tynan profile.)

The problem is that, precisely because the gags are recyclable, they're not organically connected to anything else; as a result, the movies, however funny, feel slapdash and disjointed at best—the jokes may be funny, but they never really build to anything. I recently watched all of Brooks's films again, and, having looked forward to the hilarious bits I'd remembered, was surprised at how many
longueurs
there were. As with a Catskills comic, you tend, with Brooks's films, to recall the brilliantly funny moments and forget the rest.

 

Despite the mixed-to-terrible notices
The Producers
received when it opened in 1968 (“amateurishly crude,” Pauline Kael wrote in
The New
Yorker
; “a violently mixed bag,” “shoddy and gross and cruel,” Renata Adler wrote in the
Times
), Brooks's film soon established itself as a cult favorite. Today, it's not unusual to see it counted among the funniest movies ever made. This popularity surely owes a great deal to the same crudeness, grossness, cruelty, and amateurishness that the critics complained about. Unlike Woody Allen, with whom Brooks is often lumped in discussions of comic moviemaking, not least by himself (“Listen, there are one hundred and thirty-one viable directors of drama in this country. There are only two viable directors of comedy”), Brooks has made no attempt to become more “artistic,” more ostentatiously polished. To Allen's intellectual
artiste
, Brooks has been more than happy to play the outrageous clown; like Bialystock, he gives audiences access to their ids. (However ably it parodies old favorite westerns like
Destry Rides Again
,
Blazing Saddles
is most famous for a scene that follows a cowboy meal of baked beans to its logical, if protracted, gastroenterological conclusion.)

“Half of Mel's creativity comes out of fear and anger,” the comic Mel Tolkin has said. “He doesn't perform, he screams.” Brooks, the former stand-up who knew how much the public loves the high-wire spectacle of improvisation, of someone just standing there screaming, forcing the audience into delighted and sometimes outraged submission, had no plans to smooth himself out. “If someone wants to call my movies art or crap, I don't mind,” he told Tynan. “I produce beneficial things. A psychiatrist once told me he thought my psyche was basically very healthy, because it led to product. He said I was like a great creature that gave beef or milk. I'm munificent.” It's good to be the king.

The comedian's willingness to go as far over the top as necessary to get his audience's attention was nowhere more evident than in his first movie, whose technical crudeness attested to the wildly megalomaniac energies of its creator. But then,
The Producers
was nothing if not a testament to the obstinacy of vulgarity, the tenacity of bad taste; Brooks included that big neo-Nazi production number “right in the middle of the movie” because he knew that audiences occasionally want bad taste, want to have their faces rubbed in bona fide kitsch. (
Springtime for Hitler
is, Max declares, the musical about the unknown Hitler, “the Hitler with a song in his heart.”) The impulse to force us to confront the grotesque is the germ of a certain kind of comedy—the kind that we're
relieved to participate in because it frees us, temporarily, from everyday conventions and proprieties.

Or allows us vicariously to vent “fear and anger.” The idea for a musical about storm troopers wasn't as random as it may look: Brooks has recalled how, as a private who saw action in Europe at the end of World War II, he “sang all the time” when confronted with American corpses, and “made up funny songs.” It's worth keeping in mind, when comparing the original
Producers
to its shiny new epigone, that Brooks and the audience for his film, when it first came out, were old enough to have fought the Germans—a fact that tells you a lot about the nature and outrageous appeal of his comic style at its provocative best.
Springtime for Hitler
was a far more daring violation of taste twenty years after the end of the Second World War than it could ever be now. Indeed (in one of his rare if grudging concessions to considerations of taste and sensibility) Brooks agreed to change the name of his movie to the innocuous
The Producers
from its original title,
Springtime for Hitler
, because the film's Jewish distributor was afraid that the latter, even in a comedy, would alienate Jewish audiences.