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Searching Off-Broadway for Excellence
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20157 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1992 |
1,690 Words |
| Author
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William Ruhlmann
William Ruhlmann is a critic based in New York. His seventh
book, The Rolling Stones, was published last September. |
In the world of New York theatergoing, if Broadway, with its handful of glitzy blockbuster musicals and little else, has long since ceased to provide a forum for innovative and original theater, and off off-Broadway, with its dozens of low-budget and subsidized plays, has proven fragmented and marginal, off-Broadway has captured a vibrant middle ground, trying for the original while also keeping an eye on ticket sales. Among the shows to turn up in the first half of the 1991-92 theater season, a representative sampling includes a couple of musicals done in familiar styles, a historical play, and two original looks at contemporary life. The mixture of subject matter and the range of quality are typical of the lively scene.
"Science Fiction--Double Feature," the introductory song to the campy 1973 British musical The Rocky Horror Picture Show, referred, among other movies, to the 1956 film The Forbidden Planet, and the show made an explicit connection between such trash cinema and the contemporaneous dawn of rock 'n' roll. Return to The Forbidden Planet, Bob Carlton's British musical, is a stepchild of Rocky Horror as well as a singing, dancing version of the movie. As with both those works, your enjoyment of it will depend on your willingness to laugh at it as much as laugh with it.
The new show has other parents as well. The Forbidden Planet was based, very roughly, on The Tempest. Return cribs much of its dialogue from Shakespeare--though not from just The Tempest. In fact, any scholar would likely get a headache just trying to keep the references straight.
The next unusual element in this stew is rock 'n' roll. Rocky Horror had original songs, but Carlton has lifted a collection of familiar songs from the midfifties to the midsixties and found places for them, sometimes by altering the words here and there.
Put it all together, and you may find yourself in a scene in which Captain Tempest (Robert McCormick, who bears a distinct resemblance to Robert Goulet) speaks lines from Antony's eulogy for Caesar, then switches to parts of Kate's speech on wifely behavior from The Taming of the Shrew, then finds himself in a duet with Gloria, the Science Officer (Julee Cruise), singing James Brown's "It's a Man's World."
The rock 'n' roll comes off much more successfully than the Shakespeare does, and the plot, though helpfully repeated at the top of the second act by the videotaped narrator, James Doohan (Scotty from Star Trek), is hard
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