A gay old time sure isn’t what it used to be
NEW YORK–On a summer night 32 years ago, I sat watching The Ritz on Broadway and laughed ’til tears streamed down my face.
Earlier this week, I caught the revival of the same play that the Roundabout Theatre is presenting at Studio 54.
There were still moments when I laughed uproariously, but more often I sat there merely smiling – and a lot of the time I was thinking, “What had caused the change? Was it me? The play? The production? Or the 32 years in between?”
The answer is probably “all of the above.”
A farce set in a gay bathhouse where the hero is hiding from a trash-talking Mafioso was probably a lot funnier before two things: AIDS and The Sopranos.
Back in 1975, there wasn’t an STD that couldn’t be cured with some sort of antibiotic and even though The Godfather films had kept the Cosa Nostra firmly in our minds, it always seemed like they were in a mythical kingdom, not our own backyard.
But then men started dying from a mysterious virus that wound up killing millions of people. And although AIDS’s fingerprint on the North American landscape isn’t as strong as its once was, the rest of the globe is now suffering as well.
(You think all of that is a thing of the past? Some studies estimate at least 40 million people worldwide are currently living with HIV/AIDS.)
And on the Mafia front, well, once we all welcomed Tony Soprano and his world into our homes for six seasons and witnessed the darkly amoral landscape they inhabited, it got a bit harder to laugh at cartoon goombahs as they made deathbed demands to rub out their son-in-law.
The intervening years have also made the whole world more gay-savvy (Will & Grace, anyone?) and while it once may have been enough to pronounce the phrase “chubby chaser” to bring down the house, it now takes a little more imagination.
I’m willing to bet director Joe Mantello, who staged this revival, was aware of all these problems, because he’s compensated by pulling lots of rabbits out of his capacious theatrical hat.
The “talent show” staged in this bathhouse as a climax to Act II is now full of hysterical tips of the hat to Broadway favourites from the 1970s and, until you’ve seen one frantic actor play the entire chorus of white-gloved hands that opened Pippin, singing “Magic to Do,” you haven’t lived.
Rosie Perez is also deliciously toxic as the Spanglish spitfire, Googie Gomez, who complains about never getting to play “one of the f—king Trapp kids” in The Sound of Music as she fights a never-ending battle with one of her shoes.
And the final whammy of three mismatched guys dressed up like the Andrews Sisters still provides a substantial comic punch.
But when the script by Terrence McNally takes over, things get a lot slower and less glorious.
McNally has always admitted he was trying to write a classic Feydeau-styled farce, in which situations are carefully set up to allow for an ultimate explosive comic payoff.
But McNally must think we don’t have the patience to wait for our laughs and so he fills the prep period with lots of gay banter that was fresh 35 years ago, but now seems like the kind of stuff Eric McCormack and Sean Hayes would have flung back at their writers with orders to make it snappier.
Yes, when the farcical plot machinations of The Ritz finally come together, with doors slamming and desperate people racing all over Scott Pask’s stunning three-storey set, it provides a healthy dose of merriment.
But when the actors take their curtain call to the disco beat of “Last Dance,” it seems more darkly ironic than lightly nostalgic.
Because for too much of the evening, the shadows of the past have stifled the laughter of the present.
Source: thestar.com