| Papp and Lincoln Center (very long) | |
| Last Edit: AlanScott 06:29 am EST 02/28/19 | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 06:21 am EST 02/28/19 | |
| In reply to: In The Boom Boom Room - Whistler 02:23 am EST 02/28/19 | |
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| For whatever reason, as soon as Papp took over at Lincoln Center, he seemed to find very few first-rate plays for the next few years. Actually, he rarely found more than one or two within one season anywhere, but that was OK at the Public. It wasn't OK at the Beaumont. He might have been better off focusing on revivals at first, as you suggest, but even with revivals he did not get great results most of the time at the Beaumont. So while it's probably true that the Beaumont audience didn't especially want raw, if more of the plays had been of the caliber of a great Public triumph like Sticks and Bones rather than Mert and Phil or Black Picture Show, he would have had greater success. It's been a while since I've told here the story of the Wednesday matinee I saw of Sticks and Bones well into its run at the Golden, when about half if not two-thirds of the orchestra audience got up virtually all at once and starting exiting up the aisles when the climactic violence started but I think even something as upsetting as Sticks and Bones would have been accepted by the not-unsophisticated subscription audience at the Beaumont. Beaumont audiences may not have especially wanted raw, but they were mostly serious theatregoers. I think that the Beaumont just isn't all that good a fit for a lot of modern plays. When I think of the best new plays Papp produced over the course of his career, I think that relatively few of them would have played very well at the Beaumont. For that matter, he was right to produce Streamers at the Newhouse, where he produced several well received Shakespeares, including Moriarty's first Richard III, which was a big hit, along with some poorly received Shakespeares. But Streamers probably would not have played nearly as well at the Beaumont. It needs some claustrophobia, which you just cannot get there. I think that even if Papp had opened with a triumph, it would have been tough if he'd followed it with the new scripts and the flawed revivals that mostly followed. Actually, his first season was decidedly better than his second. Boom Boom Room was not really a disaster in performance, just a bit of a disappointment. Ditto The Au Pair Man, which was probably enjoyed reasonably well by the audiences. (I missed Au Pair Man but I saw all the others.) What the Wine-Sellers Buy got generally good reviews and I think audiences liked it. The Dance of Death managed to make Strindberg seem safe and uneventful, but again it was more a disappointment than a disaster. Then Papp moved Short Eyes into the Beaumont, where it worked pretty well. I didn't think it was all that good and perhaps it made some of the Beaumont audience very uneasy but I'd guess that most of them were impressed if only because they'd been told by the critics that they should be. I think the second season of one really poorly received production after another was the killer, and the sole revival, the panned Liv Ullman-Sam Waterston A Doll's House, was no help. In some book, there is a story about Richard and Dorothy Rodgers going to see it. At some point, presumably during intermission or as they were leaving, Dorothy asked him when Ibsen died, and he answered, "Tonight." So then Papp went to nothing but revivals for the third season (even though the two Scandinavian revivals had not worked out too well), and he rented the Booth for new plays (and that didn't work out too well), but the Beaumont revivals ended up being a problematic bunch to varying degrees until Threepenny Opera. Some very odd choices among those revivals, such as bringing to the Beaumont the not-very-good Delacorte Sam Waterston-Michael Rudman Hamlet in hopes it would be better with adjustments, and casting Ruth Gordon as Mrs. Warren. Trelawney made more sense on paper than the other two, but ended up not so good, although when Papp had produced the play a few years earlier at the Public, that production had been a success. So he ran the Threepenny into the following season, leaving room for just the famous Cherry Orchard that was admired by almost everyone and the Agamemnon, which got a mixed reception. Of course, one crazy thing was that the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center was finally hitting a generally respectable and sometimes very good level when Jules Irving resigned after the Forum season (where a lot of the best Repertory Theater productions had been) got canceled for lack of money. And the last Forum production — the repertory of two Beckett evenings with Tandy and Cronyn — was the biggest hit in the Forum's history, a sold-out hot ticket. The board was then excoriated for never having given the company anything like the kind of financial support that the other Lincoln Center constituents received. It came out that over the course of six years, the company's budget had never been raised, despite inflation. Papp was good at raising money. I think that's part of why Lincoln Center wanted him. No one there cared about raising money for the theatre company, but they figured he'd do it himself. Btw, I do want to mention that by the time the play generally known as In the Boom Boom Room opened at the Beaumont, it was called Boom Boom Room. It had been announced as In the Boom Boom Room, and after the Beaumont production, it again become In the Boom Boom Room, but for whatever reason, its official title at the Beaumont was simply Boom Boom Room. |
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