Theater

THE THING ABOUT Hallelujah, Baby! and You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown is that they had no right even happening. If certain people in their madness thought it was possible to handle the problem of the Negro revolution light-heartedly and others to project comic strip characters into life across the footlights, and still other people in their madness decided to back these ventures with money, talent, time and taste—well, that’s show biz. But odds are odds and the odds were that they’d fall as flat as Governor Rockefeller’s lottery. But—nothing ventured, nothing ventured, as the saying doesn’t go. If the payoffs in the theater were as automatic as an AT&T (pardon) dividend, then there would be no bear market on stardust. Your Cabarets, Hello Dollys, and Mames, those brash, beautiful, expensive and all but sure-fire big star vehicles, are fine so long as Broadway and Off continue to accommodate the offbeat productions that allow fresh talents to shine as they do in Hallelujah and Charlie Brown.

Let’s take the roughest, toughest, cruelest problem in America today, the assimilation of the Negro into the dominant white community. Let’s set it to music, be cheerful about it. Let’s ring in an old-fashioned mammy figure, and a shufflin’, high-gamblin’ Pullman porter. For laughs let’s make the white man a liberal, and a nice guy, and still not a boob. Let’s have him fall in love with the Negro girl, and ask her to marry him. Let’s take our idea, and our money bags, and go jump in the nearest lake; it will be simpler and more merciful that way, because what we’re planning will enrage Negro militants and their allies—this is no LeRoi Jones set to music—and repel wide segments of the white community. But it hasn’t worked out that way. First of all Hallelujah is the work of pros: Arthur Laurents (book), Jule Styne (music), Betty Comden and Adolph Green (lyrics) —they’ve got style, they’ve worked together successfully in the past, they know what a hit is all about. On top of that, they’ve come up with the novel idea that race relations, while troubled, can bring out the best instead of the worst in people and, an added gimmick: the star, Leslie Uggams, is always 25 years old—25 years old at the turn of the century; in the Jazz Age and Depression; during World War II and in the Mod Sixties. Her mother never gets older —or changes. Her boy-friend never gets older, but changes from Pullman porter to mid-Thirties Communist, to militant Sixties civil rights leader who hates Charlie—all Charlies. Her white protector and friend never gets older, but grows in wisdom and tolerance. Hallelujah shows you just how much advance the Negro (and the white man) has made since the turn of the century. This aspect of Hallelujah, Baby! has to be discussed; it’s what people are curious about. But in the end the audience no more goes to Hallelujah to get a lesson in tolerance than it went to Wait a Minim! to deplore apartheid. People flock to the Martin Beck because Hallelujah is a blockbuster of a show and its star, Leslie Uggams, is something, SOMETHING. She can belt it out like Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand, croon like Lena Horne, there’s an echo there of the younger Mary Martin, but also a great big massive hunk of native God-given talent: Sing she can, act she can, dance she can, clown she can, emote she can. Like her, you must. It’s that stardust element again that — even years and years on the Mitch Miller show couldn’t conceal. Watch her sing “Smile, Smile,” which is what black folk do when white folk are around, or spoof it up in “Witches Brew,” a Marxist dialectical WPA version of Macbeth, and you’ll be coming back for more of the same whenever Miss Uggams is around. Her charms dazzle, but don’t manage to eclipse great companion performances by Lillian Hayman as her mother, Allen Case as the friendly white man and Billy Dee Williams as Clem, her militant boy friend.

PL

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Priscilla L. Buckley

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THE THING ABOUT Hallelujah, Baby! and You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown is that they had no right even happening. If certain people in their madness thought it was possible to handle the problem of the Negro revolution light-heartedly and others to project comic strip characters into life across the footlights, and still other people in their madness decided to back these ventures with money, talent, time and taste—well, that’s show biz. But odds are odds and the odds were that they’d fall as flat as Governor Rockefeller’s lottery. But—nothing ventured, nothing ventured, as the saying doesn’t go. If the payoffs in the theater were as automatic as an AT&T (pardon) dividend, then there would be no bear market on stardust. Your Cabarets, Hello Dollys, and Mames, those brash, beautiful, expensive and all but sure-fire big star vehicles, are fine so long as Broadway and Off continue to accommodate the offbeat productions that allow fresh talents to shine as they do in Hallelujah and Charlie Brown.

Let’s take the roughest, toughest, cruelest problem in America today, the assimilation of the Negro into the dominant white community. Let’s set it to music, be cheerful about it. Let’s ring in an old-fashioned mammy figure, and a shufflin’, high-gamblin’ Pullman porter. For laughs let’s make the white man a liberal, and a nice guy, and still not a boob. Let’s have him fall in love with the Negro girl, and ask her to marry him. Let’s take our idea, and our money bags, and go jump in the nearest lake; it will be simpler and more merciful that way, because what we’re planning will enrage Negro militants and their allies—this is no LeRoi Jones set to music—and repel wide segments of the white community. But it hasn’t worked out that way. First of all Hallelujah is the work of pros: Arthur Laurents (book), Jule Styne (music), Betty Comden and Adolph Green (lyrics) —they’ve got style, they’ve worked together successfully in the past, they know what a hit is all about. On top of that, they’ve come up with the novel idea that race relations, while troubled, can bring out the best instead of the worst in people and, an added gimmick: the star, Leslie Uggams, is always 25 years old—25 years old at the turn of the century; in the Jazz Age and Depression; during World War II and in the Mod Sixties. Her mother never gets older —or changes. Her boy-friend never gets older, but changes from Pullman porter to mid-Thirties Communist, to militant Sixties civil rights leader who hates Charlie—all Charlies. Her white protector and friend never gets older, but grows in wisdom and tolerance. Hallelujah shows you just how much advance the Negro (and the white man) has made since the turn of the century. This aspect of Hallelujah, Baby! has to be discussed; it’s what people are curious about. But in the end the audience no more goes to Hallelujah to get a lesson in tolerance than it went to Wait a Minim! to deplore apartheid. People flock to the Martin Beck because Hallelujah is a blockbuster of a show and its star, Leslie Uggams, is something, SOMETHING. She can belt it out like Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand, croon like Lena Horne, there’s an echo there of the younger Mary Martin, but also a great big massive hunk of native God-given talent: Sing she can, act she can, dance she can, clown she can, emote she can. Like her, you must. It’s that stardust element again that — even years and years on the Mitch Miller show couldn’t conceal. Watch her sing “Smile, Smile,” which is what black folk do when white folk are around, or spoof it up in “Witches Brew,” a Marxist dialectical WPA version of Macbeth, and you’ll be coming back for more of the same whenever Miss Uggams is around. Her charms dazzle, but don’t manage to eclipse great companion performances by Lillian Hayman as her mother, Allen Case as the friendly white man and Billy Dee Williams as Clem, her militant boy friend.