Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/060192/06019941.000

Text File | 1992-09-10 | 4KB | 83 lines

                                                                                REVIEWS, Page 81

THEATER

Dancing Till They Drop


By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

    TITLE: They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
    AUTHOR: Music by Robert Sprayberry; Lyrics and Book by
            Nagle Jackson
    WHERE: Denver Center Theater

    THE BOTTOM LINE: A gritty Depression-era musical with
Broadway potential.


    Few kinds of civic betterment have enjoyed wider approval
than the regional nonprofit theater movement. But the acclaim
has tended to obscure three dirty little secrets. First, many
of these institutions have been afflicted with an edifice
complex, caring more about glistening facilities than about what
goes on inside them. Second, the regional houses have been
loath to risk developing new plays and, even more, new musicals.
Third, at many of them the acting is mainly mediocre. A seeming
example of the first and third shortcomings is the Denver Center
Theater. The four-stage complex is as impressive an array of
arts buildings as can be found short of New York City or Los
Angeles, but the resident company is sometimes plain
embarrassing.

    When it comes to new works, however, hardly a troupe in
America has so rich a record. Denver has sent Quilters to
Broadway, Hyde in Hollywood to American Playhouse on PBS, and
Circe and Bravo and Veterans Day to London's West End, among
others. At the moment, the troupe has four full-scale premieres
on its stages, and next month brings staged readings of eight
more.

    By far the most ambitious of the current efforts is They
Shoot Horses, Don't They? The gritty, poignant musical about a
Depression-era dance marathon is derived from the same Horace
McCoy novel as the 1969 film starring Gig Young and Jane Fonda.
The phenomenon of the endurance dance is grimly compelling in
itself: couples shuffling around the clock for months,
withstanding exhaustion, injury and humiliation in pursuit of
the cash prize for the last pair standing. But the script evokes
the '80s as well as the '30s and suggests the sick symbiosis,
then and now, between would-be stars grabbing at a grimy corner
of show business and the prurient, prying public come to watch.

    Unlike a British adaptation a few years ago that relied on
well-chosen period tunes, this Horses features a good new score,
blending old-fashioned novelty numbers and ballads with
contemporary character songs for fully a dozen roles. In the
exquisite ensemble number Sunday Morning, a lilting series of
one- and two-line vignettes recalls the everyday normality that
the contestants once enjoyed and that the Depression destroyed.
But while Nagle Jackson's book is shrewdly and tightly
constructed, his lyrics frequently sound clankingly obvious and
unrevealingly generic ("We found the Depression depressing, and
so we just went on dancing").

    Director Alan Bailey and designers Andrew Yelusich (sets
and costumes) and Charles MacLeod (lights) achieve just the
right balance between the seedy and the dreamlike in this
California pierside. Most of the 25 actors are only adequate,
however, and not one has a first-rate singing voice. Jeff
McCarthy has a sledgehammer unsubtlety as the unscrupulous
impresario Rocky, Thomas Nahrwold is bland in the underwritten
lead role of a failed film director, and Kathy Morath plays his
despairing partner with an unrelenting snarl.

    The Denver company's managers are hoping to see this show
go on to Broadway. That will take significant rewriting and
much recasting. But at the swaying and footsore end of that
marathon should be a prize worthy of the struggle.