Serjeant Musgrave's Dance

A subdued and somehow melancholy production of John Arden's Serjeant Musgrave's Dance opened, one day late, at the Loeb last night. I cannot say how the play will run when John Ross regains his voice and rejoins the company, but last night's performance was a thoroughly competent job interrupted now and then by brilliance.

To produce Arden, any Arden, is to attempt to solve two problems which have confounded the author himself since he began writing for the stage 11 years ago. The first is, how should the ballads and rhymed verse he so enjoys be stitched to the colloquial dialogue? The second is, how can one pick sides in plays where all the characters are likely to chuck their ideas and, in a completely metaphorical way, mind you, drop their pants.

Dan Freudenberger, who directed the show and designed the sets, has properly kept the rhymes and songs as unobtrusive as possible, grace notes to a theme. Everyone who is called on to sing manages the rough, sad voice of the balladeer.

The problem of picking sides, however, has not been solved, and the first two acts languish a bit because of it. Arden says in the introduction to the play, which is excerpted on the Loeb poster, that he is a timid man and that the play advocated complete pacifism timidly. The vacillation is within the play as a whole, in the dealings between characters and not neatly bottled in any one of them.

Yet Tom. Jones as Serjeant Musgrave holds back, refuses to show the fury in the words he speaks. Musgrave is no apologist, he is as cheerless and pinched a revolutionary as ever you will find at a Progressive Labor meeting. When Jones rages about the stage in the third act, rifle butt and bayonet swinging in murderous passion, the play suddenly has a purpose and a center.

Important as I take this flaw to be, it is not overwhelming, and Jones' later moments are almost atonement. John Lithgow as Sparky is, predictably enough, superb throughout as is Jack White as the changeable bargee. Roger Kozol who stood in for Ross as Hurst will, with any sort of justice, become a legend. It is said that he learned the part in one night and took an hour exam yesterday Kozol used a book, of course, but he was acting, not reading.

The three town officials, Michael Brooks as the mayor, Trevor Waters as the parson and John Gilmore as the constable should spend more time bullying an less luxuriating in the rich sound of their English accents. The three of them haven't got the arrogance of an old man whistling after a cat at night.

Norma Farber is quite good as Mrs. Hitchock, the tavernkeeper. The bar-maid and soldiers' whore, Anne is played by Dorcas Gill with little success, thereby keeping several bawdy scenes from being particularly bawdy. Her voice is too hard and flat and her movements stiff.

Freudenberger's staging and sets are first rate. He put the play in the round, as Spring's Awakening was done last year, and it works. Some of the dramatic force he loses by underplaying Musgrave he regains by keeping the action so close to the audience. The program does not indicate who designed the lightening, but whoever it was did it well.