Slightly Foxed

MAD ABOUT MINTZ--as you've probably heard by now-is about the efforts of a hard-sell promotional team to peddle the words of a third-rate writer. It would be easy--and it wouldn't be a million miles away from the truth--to say that Mad About Mintz is self-descriptive, that it has been hyped to the point where its (very real) virtues are disappointing. It's still worth seeing, but of expecting two and a half hours of pleasant whimsy, not non-stop genius.

MAM's first act is too long--it goes on for two hours. All this time is spent working out the details of a plot which is meant to be too involved for me to be able to summarize it. But this isn't the kind of force in which the structure of the plot itself is the entertainment--doors constantly opening and closing: first one then two characters forced to hide in the closet. Here the plot is about as lissome as a set of steel girders on which to hang puns, blowing like so many colored handkerchiefs with the command "laugh" emblazoned on there.

The visual jokes are imaginative and successful. A "bullet" sequence parodies some of the cliches of silent film comedy; a threatening group sneaks up behind someone who turns around with a frown, and they scamper away in terror. This is set to music that is its perfect complement. But elsewhere the music is less successful: it is scattered, somehow, never coming together to a really memorable tune or grand chorus, rarely providing the aural punch to go along with visual jokes.

Phillip laZebnik's lyrics are at their best sublimely witty in the tradition of Noel Coward. Cole Porter and Tom Lehrer. "We'll be the perfect duet Two mouths sucking the same Sucret." "Call up Ronald Reagan and ask for my Friend Flicka." There are ten songs in the long first act, and nine in the second act, which is only 40 per cent as long. Some of these--"Power to Persuade" and "Team Song are the standouts--are clearly what makes the second act so much tighter than the first. The script is not quite funny enough--though its effort is respectable and never embarrassing--to carry too snany words without music. "You want me to cut off my toe for you?" one of the characters asks. "No, I'll cut it off for you" is the groan-worthy reply. "Are you nervous?" someone asks. "No, no, I'm just nervous, that's all." It does come off better on stage, but not that much better.

THE SECOND ACT is a version of "Paradise Rejected" and gives LaZebnik a chance to play around with Milton and Shakespeare jokes. Some are good: "To be or not to be," someone begins. "Well, there's nothing to be gained by pursuing that line of thought." The appearance onstage of Satan, Adam, Eve, and God (as well as a deadpin walk-on by St. Peter Borowitz that steals the show for a few moments is a source or clever lines for LaZebnik, usually Satan sings:

I've been a star

And half the reason I left the colestial crew

Was the tedium of shining all night through

And God remarks, "I fell guilty, I can't help it I am what I am." she shrugs. A female Jehovah in love with Satan is a reversal with more satiric point than many of the Romantics were able to suggest--one of LaZebnik's most inspired ideas. But except for few brief stretches--as when a Keystone Cop enters and rat-tat-tats the finest.

"Who stole the door? This is an open and shut case. (He is attacked by people wielding salt-shakers.) I'll have you arrested for salting an officer.

LaZabnik can't quite keep up the pace. It's a little bit predictable to have God call Satan a "little devil" and he seems to think that just repeating words like "rhubarb" and "maraschino cherry" and "kumquat" will get laughs as surely as the name "Brooklyn" will once supposed to.

LaZabnik's earlier work, The Teeth of Mons Herbert, was much weirder than this. The jokes were more obscure, but you got the sense he had a truly original sense of humor. Maybe Mad About Mintz is something of a commercialization of his talents, an attempt to bring the LaZebnik wit to a wider audience than the Lowell JCR. His parodies of Hamlet and Paradise Lost count on only as much knowledge of these works as the casual reader of Bartlett's could be expected to have. The move to Agassiz has made LaZebnik's theater less intimate, more like musical comedy. In Teeth he paid little serious attention to plot and wrote a bizarre kind of free association opens buits, MAM the must hardly accompanies the dialogues in all. Occasionally the first violin gets to put in a comment but the rest are silent.

The cast, on the whole, is fine, Dick Bloom, Jim O'Connell and Ken LaZebnik make an energetic, professional and effective male chorus; David Goldbloom is Satan carries much of the show along by his shoer bravaoo, Douglas Hughes plays the closest the show has to a straight man, with consistent, aplomt and a fine voice. "The Nords" (Nancy Abrams Amy Berman and Patty Low) are very funny when deadpanning the lines of a fake Greek chorus:

"Who are you who open your mouth

And speak to us with tongue and lip?"

but less good when they sing--LaZebnik's lyrics require precise enunciation and too often jokes are missed simply because the words are smudged not only in their songs but throughout. Janice Cuddy (God) and Debbie Smigel (Jenny Novocane) are both excellent; Cuddy's "Power to Persuade" is belted out with high skill. Nancy Raffman brings a sharper edge to her role than most others in the cast and her kind of mania is just what an actor of actress needs to bring so this show.

I almost said "this kind of show", making it part of a category that couldn't even be considered when talking about The Teeth of Mons Herbers, which was sui generis in a way MAM isn't and doesn't try to be. But LaZebnik's next work--based on the assassination of James A. Garfield by a disgruntled office-seeker--might offer proof that success hasn't spoiled him. His talent is too original for us to be able to afford to lose.