CAST, ARCO & 3PO: The Fall Season Hits Its Stride

The usual stacks of lumber are occupying Leverett Old Library these days as Slow Dance on the Killing Ground, one of several House shows moving from the audition-and-bookwork stage to the run-through, starts to take shape.

Slow Dance, co-sponsored by Leverett and Black CAST, and slated for the first weekend in November, is just at the point where the stage lights hanging from the room's ceiling stop embodying a baleful threat. The cast of three--who play a young Black man, a young white woman and an old white man undergoing a long confrontation and catharsis in a shop--are just sketching the patterns needed to make the show more than a muddle of soliloquies.

Jacob Lamar plays the young Black man, swift and fierce, something of a swashbuckler, full of lashing motion. David Reiffle, the elderly shopkeeper, settles into counteracting stubborness and stolidity, wrapping himself in a faint German accent.

Black CAST (before becoming independently recognizable, stood for Community and Student Theater) tries to produce shows that concern community life and "portray Blacks as they would like to be portrayed in the community," says vice president Kevin Porter.

Neither Slow Dance nore the December show, Purlie, is likely to lend itself to another CAST tradition, that of touring a production to Walpole Prison or elsewhere outside Harvard. But Alan Shotkin, producer of Slow Dance, hopes to increase the show's exposure by more traditional means, primarily by cramming eight or nine performances into the two-weekend run. Because so much devolves on each actor, matinees, but no midnight shows, are being contemplated. "You could kill people that way," Shotkin explains.

Grand Opening

The ARCO Forum at the Kennedy School of Government finds one more form of political expression tonight as Jean Anouilh's Antigone starts its four-day run.

Though in many ways the experiment is daring, the creators of the IOP's first dramatic production ever will be spared one worry--the fear that a flop would preclude any further attempts to mount politically relevant drama in the space. "I don't think we're going to be daunted, even if we're not as successful as we think we will be," says Jane Markham, the IOP's liaison for the project, who expresses a firm commitment to support not only Antigone and Hair, (going up as soon as Antigone comes down), but similar projects in the spring as well.

So far the experiment seems to be working, although inexperience has caused some unexpected pre-production tangles. No one had thought to worry about storage space for props and costumes, or about the difference between a seating plan with sight-lines to a single podium and one geared to the varied action of a play. And the show, though mounted very simply, ran over its $1200 budget because of "our complete lack of everything." Markham says, explaining, "It's just so different from what we ordinarily do."

The K-School has, of course, been able to provide some definite advantages, notably its "big media machine," director Ted Osius says appreciatively. Taking advantage of the occasion to make a "Splashy opeining," the group invited media representatives to a gala dress rehearsal and reception last night and papered the University with two rounds of posters. The first of these probably caught numerous eyes political and otherwise with the mysterious display of a line from the show, demanding. "What Went On In the Back Room--In the Smelly Kitchen of Politics?"

The play itself uses the excitement of the Forum's space to emphasize the dissonant, the eerie and the small. The audience capacity of 800 has been pared to less than 200, partly because of the sight-lines, but partly because, says Osius. "We wanted to keep things intimate. There was no reason to seat people in corners."

Voices from single actors and the nine-person chorus will sound from unexpected directions, as will the original incidental music composed entirely of percussion. In the only major departure from the script. Antigone's two brothers will open the play by battling to the death in a ritual sequence choreographed by Nicole Grace--a professional who has worked with George Balanchine--to the tune of two "battling" pianos.

Final Products

As smaller shows gear up to start, the Loeb's immense and detailed Threepenny Opera has only one weekend left to run. After surviving the sudden incapacitation of John Langdon, cast as J.J. Peachum, with the masterful pinchhitting aid of Ernest Kerns, Threepenny arrives on the stage with, if not quite a unified impact, certainly enough brilliant elements to satisfy any viewer.

The savage intensity of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's script and score, probably already familiar to many who will attend this production, director R.J. Cutler sharpens considerably with a raw-edged style of acting and "the meanest nastiest filthie to translation we could find," says one lead. Like the lyrics to the "anti-operatic songs, some of the combative harshness in the acting makes the audience shift uneasily. But it gives them at the same time the feeling that Cutler & Co. meant their skin to crawl this way.

Some of the brilliances are to be expected. John Bellucci as Mac the Knife, for instance, turns in a performance steaming with violence and malice, and the Weill songs, despite some weakness in the orchestra, wound and horrify as they must. But there are other, less conventional strengths, each illuminating enough of the production to carry it past awkward moments. Lars Gunnar-Wigemark, snarling and slobbering as he narrates, inspires awe and terror even when he enters unexpectedly carrying a bright pink can of Tab; and Martha Hackett as Jenny, Macheath's favorite whore, provides the evening's most gripping moments in her two songs. --Amy E. Schwartz

Downtown

Michael Bennett's new musical, Dream Girls, makes one wonder if his hit A Chorus Line was merely a fluke. Although Girls chronicles the rise and fall of a singing group based loosely on the Supremes, it remains an essentially soulless show.

Tom Eyen's cliched book and lyrics lack the wit and satiric bite that infused his Mary Hartman scripts. With lines like "Show business is a rough business, and it is a business," we feel we're watching a 1930s movie musical in technicolor with Bennett trying to do a Busby Berkeley turn. The choreography here however, lacks flair, Henry Krieger's music is a mediocre imitation of the '60s sound, and this extended, boring production reduces the audience to waiting for the girls' next costume change in their $1.5 million wardrobe.

Better to stay up late one night and catch the original Forty-Second Street.   --Brian M. Sands