Broadway Comes to Cable

By RICHARD CORLISS

The home box has a sparkling new season of music and drama

"I want to hear a warm, thrilling voice cry out, Hallelujah! Hallelujah! I'm alive!" So spoke Jimmy Porter, the cold, cauterizing antihero of John Osborne's 1956 play Look Back in Anger. And so might an American viewer today appraise the three major TV networks, where the individual voice tends to get lost in the Valium murmur of a hundred soap sellers, newscasters and tough private eyes. For the unique noise of a writer's whirring mind or an actor's seductive rhetoric, one could only turn in gratitude to PBS and its Great Performances and Theater in America series. Now there is another venue: cable. In their early years, the pay-movie networks dropped an occasional stage hit into their feature-movie schedules. Recently, with the proliferation of culture systems like CBS Cable and Hearst/ABC's ARTS, the trickle of musicals and drama has turned into a flood. As long as viewers' interest and sponsors' good will remain, theater on cable is here to stay.

This month alone The Entertainment Channel is offering a splendid re-creation of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, starring Angela Lansbury and George Hearn; Showtime has Paul Osborn's 1939 comedy Morning's at Seven, with four stars from its recent Broadway revival; and Home Box Office is airing Camelot, with Richard Harris as King Arthur in the throes of male menopause. Other transplanted Broadway shows will follow later this year: Lanford Wilson's Fifth of July (Showtime), Medea with Zoe Caldwell and Judith Anderson (CBS Cable) and Long Day's Journey into Night with Ruby Dee and a trio of black actors as Eugene O'Neill's black Irish Tyrones (ARTS).

The lure of the legit is strong enough to have attracted star actors who might otherwise be making much more money in Hollywood movies. Tommy Lee Jones and Tuesday Weld tap the dignity of N. Richard Nash's prairie romance, The Rainmaker (next month on HBO). Faye Dunaway and Dick Van Dyke made for a moving odd couple in The Country Girl (Showtime). And Malcolm McDowell captured the fury, if not the poetry, of angry young Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger (Showtime).

Ever since the electronic eye's infancy, TV and the stage have been infrequent, fractious partners. The 1950s are remembered as television's golden age of drama, and for good reason: not only was a new generation of playwrights creating intimate drama for the anthology series like Kraft Television Theater and Studio One, but Broadway stars were bringing familiar plays into a million homes. Noel Coward and Lauren Bacall struck a happy medium in Blithe Spirit; Katharine Cornell exhumed The Barretts of Wimpole Street. But in a decade when just about every new Broadway hit was sold to the movies, producers had little interest in "settling" for TV's small money, tiny screen and no prestige. Today, few Broadway plays except Neil Simon's make it to Hollywood. Naturalistic drama of the sort that translates easily to movies is out of fashion among the younger playwrights, and the teen-agers who constitute the core movie audience would be bored by all talk and no action. So theater is searching out a new audience: the middleaged, upper-middle-income subscribers to cable.

With an eye toward exposure of their product, if not immediate profits, theater entrepreneurs have teamed with cable systems for ambitious slates of plays and musicals. RKO/Nederlander is producing ten shows, including Sweeney Todd and Lena Home, The Lady and Her Music, for The Entertainment Channel. Joseph Papp has shown Sticks and Bones and The Dance and the Railroad, two hits from his Public Theater in New York City, on the ARTS system. For ARTS, Film Maker Robert Altman taped two one-act plays he had directed off-Broadway, and for Showtime he filmed his Broadway effort Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean.

Good intentions do not always make for good plays, nor good theater for good television. Both are media of words and faces, but for TV the tone must be pitched--lobbed, really--so as not to crack the small screen. The more intimate the play, the easier it is to make it work on TV, to tape it in a studio and turn it into superior TV drama. With an anecdotal story, a few simple sets, some pungent dialogue and two powerful, ingratiating actors in John Kani and Winston Ntshoma, Director Merrill Brockway can turn Athol Fugard's Sizwe Banzi Is Dead (shown on CBS Cable) into compelling television.

In David Storey's lovely, acrid chamber play Early Days (CBS Cable), Sir Ralph Richardson plays an aged politician, a cagey dotard who urinates on public walls, forces his family into awkward sexual intrigues and carries to his grave an instinct for the emotional jugular. Under Anthony Page's direction, Early Days became a poignant documentary of Sir Ralph's face. In tight closeup his eyes tear in remembrance and remorse; one eyebrow seems permanently arched from a half-century's quixotic disapproval; the duffel bags under the eyes suggest an old man who has seen too much, while the thin smile is that of a precocious child waiting the chance to torture a small, furry animal. Early Days played beautifully on a small stage in London's National Theater two years ago; on television it is preserved and perfected.

Some producers tape their shows before an invited audience to simulate for the home viewer the excitement of a night at the theater. Too often, the play is reduced rather than enhanced. For the camera actors act; for the audience they perform, Ming up the ballroom stage with long strides, pausing to cadge the expected laugh, hardballing their gestures to the top balcony. So some shows are taped on a proscenium stage but mostly without observers; applause and audience shots are used only at the beginning and end of the work. Thus in Camelot the actors can create their roles for the people at home who will actually be watching the show. And the show's Star Wars-type special effects can be rehearsed until they are dazzlingly right. One might wonder why Richard Harris needed to play Arthur in yet another medium (after the 1967 movie and last year's Broadway show), but this Camelot provides the answer: it is a comely hybrid of film, theater and TV.

As with most pay-cable theater offerings, Camelot is a safe bet: a hit show that became a hit movie, with a big star treading the boards once more in an upscale TV dinner theater. Sweeney Todd is something more dangerous, and something close to thrilling. When produced in 1979, Sondheim's macabre opera was not the stuff theater-party hits are made on: a musical about a London barber who cuts his customers' throats, a stage set as bleak as Bedlam, a score full of tunes to scream on your way out of the theater. On cable this sprawling Guignol fits with surprising snugness, and Angela Lansbury still schemes and postures through the role of Sweeney's accomplice like a deranged Raggedy Ann. As Sweeney, George Hearn gives a darkly heroic performance that by rights should win him an Emmy nomination next year. Sondheim advised Director Terry Hughes on this production, triggering speculation that some of his other unfilmed musicals might finally be preserved. Company, Follies, Anyone Can Whistle--there are works to be done. Cable can do them.

-- By Richard Corliss

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