They Defied the Doomsayers

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Broadway, to its peril, has increasingly gone the way of the movies: it has become a business of megahits and instant flops, of shows that either stake a claim on immortality ("Now and forever" the Cats slogan boasts) or die within days. It costs so much to keep a play running--from $80,000 to $150,000 a week, not counting TV advertising--that unless the reviews are raves or a large advance sale provides a cushion, skittish investors often decide to cut their losses by closing worthy shows right away rather than struggling to survive and recoup. One sad measure of that impulse came with last week's Tony nominations: of the 17 shows nominated in various categories, three had folded the week they opened.

Yet the Tony nominations also confirmed the wisdom and courage of the producers of three shows that have bucked this trend. All three lacked surefire commercial appeal, and all faced some critical skepticism, but they defied the doomsayers and hung on. Last week they were rewarded. Big River, a sweet, small, no-stars musical based on Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, captured ten nominations, one for best musical. Joe Egg, a searing and yet raucously funny story about the parents of a hopelessly retarded child, was nominated for three acting awards and for best revival. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, a bitter and explosive recollection of racial prejudice that unfolds during a recording-studio session for a 1920s blues band, won three nominations, including one for best play.

The most remarkable of the three survivors is Ma Rainey. Playwright August Wilson had never had a play produced commercially. The cast were relative unknowns. The play's subject is gloomy and its ending violent; the characters are mostly black, and the two whites are unsympathetic. Yet since it opened last October, it has played to 60% of capacity in the 1,108-seat Cort Theater, although it has not yet been able to repay its backers.

The power of the play comes from the barely suppressed rage of its central characters: Ma Rainey (Theresa Merritt), a fierce, massive singer who has reacted to prejudice by creating an isolated world in which she need not tolerate the least compromise, and her backup trumpet player (Charles Dutton), a keenly ambitious composer-arranger who is fixated on the memory of his mother's rape by white thugs. When these two potent wills clash, the bystander who suffers is, inevitably, one of their own and not a white oppressor. Episodic and slow but vividly real in portraying even minor characters, Ma Rainey marks the emergence of a substantial new voice for the theater.

Big River sounds like an unlikely marriage: Mark Twain, giant of American literature, and Roger Miller, twangy country songwriter. Twain wrote penetratingly of the time when his nation was a frontier. Miller (Dang Me, King of the Road) provides at most a wistful echo of that era, a longing for the free and easy life now that there are few byways left to wander. But the musical, featuring 17 of Miller's down-home ditties, seems utterly natural, as full of unforced charm as Huck himself.

The picaresque ramblings of Huck (Daniel Jenkins), who runs away from the enslavements of civilization, and his friend Jim (Ron Richardson), a literal runaway slave, have been pared into a purposeful narrative without diminishing the aura of spontaneity. William Hauptman's book also sustains Twain's deeper exploration of how a society could view slavery as normal and regard assisting a runaway as a crime against property. The story starts slowly and wobbles in tone, but achieves the original's deft mix of social comment, slapstick farce, heartrending melodrama and boy's own tale of danger. Big River, which started in regional theaters and seems likely to become a standard there, deserves its place on Broadway. It is gentle, thoughtful, slightly old-fashioned and much cleaner than the back of Huckleberry's perennially unwashed neck.

Joe Egg first appeared on Broadway in 1968, and its lead roles have been a recurrent draw to major actors ever since. For Jim Dale, a manic clown who won a Tony for walking a tightrope in Barnum, and Stockard Channing, a lopsided-grinning gamine best known for mugging her way through the movie Grease, there could scarcely be better parts to broaden their images. Brian and Sheila cannot have anything like a normal life if they keep their helpless spastic daughter Josephine; they cannot rid themselves of guilt if they remand her to the unloving custody of the state. Yet, mercifully to audiences, the story is not their sorrow but their admirable if cockeyed determination to cope. They face their nearly intolerable burdens with a giddy, all-mocking humor, a pretend merriment that at times becomes infectiously real.

Dale has the showier role. In recounting, directly to the audience, the downs and irrepressible ups of the couple's years together, he mimics a condescending Viennese specialist, a trendy clergyman, a miraculously cured boy catatonic turned tap dancer. Leaping like a mountain goat from one peak of artifice to another, Dale displays flashes of a fine mind wasted on self-pity and despair. Channing joins him in these sarcastic reveries, but most of the time she has the hard duty of being normal. Sheila is clever enough to keep up with Brian but is essentially undistorted. She feels a mother's love. At the end, while Dale plots and scurries to transform their life, Channing goes about her daily routine. She demonstrates that in art, as in life, the real bravura performance can be quiet fortitude.