Bound For the U.S.A.

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

When American stage professionals head off to London for a busman's holiday of playgoing, the standard witticism is that they are getting a head start on the upcoming season back home. Britain, long a supplier of straight plays and now seemingly the only source of successful musicals, this past season exported shows that won twelve of Broadway's 19 Tony Awards. The current London stage features seven works already announced for U.S. production; others are under consideration. In addition are the star-cast classics, adaptations of great novels, formula thrillers, trousersdown farces and sociopolitical dramas that make London during any summer week as richly varied a theatrical panoply as Broadway during an entire season.

Perhaps the most striking symbol of Britain's impact came in the West End opening last week of Follies, not so much a revival as a complete reconsideration of the 1971 Stephen Sondheim musical, set at a reunion of performers of Ziegfeld-style spectacles. The original version won five Tony Awards but lost nearly all its then awesome $800,000 investment, and save for a 1985 Lincoln Center concert version, there has been no revival. The $3 million-plus London production opened to bigger advance sales than Cats, Les Miserables or the current hottest ticket, Phantom of the Opera, according to Cameron Mackintosh, who produced them all. If it thrives, he envisions raising $8 million to "help bring Follies back to Broadway, which created the traditions it celebrates" -- a rare reverse transfer that would be welcome and yet, for Americans, a little humbling.

As a result of Mackintosh's invitation to Sondheim and Librettist James Goldman to "have a wee think" about revamping the show, the pair has come up with four new songs and a completely new book. According to a program note by the creators, "scarcely a line of dialogue remains from the original." The central story of two couples, old friends, who married the wrong partners used to end in nervous breakdowns for some of them; it now closes with self- understanding and at least hints of reconciliation. What felt in 1971 like a put-down of old-fashioned musicals for their saccharine irrelevance has evolved into an unabashed celebration of revolving multicolored staircases, grandes dames in glittery dresses and kick-stepping lines of chorus boys in top hats. One of the new numbers, performed deadpan by Diana Rigg, is a striptease ending in a bubble bath. The original Follies might have inspired the wisecrack that nostalgia isn't what it used to be, but in this version, it certainly is.

If what seemed groundbreaking in 1971 has become mainstream, even slightly dated, the reason is that Follies profoundly influenced much of what followed. The show remains at once a brilliant pastiche and a prescient farewell to a style of musical that became the most popular form of theater in history but that no one seems willing or able to write anymore. The guts of the story, as in the first version, are plaintive solos for disillusioned women: Broadway Baby, in which an old show girl (Margaret Courtenay) recalls youthful struggles in a tinkly, ironic forerunner of A Chorus Line's What I Did for Love; Who's That Woman?, a realization by a brassy belter (Lynda Baron) of how age has crept up on her; Could I Leave You?, an outpouring of vitriol from a neglected wife (Rigg); Losing My Mind, the pathetic admissions of a suppliant lover (Julia McKenzie). Sondheim's best lyric ever is I'm Still Here, an anthem of survival that compresses four decades of social history into the battered but unrepentant cry of a faded star. It gets a showstopping performance by Dolores Gray, who made her Broadway debut in 1944 and hasn't faded a bit. Follies seemed fragmented and vignettish in 1971, and still does. But the tinsel glitters like stardust, and the vignettes are often thrilling.

While Follies overshadows everything else on offer in London's commercial theater, it is only one of four musicals slated for the Great White Way. The others are Chess, a cynical and muddled narrative in which Sicilian openings and checkmates serve as metaphors for nuclear disaster; Phantom, a quasi- operatic retelling by Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber (Evita, Cats) of the much- filmed monster-meets-girl melodrama; and another revival from the heyday of the Broadway tunesmiths, Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate, in a consistently lively rendition by the Royal Shakespeare Company that nonetheless will need star quality recasting to prosper on Broadway.

In addition to musicals, the West End offers one surprise delight that is, rather, a play with music. Up on the Roof is a British cousin to The Big Chill, an unpretentious glimpse of the evolving bond among five friends at college graduation in 1975, a wedding in 1980 and a tenth reunion. They meet as members of an a cappella rock group and often break into semi-oldies song: the sweet, sentimental arrangements, unaccompanied by a band and therefore a realistic part of the action, aptly comment on their changing lives. The appealing cast, which helped write the show in improvisations, achieves the authentic small touches of camaraderie.

Among straight plays, the most offbeat, and best, is the Soviet drama Sarcophagus, written within two months after the Chernobyl disaster by Vladimir Gubaryev, science editor of Pravda. Set at a research hospital to which victims are sent, the narrative offers straightforward human interest yet also manages to incorporate medical and scientific debate and, impressively, a relentless political inquest into the shortcomings of the Soviet bureaucracy. The focal character is a Shakespearean fool (Nicholas Woodeson), a victim of a laboratory accident who has somehow survived for more than a year, prematurely aged and deformed, but in full use of his wits. Liberated by his status as a medical miracle and by the very fragility of his existence, he asks the questions no one else dares to and utters what others only think. His corrosive wit makes what could be a dreary preachment ferociously entertaining. Sarcophagus will receive its U.S. premiere in a different production in Los Angeles in September.

Two other new plays are slated for the U.S. Breaking the Code, a true story of an early computer genius whose career was wrecked by revelation of his homosexuality, is worth seeing primarily for the star turn of Derek Jacobi, who has left the role in London but will play it on Broadway. Serious Money, a scathing caricature of the London equivalent to Wall Street's insider-trading scandals by Caryl Churchill (Cloud Nine), seethes with energy but lacks the intellectual ambition of true satire. Instead of prompting a complacent audience to see its own sins portrayed, the drama settles for the lesser heights of propaganda, with actors and audiences congratulating each other on not being like these moneygrubbers. The central point -- the presumed parallel between greed among young stock manipulators and the national mood that led to re-election for Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher -- is provocative but unexplored.

Of London's dozen-plus other new plays, three clearly merit a U.S. transfer. Alan Ayckbourn has become known as the British Neil Simon for his string of popular comedies. But unlike Simon, whose work is becoming more generous and forgiving, Ayckbourn grows steadily more sour. In A Small Family Business he traces, far more convincingly than Churchill, the seemingly small steps by which a clan of furniture manufacturers turn into outright gangsters, all in the name of fiddling the taxman, outdoing rival firms and one-upping one another. In Melon, Playwright Simon Gray seems to look back on two decades of his own urbane stage talk (The Common Pursuit, Otherwise Engaged) and reject that whole genre in favor of a messy, harrowing confrontation with life's inescapable realities: illness and death. The play's odd name is that of the title character, pitilessly enacted by Alan Bates as he swiftly plummets from domineering success to desperate schizophrenia. Risky and uncomfortable to watch, in both content and form Melon is a play of admirable daring.

Kenneth Branagh played Henry V for the R.S.C. two seasons ago at the astonishing age of 24 and won comparison to Laurence Olivier. Now Branagh has launched his own company and is starring in its first venture, which he also wrote, a Northern Ireland story called Public Enemy. If the title recalls the James Cagney gangster picture, it should: Branagh's story turns on the fact that he is a stunning Cagney look-alike, sound-alike and even dance-alike, having mastered the loose-ankled, leg-crossing style of Yankee Doodle Dandy. The down-and-out youth he portrays, however, identifies more with Cagney the nihilist avenger. As this unemployed impersonator gets crazier and crazier, the violence of screen fantasy starts to merge with the equal mayhem of the everyday life around him. Public Enemy starts as a trick gilded with nostalgia. Without ever abandoning the initial conceit, it manages to sting the consciences of spectators, accusing them of shrugging off Belfast's epidemic killing as just someone else's insoluble problem.

Perhaps the aspect of London theater that makes Broadway denizens most envious is not the new work but the abundance of classic revivals. The West End currently features superb renditions of Chekhov's The Three Sisters and J.B. Priestley's metaphysical rumination An Inspector Calls, while the R.S.C. has been enjoying a solid Romeo and Juliet in modern dress and a soulful Richard II starring Jeremy Irons. Another Shakespeare play, Antony and Cleopatra, directed by Peter Hall, is simply the best show in London. With Anthony Hopkins' noble Roman to Judi Dench's imperious Egyptian, this is a magnificent staging, nearly four hours of nonstop action that gives spellbinding immediacy to political intrigue two millenniums old. In almost any other production, the cheers would surely resound for the Octavius of Tim Pigott-Smith, a very archetype of the smiling lethal pragmatist, or for the Lepidus of John Bluthal, a magnificent hack with keen survival instincts, or for the bluff, soldierly Enobarbus of Michael Bryant, who, in the play's most spectacular moment, evokes an entire great battle just by his eyes' fearful reaction to its distant lights and noise. But Hopkins and Dench so fully explore the admirable and pitiable central couple, their triumphs and dissipations and unconquerable wills, that they make the roles their own for a generation -- and remind all who watch them of why Broadway views London with esteem and envy.