Hourglass
in the press.....
TROUBLE
IN PARADISE - June - July 2006
"YUMMY...This
is
a great-looking, giddy little production, playfully mocking
and reveling in the impossible glamour of those Depression-era movies
about money and mores.... As the criminal couple, Jeremy Shamos and
Nina
Hellman are smooth as silk. Carolyn Baeumler is elegant and sympathetic
as their target, Madame Colet."
-New York Times (Anita
Gates),
6/23/06 - "Trouble in Paradise: The Impossible Glamour That Was
Lubitsch" - Click
here to read entire review
"ENCHANTING...Directed
with jaunty aplomb by Elyse Singer, the actors glide smoothly
into a witty simulacrum of the movie. Jeremy Shamos, his voice a
cultivated purr, excels as the suave international thief Gaston
Morescu; the vulpine Nina Hellman tears amusingly into the role of his
life-partner in crime, and Carolyn Baeumler has a sweetly soft presence
as their easy-living, free-spirited mark...Set designer Lauren Halpern
and costumer Theresa
Squire—squeezing great-looking work out of a presumably tight
budget—help make this stylish production pop like a bottle of domestic
champagne. Trouble in Paradise is Off-Off heaven: a $20 show
that plays like a million bucks. "Time Out New
York (Adam Feldman) 6/29/06
Click
here to read entire review
"With
his wide brow and taut grin, Shamos radiates a debonair
insouciance, and wide-eyed Hellman nearly outdoes him with her brassy
guile...The director and designers have great fun with the piece's
upper-caste
costumes and art deco milieu. Hellman's gold lamé, Rattazzi's
stock
garters, even an unpretentious telephone table threaten to steal the
show (perhaps not such a surprise in a comedy about thievery). The
bouncy, blurting jazz score by Steven Bernstein also makes away with
one's heart...Paradise is a fairly Edenic evening." -- Village Voice (Soloski) "To Heiress Human: Frothy swindle comedy
captures that Lubitsch touch" Click
here to
read entire review
"The
perfect entertainment for a summer evening. One can almost hear
the martinis chilling all throughout this detailed production, directed
beautifully by Elyse Singer... the stellar cast of Trouble in Paradise
is hilarious... For those of you craving a satisfying taste of
yesteryear, Trouble in Paradise is the perfect dish. It goes down easy,
fills one up, and leaves one completely fulfilled. Lubitsch would be
proud."
-NYTheatre.com (Michael
Criscuolo), 6/19/06 - "Trouble in
Paradise" - Click here to
read entire review
"This
theatrical adaptation would make Lubitsch proud, as the jokes and
punch lines consistently hit their mark. The entire cast of Trouble in
Paradise had the audience in its palm and roaring approval, as reliably
as a laugh track. "
-offoffbroadway.com (Adrienne Cea),
6/16/06 - "Stolen Hearts" - Click here to
read entire review
"Every
once in a while a reviewer discovers a sparkling gem in a little
theatre off-off Broadway... Singer gives us action, smart snappy
movement, perfectly timed dialogue and a great cast. TROUBLE IN
PARADISE is a swell show with great charm, sophistication, and panache,
and is entertaining from start to finish. Long may it wave!"
-Lively Arts, 6/22/06 -
Click
here to
read entire review
Click
here to read Time Out New York's feature article "BELLE OF THE
SCREWBALL: Multifaceted
actor Nina Hellman goes high camp in Trouble in Paradise. "
Red
Frogs by Ruth Margraff - February 2002
"Cherish good avant-garde theater, like Red Frogs
at P.S. 122...brilliant ideas build on one another like a crossword
puzzle, and the stage and audience share an in-on-the-joke
camaraderie...RED
FROGS fuses a bewildering variety of ideas and themes and styles into
an
almost indescribable but very exciting evening." - nytheatre.com
"[RED FROGS] takes its audience on a joyful glee ride
through a landscape
of contemporary culture blurred and distorted by tidal waves and the
author's
own wicked sense of humor...the play's carnival atmosphere bursts with
joie de vivre...While there's plenty of meaning to be found in RED
FROGS,
the proceedings at P.S. 122 make Margraff's message a
roller coaster of fun." -- AmericanTheater Web
"a mouth-watering cast of downtown all-stars"
- TIME OUT NEW YORK
"the performances are all outstanding."
- offoffoff.com
"Entertaining, odd and sexy...the actors
handle themselves beautifully, keeping the reigns firmly in their
grasp,
while still letting the play take on a life of its own...like a
sculpture
or work of art or music, each spectator will have a highly
individualistic
idea of what is taking place." -- SHOW BUSINESS
.Sex
by Mae West - December 1999 - February 2000
"Exuberant...first-rate"
New York Times
(Vincent
Canby), 2/13/00 - "Mae West, Still There for Us to Come Up and See" Click
here to read entire review
"Smart, funny...almost
maliciously provocative...this
show is good comedy."
New York Times
(Bruckner),
12/24/99 - "Mae West's First Play (for the Stage, That Is)" Click
here to read entire review
"Bursts with verve and
naughtiness..."
Village Voice
(Russo),
12/28/99 - "West with the Might" Click
here to read entire review
"Amazing cast...sensational"
Show Business
(Callahan),
12/22/99 - "Come Up and See it Some Time" Click
here to read entire review
"Elyse Singer and the
Hourglass Group have
put back the sting in 'Sex' and made it a hot ticket once again...this
is the first hot date play of the 21st century."
Back Stage
(Gluck),
1/21/00 - "Sex"
"Delicious...Ultimately one
has to wonder,
if it hadnít been for gay men--and simpatico women such as
Singer and Baeumler--would
there ever have been a Mae West? Fortunately for the arts, all
have
lived to entertain another day. Just like the revival of
Sex."
The Advocate
(Drake),
2/1/00 - "Wicked Wit of the West"
"The most inspired revival
choice of the
year...'Sex' succeeds as a searing conflagration of lust and wit."
New York Blade
(Smith),
1/7/00 - "Red Hot: 'Sex' Still Satisfies"
"The ingenious concept of the
production--and
the charm and energy of the players--have made this one of the more
enjoyable
theatre-evenings of the season. Carolyn Baeumler, in West's
starring
role, is a vampish delight. But the entire cast, each in his or her own
style, is great fun to watch."
nytheatrrewire.com
(Loney) - "SEX" -- A Play by Mae West [****] Click
here to read entire review
"Bright-eyed and
bushy-tailed, this crack
ensemble enacts this somewhat serious farce with an aphrodesiacal
confidence.
To see the tribe of them strut their stuff is to feel alive; at sundry
moments I was tempted to leap onstage and join them."
offoffbway.com
(TravSD)
- Jan. 2000 - "'Sex' at the Gershwin Hotel" Click
here to read entire review
"Baeumler is great...Hellman
is hilarious."
Manhattan FILE
(LW)
- Feb. 2000 - "Sex"
'SEX' FEATURES ON THE
WEB:
Salon
- "'Sex' and Synanon Onstage" - by Cintra Wilson
Village
Voice - "Mae Day! Mae Day!" - by Alexis Soloski
New
Criterion - "Mae Days" - by Mark Steyn
Freitag
(GER) - "Hedwig aus Ostberlin" - by Henrike Thomsen
To view additional feature
articles
on SEX, click here.
BabyMistressDivaBitch
by Sarah McCord
"With
the obvious talents of Ms. McCord and her director, the seemingly
ubiquitous
Elyse Singer, who's been responsible for more interesting theatre
lately
than almost any other young director in New York..." -- (November
1997)
"The
show is masterfully directed by Elyse Singer, who has managed
to
keep McCord the actor out of the way of McCord the writer and vice
versa."
-- Greenpoint Gazette, (10/1/97)
Sex
by Mae West [reading at New York Theatre Workshop]
"the
combination of camp and protofeminism make Sex both wickedly fun
and
eminently fascinating." -- Time Out New York (7/24/97)
Hundreds
of Sisters & One BIG Brother by Deborah Swisher
"a
riveting
solo performance...Swisher is a performance artist with a stage
presence
so engaging you want to follow her anywhere she's inclined to take you,
acting skills so well defined she makes each moment alive and
immediate,
and a narrative style so disarmingly honest that you won't soon forget
either the tale she has to tell nor its larger implications...One quick
scene follows another, beautifully orchestrated by Elyse Singer...Sisters
[is] not only an extraordinary personal odyssey but a smart and
provocative
parable for our time" -- San Francisco Examiner (3/13/99)
"captivating...Director
Elyse Singer guides Swisher through a crisp, beautifully designed
production..."
-- Oakland Tribune (3/17/99)
"a
complex, compassionate, funny and ultimately poignant play" -- SF
Weekly
(3/17/99)
"Ever
since the Dead died...it's been hard to make the '60s fresh, but the
ingenious
directing, creative set design and superb writing in Hundreds of
Sisters
is enough to make you say 'Groovy!'" -- San Francisco Bay Guardian
(3/17/99)
"stunning
one-person show... extraordinary." -- Village Voice
(8/18/98)
Love
in the Void (alt.fan.c-love) by Elyse Singer & Carolyn
Baeumler
"the
piece as a whole, directed by Elyse Singer, was terrific. Words
and images kept trading places. The technological world was given flesh
and blood without losing its aura of science-fiction spookiness." --
Margo
Jefferson, New York Times 5/17/95 For full review, click here.
"The
American fascination with the trope of the tragic torch singer gets a
funny
and harrowing workout in Love in the Void" -- John Istel, Village Voice
(8/15/95)
"coadaptors
[Carolyn] Baeumler and Elyse Singer have slyly located their Courtney
Love
in a Richard foreman-esque existential hell...Baeumler, as Love might
say,
fakes it so real she is beyond fake." -- James Hannaham, Village Voice
(8/22/95)
"It
took a small theater piece based on the Internet posts of Hole's
Courtney
Love to evoke the essentially psychological nature of
cyberspace..[Carolyn
Baeumler's] performance is impresive both in its physical and emotional
aggressiveness and its aesthetic restraint....she and director Elyse
Singer
are able, perhaps for the first time on the stage, to capture a bit of
the ïNet mystique." --Ed Hewitt, Music Wire 8/23/95
For
full review, click here
.
"Courtney's
intelligence, biting humor, and weary worldliness, from having
experienced
more psychic agony than she should ever have had to in her relatively
short
existence, is captured by Baeumler, in a powerful portrayal...Most of
the
play is extremely funny." -- CaRol E. Mariconda, Addicted to Noise
(8/2/95)
The
New York Times Arts & Leisure
September
18, 1995 SUNDAY VIEW/Margo Jefferson
From
Internet to Wharton's Inner Sanctum
Once
you've committed yourself to the view that theater takes place all
around,
there is no such thing as a vacation. Denied the usual run of openings
in the usual houses on and off Broadway, you visit all sorts of
theaters:
a theater in a stable or a park, a theater on the edge of a forest or
in
a back room the size of a studio apartment, theaters that link you to
the
larger world of nature and history or theaters that seal you off and
become
as self-contained as Alice's rabbit hole.
'Love
in the Void' "Love in the Void (alt.fan.c-love)" took place in a black
hole of a room at Here, a performance space in SoHo. The stage (the
front
of the room, really) was all white; there were white sheets from
ceiling
to floor, white projection screens and a big white web. When the lights
went down, you found yourself on the Internet, inside a war of words
and
wills being fought between a rock star and her greedy, needy
audience.
The
star (played by the actress Carolyn Baeumler) was Courtney Love, and
she's
one of rock's most compelling multiple personalities: a Lolita who
would
like to have her words with Mr. Nabakov; the widow of a rock hero (her
husband was Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, who killed himself in April 1994);
a self-mocking, self-dramatizing rock-beat poet whose talk is wild,
sexy,
blasphemous, very funny and very smart. (Did her fans think she was
talking
about heroin? Excuse me, that was "heroine.") She made the covers of
Esquire
and Ms. magazines in the same month, and it wasn't a
contradiction.
The
piece was a multimedia adaptation of Ms. Love's computer dialogue with
her fans in the six months after Cobain's death. Messages flashed on
and
off the screens. So did images: film of the real Ms. Love in concert,
throwing
herself--stage-diving--into the arms of her fans, and film that showed
Ms. Baeumler putting on her Courtney Love makeup and wig.
Throughout,
Ms. Baeumler held the stage in Courtney Love drag (a baby-doll pink
dress
with black lingerie strategically peeping through), throwing herself in
and out of the web as she listened to the disembodied voices of
Internet
inquisitors. We ought to organize a stoning, said one. Admit it,
Courtney,
said another with aggressive encounter-group earnestness, you're too
ambitious
to trust your talent; you want to be a star, like Cher or Demi Moore.
She
hurled her answers back into the void--retorts, rants and satiric riffs
on everything from the sweetness and light of the "Free to Be You and
Me"
toys Ms. Love grew up with to the maniacally phallic stage acts of her
male rock peers.
Was
Carolyn Baeumler as compelling to watch as the real Courtney Love? No,
she was a hard-working, efficient runner-up. But
the piece as a whole, directed by Elyse Singer, was terrific. Word and
images kept trading places. The technological world was given flesh and
blood without losing its aura of science-fiction spookiness.
And a performer (Ms. Baeumler, but really Ms. Love) got to play with,
to,
against and for her audience, manipulating then interrogating us and
herself,
making us change our minds about her every minute.
.
New
York Times - Friday, December 24, 1999
"Sex":
A Gentle Nostalgia Trip, by D.J.R. BRUCKNER
NEW
YORK -- If it helps a writer to know a lot about her subject, Mae West
brought great authority to her first play, "Sex," written and first
produced
in New York in 1926. The writing is not as accomplished as it is in
some
of her later film scripts, but there are enough characteristic West
lines
to let you know who the author was, and it was good enough to get her
tossed
into jail in 1927 as the creator and star of an indecent public
performance.
As a publicity stunt the trial was perfect; from then on she was a star
whatever she did.
Oddly,
the text of the play was lost for 70 years. So the show was never
revived
in the city. But now the Hourglass Group has resurrected it in a
production
at the Gershwin Hotel -- a setting that has the '20s written all over
it
-- under the direction of Elyse Singer. It is smart, funny and even a
little
irreverent to West's creaky plot and often corny dialogue. Ms. Singer
is
one of the three founders of Hourglass, and the other two, Nina Hellman
and Carolyn Baeumler, play key roles. Hourglass itself is devoted to
bringing
attention to the work of women, but the production is by no means a
captive
of the playwright.
West's
plot is right out of the pulps. A bright young prostitute in Montreal,
Margy (originally played by West, here by Ms. Baeumler), determined to
get out of her racket and marry well, takes the advice of a British
naval
officer to "follow the fleet." That takes her to Trinidad, where she
meets
the naive scion of a rich family from Greenwich, Conn. He proposes to
her
and whisks her home to his parents' sprawling mansion.
Then
the plot thickens. One of Margy's Montreal boyfriends had seduced an
American
society matron -- out slumming in a town where she wouldn't be
recognized
-- to follow him one night to Margy's apartment, where he slipped her a
mickey and stole her jewels. Margy and her naval officer friend return
home, find the comatose woman and help her get back to her hotel. Of
course,
the woman turns out to be the mother of Margy's fiance. And Margy's
sailor
friend, who truly loves her, turns out to have been invited as a house
guest by the fiance. The matron's seamy escapade might be revealed and
... well, you can write the rest of it.
"The
only difference between us is you can afford to give it away," Margy
says
to the trembling mother. There are many more needless complications
here,
but since most give rise to comic situations and good lines, what's to
object to?
Ms.
Baeumler is alluring and almost maliciously provocative as Margy, even
if she displays little of the sense of mockery (including occasional
self-mockery)
that made West such a natural show-stealer. Ms. Hellman, first as
Margy's
friend Agnes, a fellow prostitute miserably nostalgic for her rural
religious
past, and then as Marie, a maid in the Greenwich mansion, creates two
comic
characters so distinct it is hard to believe they are played by the
same
woman.
Agnes,
who would make a fitting bride for a scarecrow, all fray and no nerve,
has a voice like failing brakes on a New York subway train, but louder.
Marie, all curves, seduction and impertinent curiosity, purrs in a
French
accent that gets a laugh about every second word.
Cynthia
Darlow, a Broadway veteran, is hilarious as the society dame on a lark
and even funnier as the frightened mother trying to evade the
consequences.
T. Ryder Smith, as Margy's naval admirer, Lt Gregg, is virtually a
compilation
of early American film depictions of British men; he seems to extend
the
notion of stiff upper lip to his neck, back, knees and elbows, to
wonderful
effect. And Andrew Elvis Miller as Margy's clueless young fiance is a
delicious
contrivance; he manages to look like a wax mannequin that talks like a
book, with so much sincerity he makes honesty seem quite obscene.
Little
else in the play sounds obscene at all, despite the long strings of
innuendo
that always marked West's writing and speech.
Hourglass
surrounds the acts of the play with snippets from the 1927 trial of
West,
which is probably a good idea because few in the crowd this company
attracts
can have been 10 years old when West died in 1980 and probably have
little
idea how the legend began. The scene in a hotel cafe in Trinidad gives
the troupe a chance to liven up things with some '20s songs, and sound
tracks by Steven Bernstein's Sex Mob thread modern jazz, intelligently
anchored in that era, through the whole evening.
Altogether,
this show is good comedy, if sometimes at the expense of the script,
and
for those who can remember Mae West alive, it is also a gentle
nostalgia
trip.
New
York Times - Arts & Leisure - Sunday, February 13, 2000
"Mae
West, Still There for Us to Come Up and See",
by VINCENT CANBY
Imagine,
if you can, the spectacle of Mae West playing Norma Desmond in
"Sunset
Boulevard."
That
possibility, reported by Cameron Crowe in his book "Conversations
With
Billy
Wilder," must seem incomprehensible to anyone who treasures Gloria
Swanson's
sinuously macabre performance in the 1950 classic. Was Mae West
some
kind of joke? Apparently not. But even if Mr. Wilder initially
intended
"Sunset
Boulevard" to be an outright comedy, it is difficult to see how he
might
have used an actress who possessed such a limited, if vivid,
professional
persona.
We'll
never know. Mae wasn't interested in the Wilder project because,
it
seems,
she didn't want to play a faded movie star. She knew her fans
would
never
believe it. Though she was then in her mid-50's, and no longer in
demand
by the film studios, she felt she was still in the bloom of her
youth,
successfully
touring with "Diamond Lil" from time to time and discovering new
fans
on the nightclub circuit.
She
was then someone recognized and/or sought out by such as Cecil
Beaton,
Colette
and Sacheverell Sitwell. In his admiring review of her 1949
revival
of
"Diamond Lil," Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times was moved to
acknowledge
what he called, in an uncharacteristically poetic effusion, "the
sublime
fatalism of the entire business," going on to ask, "Is she kidding
or
is
she serious?"
Mae
West had become an institution, which is dangerous.
Today
it seems that Mr. Wilder's vision of Norma Desmond in the stout form
of
Mae
West was nothing less than prescient. Gloria Swanson may have acted
Norma
Desmond,
but Mae West lived the character, far longer and far more
successfully
than Mr. Wilder, in the late 1940's, might have imagined.
That's
one of the subsidiary revelations of "Dirty Blonde," the nervy,
exceptionally
entertaining Off Broadway production that contemplates the
legacy
of Mae West in a format that mixes comedy and song to suggest that
life,
after all, is very much like a revue. Unfortunately, plays its
last
performance
today at New York Theater Workshop, but don't despair. There are
expectations
it will soon transfer either to Broadway or to another Off
Broadway
house. It deserves an afterlife.
So
does the season's second Mae West tribute: the Hourglass Group's
pocket-size
but exuberant Off Off Broadway revival of "Sex," West's 1926
comedy-melodrama,
which ends its run tomorrow in the tiny theater at the
Gershwin
Hotel.
"Sex"
is notorious in Broadway history for having been labeled "a public
nuisance"
by the New York police and closed down, even though it had already
played
41 weeks of sold-out performances without incident. In the trial
that
followed,
Mae was found guilty and sentenced to serve 10 days in the Women's
Workhouse
on Welfare (now Roosevelt) Island. She received great publicity
from
the trial, but at a certain cost. The publicity also scared New
York
theater
owners from booking her latest production, "The Drag," a male drag
show
that, reportedly, was the real target of the attack on "Sex."
is
wise and moving and seemingly effortless in the way that it evokes
the
life,
times and manners of Mae West. The work is a seamless
collaboration
between
Claudia Shear, the star and author of her own autobiographical
play,
"Blown
Sideways Through Life," and James Lapine, the playwright, director
and
frequent
theatrical partner of Stephen Sondheim.
Ms.
Shear and Mr. Lapine together "devised" the show, which was written
by
Ms.
Shear, directed by Mr. Lapine, and is being acted by Ms. Shear,
Kevin
Chamberlin
and Bob Stillman.
The
result is a comic enchantment about two klutzy New Yorkers: Jo
(Ms.
Shear)
and Charlie (Mr. Chamberlin), whose unusual relationship begins
when
they
meet at Mae West's mausoleum in the Cypress Hills Cemetery in
Brooklyn.
Each
is a seriously dedicated fan, though Charlie has the edge over Jo. A S
a
teenager
on a summer vacation in Los Angeles, he came to know the ancient
Mae
in
her Ravenswood apartment, her home from the early 1930's until her
death
in
1980. Briefly, Charlie was accepted into her small, sealed world,
where
she
lived her days in perpetual twilight (the sun did terrible things to
her
skin),
attended by hangers-on from the old days.
Mae
liked nothing better than to spend hours leafing through Charlie's
Mae
West
scrapbooks; on a special occasion, the queenly bee and her drones
might
go
out to eat Chinese, being driven to and from in her Bentley.
moves
swiftly in and out of the lives of Mae (also played by Ms. Shear)
and
her
various male attendants (played by Mr. Chamberlin and Mr. Stillman),
and
the
contemporary trials of Jo and Charlie. One of Jo's comic/sad
epiphanies
about
Mae: "She never saw Paris . . . but she could have."
At
first, Mae's obsession with self and climbing to the top is seen as
funny,
as
when we're told that her mother once advised her, "Don't be selfish,
think
of
your career." Only later, as Jo and Charlie gain some understanding
of
their
own lives, do they begin to see Mae in perspective. The show's
final
image,
which shouldn't be described, is as eccentric as it is triumphant,
though
in a very unusual way.
The
Hourglass Group's production of "Sex" is something else: a chance to
see
the
three-act play more or less as it was presented with music interludes
in
1926,
but also framed with quotations taken from the court proceedings
against
it. Elyse Singer is the director of the first-rate cast headed by
Carolyn
Baeumler in the Mae West role.
Mae
not only starred in "Sex" as Margy LaMont, an upwardly mobile whore
with
a
heart of gold, but she also took credit as the playwright. According
to
Emily
Wortis Leider's biography "Becoming Mae West," "Sex" has its origins
in
"Following
the Fleet," a play by J. J. Byrne that Mae bought and rewrote in
collaboration
with the uncredited Adeline Leitzbach -- Mae never shared
credit
easily. What distinguishes "Sex" from other so-called exploitation
plays
of the time is Margy LaMont's brazenly untroubled attitude toward
her
profession.
Mae
always said she was too nervous to read, so it is unlikely that she
ever
had
contact with George Bernard Shaw's "Mrs. Warren's Profession." Yet
she
would
seem to agree with Shaw that prostitution, while not something to
be
celebrated,
should be understood as a natural consequence in a society that
denies
women their economic rights and encourages their ignorance.
In
the introduction to "Three Plays by Mae West," published by
Routledge,
Lillian
Schlissel, the editor, notes that at the end of "Sex," Margy
LaMont
"is
neither saved or reborn."
She
continues, "There is no spiritual redemption . . . The ethical
arithmetic
is
redrawn -- the wages of sin are reduced from mortal transgression
to
misdemeanor."
This
is what scared Broadway and then delighted the movie audiences in
the
early
years of the Great Depression.
When
Mae went to Hollywood, her good humor and bold assumption of
sexual
authority,
coupled with her raunchy aphorisms of Wildean balance, transformed
her
into one of the world's biggest box-office attractions. She was also
the
reason
Hollywood overhauled the Production Code, the apparatus by which
the
industry
censored its own material, in this way to combat the new
licentiousness
represented by little Mae.
Her
first three movies, "Night After Night" (1932), "She Done Him
Wrong"
(1933)
and "I'm No Angel" (1933), are stuffed with the grand
doubles-entendres
that she never tired of recycling for the rest of her life.
It's
in "I'm No Angel" that she plays a lion tamer who sticks her head
into
the
big cat's mouth, prompting an admirer to say significantly, "She's
safer
in
that cage than she is in bed." This is the same movie in which she
enunciated
as her dictum about men: "Find 'em, fool 'em, 'n forget 'em."
Which,
in 1933, was her variation on what men, especially the sort whom
Mae
admired
most, were supposed to say about women.
Yet
by the end of the 1930's, Mae's movies were no longer sure-fire
box-office
hits. It wasn't only because the Production Code was sanitizing
her
material. Her range was limited and she was repeating herself. She
might
have
gone on forever as the supporting character actress she was in
"Night
After
Night," but she couldn't resist playing the star. When she hogs
the
screen
a certain monotony creeps into her work; it soon seems as if she
is
imitating
herself.
A
further problem was her age. Mae started late in Hollywood; she had
her
40th
birthday while shooting "I'm No Angel." Her ample figure was less
easily
disguised
in contemporary clothes than in the sort of gowns worn by Lillian
Russell,
but she couldn't confine her films to tales set in the Gay
Nineties.
Mae
West isn't forgotten today, but she is probably best remembered in
oblique
ways, in association with other things, like the busty life
jackets
that
World War II servicemen nicknamed for her. She is still recalled
by
occasional
impersonators, some of whom are more bizarre than others.
Following
the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, there was a news photograph of the
child
wearing the sort of feather boa and cartwheel hat that Mae sported
in
"She
Done Him Wrong."
Mae's
films still can be found in video rental shops, of course. Yet I
suspect
that the one rented most frequently is "My Little Chickadee." This
1940
comedy-western about a hooker and a card shark is not, strictly
speaking,
a true Mae West movie, having been stolen by the nimble,
white-gloved
digits of W. C. Fields, her larcenous co-star.
Mae
made three films after "My Little Chickadee," but she might as well
have
retired
then and there. Fields -- no gallant gentleman he (as Mae well
knew)
--
damaged her reputation in subtle ways that, for lethal effect, equaled
the
destruction
wreaked on her pictures by the Production Code.
Fields
didn't try to clean up her act; he did something far worse: he
made
Mae,
the laid-back, self-mocking good-time girl of "She Done Him Wrong"
and
"I'm
No Angel," look not only humorless but mean and spiteful. Though
Mae,
playing
Flower Belle, sets up the elaborate gag that transforms "My Little
Chickadee"
into one of the funniest movies ever made, the way the gag works
out
demolishes Mae's public persona.
To
escape Cuthbert J. Twillie (Fields), who believes he has conjugal
rights,
Flower
Belle puts a goat in the bed of their bridal suite, blows out the
lamps
and leaves the room in darkness. Twillie enters from the bathroom
and
climbs
into bed, noting, after a decent pause, that Flower Belle seems to
be
sleeping
in her caracul coat. "Better take it off, dear," says Twillie with
concern,
"you won't feel the good of it when you go out. . . ." When the
goat
lets
out a long "m-a-a-a-a!," Twillie is sent into paroxysms of bliss.
"The
sweet
little dear," he says, "is calling for her mama. Such blind
innocence.
.
. ."
THE
sequence is priceless, but it also has the effect of making Mae
West
appear
to be frosty and completely out of touch with her co-star, which
she
was.
Mae was not a team player. But then she knew enough to realize that
the
character
she always played, Superhooker, couldn't stand too much realism.
When
actual joy, passion or even humiliation are evident, the
Superhooker
appears
ridiculous, like Miss Piggy in an otherwise conventional
adaptation
of
"Little Women." Mae took top billing in "My Little Chickadee" but
she
wound
up sandbagged by Fields.
Both
and the revival of "Sex" remind us of the genuine good humor and
common
sense
that were the basis of Mae West's art, which today survives in
recognizable
form only in her first three films. All the others are -- to
greater
or lesser degrees -- imitations.
In
a category of its own is "Sextette," Mae's last movie, which opened in
New
York
in 1979 when she was nearing 86. The film is Mae's equivalent to
the
biblical
epic about Salome in which Norma Desmond intends to make her
return
to
the screen in "Sunset Boulevard." Mae's film is a sex comedy, based on
a
play
she had written some years earlier, about a world-famous movie star
and
the
attempts of her former husbands and lovers to prevent her from
consummating
her sixth marriage.
I'm
embarrassed to admit that, at the time the film opened, I took a
dim,
rather
puritanical view of it and of Mae, pointing to the age of the star
and
to
the infirmities she shared with the production. You didn't have to be
a
wit
to find a few laughs at her expense.
Now,
having
seen "Sunset Boulevard" a year ago and, much more recently,
and
"Sex,"
I feel quite differently. There is no desire to sit through
"Sextette"
again,
but bully for Mae for having got the screenplay onto the screen,
directed
by Ken Hughes (one of whose earlier epics was "Cromwell"), with a
cast
including Tony Curtis, Ringo Starr, Timothy Dalton and Regis
Philbin.
In
Mr. Wilder's satiric Gothic romance, the 50-year-old former movie
star
shoots
her screenwriting collaborator-lover and goes mad. In real life,
Mae
West
was equally obsessed with the public personality she had created,
but
she
wasn't nuts. She made her movie and, a year after it came out,
died
without
melodramatic incident, at the age of 87.
New
York Times
Sunday
December 5, 1999
ON
STAGE, MAE WEST WAS EVEN RACIER
By
Emily Wortis Leider
IMPERSONATORS
and cartoonists have always gravitated to Mae West because in
performance
she usually seemed to be impersonating herself, exaggerating her
femininity
and commenting on her own outrageousness.
As
she gained recognition in the 1920's and 30's, her highly stylized
drawl
and sashaying gait spawned imitation and invited caricature. Still
later,
before Miss Piggy stole her cleavage, long eyelashes and penchant for
self-celebration,
Disney used her as the model for the top-heavy Jenny Wren, and Edie
Adams
pitched cigars by borrowing her signature slogan (originally spoken
with
a slightly different word order to Cary Grant in the 1933 film "She
Done
Him Wrong"): "Why don't you come up and see me some time?"
Two
new productions opening in New York are about to remind us that long
before
her coronation as a movie queen, Mae West had found her identity on the
stage. Her 1926 play "Sex" -- which led to her arrest and jailing -- is
being revived, beginning Thursday, by the Hourglass Group. And on
Saturday,
previews begin of "Dirty Blonde," a play about West by Claudia Shear at
New York Theater Workshop.
When
she left her native New York for Hollywood to make her first movie, in
1932, Flaming Mae was almost 40 and had been performing before live
audiences
since the age of 5. "I'm not a little girl from a little town making
good
in a big town," she would famously state in Los Angeles. "I'm a big
girl
from a big town making good in a little town." In her baggage, along
with
the diamonds, velvets and bone corsets that became her trademark in her
show "Diamond Lil," she packed the scripts for several plays she had
created
for Broadway, and a carefully cultivated notoriety.
Three
of her plays, "Sex," "Pleasure Man" and "Diamond Lil," had been judged
unsuitable by the movies' moral guardians at the Hays Office. A darling
of the tabloids, West was a master of shock tactics: hot clinches,
suggestive
lyrics, lolling around the stage in her underwear, using drag queens as
actors (she wrote two plays, "The Drag" and "Pleasure Man," about
cross-dressers).
As a child actress in melodrama she had had plenty of chances to play
fair-haired
innocents but such paragons never appealed to her. Bad-girl roles did.
Reversing the formula that virtue must triumph and sin be punished,
West
made heroines of the fallen women she usually portrayed. All the famous
and interesting women in history, from Cleopatra to Catherine the
Great,
she maintained, had been considered bad. "The only good woman was Betsy
Ross, and all she ever made was a flag."
Growing
up as a trouper in plays, revues, burlesque and vaudeville, West
learned
to thrive on adversity. When the lines others wrote for her vaudeville
skits didn't suit, she wrote her own. When a starring vehicle failed to
materialize, she created one for herself. When producers fled, she and
a band of supporters formed their own Morals Production Company.
Mounting
debt and constant run-ins with both backstage and government censors
seemed
only to increase her determination. So long as the result was greater
fame
and more opportunities to perform, she made no objection when critics
carped
at her breaches of decorum. If Variety, in describing her dancing,
branded
her a "rough soubrette who did a 'Turkey' just a bit too coarse," it
meant
she was getting noticed. "Her wriggle cost Mae West her job" ran a 1912
newspaper headline, and although she faced a spell of unemployment,
West
knew she was making a name for herself.
When
her play "Sex" was raided by the New York police after a 41-week run
and
she found herself convicted of obscenity after a much-publicized trial,
she exulted. Packed off to jail, she made the front page of every New
York
daily. "I expect it will be the making of me," she jauntily informed
reporters
as she began her 8-day sentence (reduced for good behavior from 10) in
Welfare Island Women's Workhouse on what is now Roosevelt Island. "I
expect
to employ my time to good advantage . . . getting material for a new
play."
S EX," the first of West's plays to actually get produced, is a crudely
written, frankly vulgar comedy-drama with a gritty underworld edge.
Most
of its power resides in its brazen don't-mess-with-me heroine, the
beautiful
blond prostitute Margy LaMont (originally played by West), who rises
from
a Montreal brothel to a rich suitor's Connecticut mansion. She refuses
to be cowed by any man, including her pimp Rocky. "Just because you
croaked
a guy and got away with it, don't think I'm afraid of you," she warns
Rocky.
"You know if I start talking I can put a rope around that lily white
neck
of yours." Less polished and less articulate than the women West would
play on screen, Margy shares with West's other femme fatale roles an
intolerance
for cant and hypocrisy.
In
tough-girl Brooklynese she demolishes the snobbish married socialite
Clara,
who dabbled in prostitution to add spice to her boring life: "The only
difference between us is that you could afford to give it away." In
preparing
for her role as Margy LaMont in "Sex," Carolyn Baeumler has been
studying
Mae West's movie debut as Maudie Triplett in the 1932 "Night After
Night."
It was a performance that made George Raft squawk, "She stole
everything
but the camera." Ms. Baeumler said that the Mae West who played Maudie
was "elastic, loose, not so fixed as she became in later pictures."
"And
she has a different energy from anybody else in the film," Ms. Baeumler
added. Fresh from serving as the understudy of both Stella and Blanche
in the recent New York Theater Workshop production of "A Streetcar
Named
Desire," Ms. Baeumler said that in "Sex" she is attempting a kind of
duet,
"playing Mae West playing Margy." The play, directed by Elyse Singer,
will
be staged in the Living Room at the Gershwin Hotel on East 27th Street.
Courtroom dialogue taken from transcripts of the 1927 trial of West and
the other "Sex" defendants will be included, as will several songs from
Mae West movies in addition to the bluesy "Shake That Thing," which was
in the original production at Daly's 63rd Street Theater. Nina Hellman,
who co-founded the Hourglass Group with Ms. Singer and Ms. Baeumler,
will
be the singer.
Those
in the audience who are still pondering the recent contretemps between
the current Mayor of New York and the Brooklyn Museum may experience a
shock of recognition when they hear the magistrate declaring that "Sex"
deserved censoring because it "was calculated to excite in the
spectator
impure imagination" and assuring the courtroom that "New York is the
most
moral city in the universe." In her three-person play "Dirty Blonde,"
which
opens on Jan. 13, Ms. Shear takes the role of West but, she said,
neither
impersonates nor re-enacts her life story. Instead, she said, she will
highlight major public and private moments in West's career,
introducing
some of the men West worked with (Bob Stillman will play her hapless
short-term
dance partner and husband, Frank Wallace), reprising some of West's
songs
and dances ("I definitely do a wiggle"), and finding points of
commonality
with her fellow Brooklynite.
In
an opening scene in Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn, where West was
buried in 1980, Ms. Shear will play a West devotee who at her idol's
grave
meets an equally obsessed fan and cross-dresser portrayed by Kevin
Chamberlin.
As they pursue their Mae West quest, the connection between the two
will
deepen, Ms. Shear said. It was the writer and director James Lapine who
first approached Ms. Shear with the idea of creating a script inspired
by the diva who once posed as the Statue of Libido. Mr. Lapine said he
had thought of Ms. Shear "because of the Brooklyn connection and
because
she is out of the norm." He is directing the play. Asked what most drew
her to West, Ms. Shear said she puts moxie at the top of her list. She
was also impressed by West's refusal ever to play victim (West balked
when
Paramount executives tried to switch the title of her celebrated movie
to "He Done Her Wrong"). "Mae West was never devastated by a man," Ms.
Shear emphasized. "She never looked in a mirror and said, 'I'm fat.'
"
Fans
of Ms. Shear's much praised 1993 autobiographical play, "Blown Sideways
Through Life," may recall that Ms. Shear, who is the same height (an
even
5 feet) as Mae West, once tipped the scales at more than 200 pounds and
called herself "the human sofa." In the 1920's, as in the 90's, the
female
body of choice was slim-hipped, straight-lined, leggy and lean. That
was
hardly Mae West's body type, but in her long-running Broadway hit
"Diamond
Lil" she found a way to bypass flapper chic by reviving 1890's-style
amplitude
and costuming herself like Lillian Russell, with an emphasis on long
skirts,
big hats, cinched waists and billowing curves. "She found out who she
was
when she dressed as her mother," Ms. Shear said. Ms. Shear thinks West
missed out on several things "that really matter." "She never saw
Paris,"
Ms. Shear said. "And she never really loved."
SEX
IS BACK Show
Business September 8, 1999
Sex
is coming back to the city, but this particular version isn't on HBO.
Mae
West's play Sex is about to open in New York, nearly 75
years
after it first caused a stir and led to her arrest here.
West
wrote and in 1926 starred in Sex, a play which ran for nearly a
year in New York. But Sex did more than that: West was charged
with
staging an obscene production and hauled off to jail. Now, 73 years
later,
Sex
is being staged again in New York City.
It's
being presented by the appropriately named Hourglass Group, starring
Carolyn
Baeumler in the role created by West, and featuring Nina Hellman. And Sex,
directed by Elyse Singer, is opening in a venue that in some ways may
be
particularly appropriate: a hotel.
The
show is slated to open on December 9 in the Living Room, in the
Gershwin
Hotel at 7 East 27th Street. But Singer, who got the rights to do the
show,
downplayed the idea that West was an actress who also happened to write
a play or two. Instead, she said West was a playwright and screenwriter
as well as a movie star all along.
"Mae
West wrote six plays that were produced on Broadway, as well as most of
the screenplays for her films," Singer says. "Sex was her first
full-length play."
The
play itself turned into a controversial production and ended up landing
her on Welfare Island, where she served eight days in jail. Singer says
West was charged and arrested for staging an obscene production, but
that
the motive was to stop her second show from opening. The Drag,
West's
second script, features a transvestite ball.
Singer
says she was able to get the rights to do the play. But it took some
time.
When she first saw the script it was unpublished, although it has been
since. "In 1997, Hourglass began negotiating for the rights to produce
the play independently," she says.
The
production was developed through New Georges and the New York Theatre
Workshop.
It follows the story of a prostitute and what Singer calls her "search
for a better life." The story takes Margy LaMont from a Montreal
brothel
to a nightclub in Trinidad and a mansion in Connecticut.
Along
the way LaMont meets gangsters, molls, sailors and society. But Singer
adds that the play also includes the fast-paced, wisecracking dialogue
for which West became so famous. "The language ricochets like
bullets."
The
play, in addition to re-introducing West's work, also reminds audiences
that Mae West, as well as an actress, was a comic writer. And the
participants
in this production have worked together before. Singer directed
Baeumler
in another play about a high-powered performer, Love in the Void,
based on Courtney Love's Internet posts. Baeumler is now the understudy
for Blanche and Stella in New York Theatre Workshop's production of A
Streetcar Named Desire.
Hellman,
as well as an actress, is a member of the band Cake Like, which
recently
released its third album Goodbye, So What. And Singer points out that
all
three women have something else in common with Mae West.
"Were
all 32 years old," Singer says, "the same age that West was when she
wrote,
produced and starred in Sex on Broadway." If Sex proves to be
as
brazen as this confession, we're in for a real treat.
Mae
West: The Woman Who Fashioned Herself a Big Star Newsday,
Friday,
January 7, 2000
The
indelible icon of another era is the subject of a new play in New York.
And her own raunchy 1926 play is being revived.
By
BLAKE GREEN, Newsday
NEW
YORK--Few quips have achieved the immortality of Mae West's sultry
invitation,
"Come up and see me sometime." She issued it first on the New York
stage
in 1928 in "Diamond Lil," and then a slight variation on the screen in
"She Done Him Wrong," where its eternity was cemented by the guy on the
receiving end: a virtually unknown actor named Cary Grant.
From
that same 1933 movie came two other memorable West-isms: Lady Lou, when
asked, "Haven't you ever met a man who can make you happy?," retorted:
"Sure. Lots of times." And, as reassurance to another shady lady, she
observed,
"When women go wrong, men go right after them."
Pithy
wisecracks are the actress' most obvious legacy. When you delve into
Westmorabilia,
it's amazing how many familiar witty, on-the-mark irreverences and
clever
double-entendres can be traced straight back to the blond,
hourglass-shaped
actress who wrote much of her own material and delivered it in her
unique,
slack-mouthed style.
But
beyond the racy quotes that sprang, tough-dame style from the side of
her
mouth, West's was a story of survival, persistence, independence and
unshakable
self-esteem. In her life--which ended in 1980, at 87--she became both
an
icon and a caricature.
Thanks
to the miracle of celluloid, we are able to see the brassy and brazen
self-mocking
vamp of the Hollywood films West made before the censors homogenized
her
act--the classic "My Little Chickadee," with W.C. Fields (1940), comes
around regularly on television; many of the other films are available
on
video--and the campy creature who, at 85, insisted on playing a young
chorus
girl, a pathetic parody of her youthful self, in that 1978 bomb
"Sextette."
But
before there was a Hollywood Mae West, there was the stage sensation
who
came up through the ranks of burlesque, vaudeville and revues (West
began
performing when she was 6). And it's that West who is back with us for
a visit, via surrogates, in two current off-Broadway productions.
"Dirty
Blonde," an original play about West and her legacy, written by and
starring
her fellow 5-foot-2 Brooklynite Claudia Shear, opens Monday in the East
Village at the New York Theatre Workshop. Shear plays herself on the
trail
of West (including making a visit to the Brooklyn mausoleum where the
actress
is entombed) and the living sex symbol at various stages in her
colorful,
yet oddly staid, life.
Meanwhile,
"Sex," West's own raunchy 1926 play that made her both famous and
infamous
(and landed her in jail), is being given what's believed to be its
first
New York revival by the appropriately named Hourglass Group in the
Gramercy
district's Gershwin Hotel.
Margy
LaMont, the free-spirited hooker West wrote for herself, is played by
Carolyn
Bauemler, and the production, with a cast of 10 playing two dozen
roles,
has incorporated transcripts from the 1927 court trial for indecency,
as
well as West's controversial use of drag queens in her casts.
The
set for "Sex," by George Xenos, plays off Salvador Dali's famous "Face
of Mae West Which Mae Be Used as an Apartment," in which her lips are a
sofa and her eyes set within picture frames.
And,
to add to the West lore, the paperback edition of "Becoming Mae West,"
Emily Wortis Leider's 1997 biography of the actress' early years, is
about
to be released in paperback by Da Capo Press.
It
was James Lapine's idea to do a piece on Mae West, says Shear, an
old-movie
buff who leapt at his proposal and spent a year and a half researching
and developing the show, becoming, along the way, a huge fan not only
of
West's talent but also of her obsessiveness. "I don't think I've ever
had
a day in my life in which I was as focused as Mae West," Shear says
with
a laugh.
* * *
Lapine's
direction of "Dirty Blonde," which also stars Kevin Chamberlin and Bob
Stillman, began with his suggestion of an ending for the show: "Mae
West
kissing Mae West." One of these Maes is a guy--in keeping with West's
enduring
popularity as a subject for female impersonators.
"It's
interesting to me how a person's persona lasts through time," says
Lapine,
who admits, "I had thought of her in a kitschy, cliche way--like a
cartoon.
I had no idea she was a pretty amazing lady."
"Pioneer"
is a word often used when people talk about West's highly
unconventional
life. Arriving in Hollywood when she was 39, she famously announced
straight
away, "I'm not a little girl from a little town making good in a big
town;
I'm a big girl from a big town making good in a little town."
She
proved it: Only a few years later, she was the highest-paid woman in
America,
commanding $300,000 a picture. "She Done Him Wrong," the movie West
made,
"was the 'Star Wars' of its day," Shear says. "They had round-the-clock
showings."
The
Hourglass Group chose "Sex," says Elyse Singer, its director, "because
the piece has the feeling of giving birth to a star--the creation of an
icon"--importantly, the self-creation. One of the founders of a company
that operates on a shoestring, she says it was also pleasing to
discover
that West had her own difficulties financing her first play.
Sadly,
once West created her image, she was unwilling to change it, deluding
herself
that she had defied the passage of time. "She was not someone who would
take smaller, character roles to work," says Shear, who becomes a
teetering,
gargoyled West in "Dirty Blonde." "That's the part that makes you hurt
for her, but there's something about her that makes me think,
'Whatever.'
This is about the power of Mae West, and I say, 'Mae, good for you.' "
