WE'VE all heard about New York in the summertime the overwhelming heat, the humidity that covers you like a wet blanket, short tempers, violence and exhaustion. The arts in August? As they say here fugheddaboutit.
Yet, wonderfully, it's not like that at all. Hot, certainly, by Irish standards, but the natives will tell you that it's wonderfully mild and the mood of the place is positively benign. In fact, as the late, great Ella Fitzgerald used to sing, the great big city's a wondrous toil, just made for a boy and goil."
In Central Park there's open air theatre and dance. In the Lincoln Center Plaza I see about 500 people many of them of an age at which their Irish counterparts would have packed in such activity dancing their shoes off to the music of a big band, based on that of Artie Shaw. In a nearby park next morning, some 300 five and six year olds, all black and all dressed in pristine white T-shirts, are up to some mysterious business that seems to involve a lot of pushing and shoving and falling about. They make an enchanting sight. Down in the East Village, next to my pad, a street is closed off and a company of fat girls gives a dance show with that total lack of self consciousness that characterises New Yorkers.
At MOMA the Museum of Modern Art there's a superb Picasso show. And on Broadway, there's even a new musical (well new to me) amid all the eternal Cats and Phantoms and Sunset Boulevard.
Bring in Da Noise. Bring In Da Funk tells the history of black people in America through the medium of tap dancing, and if that sounds improbable, you've reckoned without Savian Glover. Savian who? Mark tile name, for this 22 year old who dreamed up and choreographed the show is set fair to be the greatest popular dancer since Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. With the aid of a cast of four magnificent dancers, a woman singer, a narrator, and two of the most amazing percussionists you have ever heard, he has audiences on their feet at every performance, roaring themselves hoarse with approval and excitement. If you're in New York, and can see nothing else, make it this.
Back in the Lincoln Center they're holding their first summer festival. Merce Cunningham, the legendary choreographer, has his company performing Ocean, a work inspired by James Joyce's never fulfilled desire to write a work about the sea and water. This week the Theatre de Complicite from London are giving their acclaimed show, The Three Lives of Lucie Cahrol. Robert Wilson is staging the rarely seen avant garde opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, first performed in 1936, with music by Virgil Thompson and a surreal libretto by Gertrude Stein. And so it goes, on and on, proving there's no closed season for the arts here.
In the midst of all this, a festival within a festival, the Gate Theatre Company is giving its Beckett extravaganza 19 plays in two weeks, plus readings and symposia. New York is not exactly a stranger to superlatives, yet even by local standards this has been a major event a hit to equal such great Big Apple Irish theatre occasions as Joe Dowlin's Gate production of Juno an the Paycock in 1988, or the Abbey/Noel Pearson Broadway opening of Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa in 1990.
Waiting for Godot got the Beckett Festival off to a dream start and had the critics reaching for their superlatives. In the New York Times, Vincent Canby called it a "pristine, fresh, very Irish production" and went on to say "This may be the jewel in the crown of the ambitious Lincoln Center festival ... it's unquestionably the event of the new theatrical season, meaning that it's an occasion for which to play hooky if you can get seats." (Getting seats, indeed, has become a major task for all the Beckett shows, which sold out before they opened.)
THE Irishness or otherwise of Beckett's plays has exercised most of the critics. Some in academe see Beckett like all great writers, as essentially stateless . . ." writes Canby. "Others suggest you can only hear the Beckett language when he's interpreted by Irish performers. Everybody's right some of the time. Also, sometimes wrong." Pozzo, the tyrant who, accompanied by his slave, Lucky, terrorises the tramps, Didi and Gogo, is played by Alan Stanford, described by the New York Times as "the only man in the Beckett universe with an English accent". This is seen by some critics to be an oblique comment in some way on the English Irish situation. It's a rather crude reading of the production by the critics, however, and one never intended, I'm sure, by its director, Walter Asmus.
Otherwise, though it has mainly been sweetness and light. Linda Weiner in Newsday writes of the Festival, "It is a treasure of an event, and says of Godot. "Unfussy and lucid, it is a sort of purifying relief after the indulgences of the Mike Nichols Robin Williams Steve Martin Showboat [a movie star version of the play] at the Lincoln Center in 1988. There is clowning, yes, but this great play has been returned to a more lean, intellectual vaudeville ... Think Stan Laurel and Athol Fugard. Think serious bliss .
Clive Barnes of the New York Post, always a friend of Irish theatre, calls the production "spare, sparse, and spartan, although markedly less abstract than Beckett's chillier Schiller [Theatre] version . . . The acting is authoritative rather than definitive . . . but the play and Beckett's vision of humanity and inhumanity is the thing."
Finally, in Newsday, Howard Kissel finds this Godot remarkably funny and down to earth." He goes on, "The success of the Gate's `Godot' has a great deal to do with the fact that Barry McGovern plays Vladimir ... McGovern has some of the undoubtable air of Stan Laurel, a useful quality for a play that never disguises its debt to vaudeville," and he also picks out Stephen Brennan, as does the New York Times, as "especially good."
Reviews of the many other Beckett productions are still coming in as I write. Happy Days, with Rosaleen Linehan and the ubiquitous Barry McGovern, gets a rave review from Clive Barnes "Staged with brilliant economy by British film director Karol Reisz and acted with supreme, yet nervously coquettish assurance by Rosaleen Linehan ... this, for my money and experience proves to be the best of Happy Days." Barnes says he has been fortunate enough to see most of the major productions of the play "and I would say that Linehan is among the best, ranking with (Peggy) Ashcrott and (Madeline) Renaud."
He is less happy about the triple bill made up of Not I, What Where and Act Without Words 1 finding them a let down compared to the earlier plays. However, Linda Weiner in Newsday is more positive, especially about Jane Brennan in Not I, in which you only see the actress's mouth, and finds Rosaleen Linehan's Winnie, "a heroine ... with enormous' emotional impact, but one more disconcertingly angry than doggedly cheerful, more sarcastic than earnest in her blithe optimism about each `happy day'."
AFTER all the success, of course, the world is beating a path to Michael Colgan's door. Both Australia and a major London theatre want to take the entire festival, but it is unlikely to be seen again the sheer effort of organising a company of 49 actors, directors, and backstage people having taken the Gate production team six months. Its constituent parts, though, seem certain to move on.
Happy Days is definitely going to the Almeida Theatre in London in the autumn, while several New York producers want to bring both it and Godot back here for longer runs.
But the only firm date for Godot, so far, is not on Broadway but in Kilkenny. It plays the Arts Week there at the Watergate Theatre on August 16th, 17th, and 18th. After that, who knows? As Beckett himself might put it "It can't go on. It will go on."
