Word: plot
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...intersections of characters' lives are set within the dislocating phases of world events. All is understood in the perspective of the slowwheeling geometry of time's sweep. Hazzard handles her saga about the lonely remnants of several families with a stylish cinematic control that gives us a highly structured plot moving in the shadow of Greek tragedy. She roams the world with a chastened recognition of larger patterns beyond individual fate, yet never burdens her writing with heavy-handed determinism...
HAPPY END is schizophrenic--an anomalous lark. The biting, sardonic music of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht don't fit the sitcom plot. The play's as far from Brecht & Weill's Three penny Opera as a Keystone Kops film is from Little Caesar. Both plays recount the daring misdeeds and romantic entanglements of a gangster, but Threepenny Opera's sordid outlaws become Happy End's petty, bumbling bullies. Despite a denunciation of capitalism tacked on at the end, Happy End is insubstantial fluff, a romantic comedy expertly staged and acted by the American Repertory Theatre Company...
Director Walton Jones milks every bit of humor from Michael Feingold's adaptation of the clever, pat script. He mocks the cliched plot, deliberately parodying the stylized, silent-movie romance/thriller. Curlicued subtitles announce songs and significant moments; when the gang rob the bank, the lights flash on and off, simulating the flickering early movies. A few touches are a bit cloying--the Fly as telephone operator, for example--but Happy End contains many slyly comic moments. Jones mounts a polished production; the actors sustain a rapid pace that admirably suits his comic intent. Uniformly excellent acting ensures the play...
...Casey's performance as Hallelujah Lil, however, that rescues Happy End from triteness. Casey provides one of the few bits of effective social commentary with her jabs at the hypocrisy of the Army hierarchy. Her sure, colorful voice invests the Weill/Brecht songs with an emotional depth that shames the plot's cliches. Casey uses the songs to suggest contradictions in Lil's character that the script brushes over. In the biting "Sailor's Tango"--sung to convert Bill-the evangelist smolders with sexual invitation. She turns the haunting denunciation of love into its tender yet rueful opposite--a declaration...
THESE FEW MOMENTS of stage magic point up the emotional barreness of the script. The songs--cynical, angry, haunting--exist in a vacuum, unsupported by any undercurrents in the production. Technically faultless as Jones' staging is, his deft exploitation of Happy End's humor exaggerates the banality of the plot...