My friend Mark took me to see a local production of
The Last Night of Ballyhoo in San Jose. It was a good, chamber-sized production of a surprisingly limp play byAlfred Uhry, the author of
Driving Miss Daisy (the play that gave Public Enemy their best punchline on
Fear of A Black Planet). Ballyhoo is a series of episodes about a conjoined, extended Jewish family during the excitment surrounding Ballyhoo - a Jewish cotillion - and the ballyh...er, brouhaha surrounding the opening of
Gone With the Wind in 1939 Atlanta.
The play was commissioned by the International Olympic Committee as a gesture of local boosterism during the 1996 Atlanta Games. It shows -
Ballyhoo is the barest thread of a story that serves as rod onto which various moments and emotional notes are hung like curtains. The curtains, however, are all familiar patterns. At one point, the family patriarch steps foward to lip of the stage to deliver a thinly veiled variation on Everett Sloane's "girl with the parasol" monologue from
Citizen Kane. There's sisterly "I was the ugly duck, you were the pretty one," histrionics straight from
Dirty Dancing and a thousand other movies. At one point, I had to resist an urge to stand up and yell out "Nobody puts Baby in a corner!"
Ballyhoo's biggest role model, though, is Neil's Simon's
Brighton Beach Memoirs. Uhry
tries hard to emulate Simon's effortless family banter with limited success. For every moment that rings true, there's ten that just lay flat. I'm struggling to say something about the Jewish foundation to the story - but it was barely there. While there's some discussion of "big issues" and few passing mentions of "Hitler and Poland", the very light Jewish seasoning is drowned out by the genteel Southern twang and even the nice boy from Brooklyn comes off as just another tool of affected ethnic color. There are no Black characters at all, but there is an unseen "maid" that's just quit her job and may have stolen an umbrella. Joy.
The Northside Theatre Company tries hard to breathe some life into the material, but they can only do so much. I liked the actor that played Adolph (!), the family patriarch. He performed the part in a jolly-grandfather blueblood accent straight out of a Frank Capra movie. The mostly female cast hung together like a believable brood. The love story was there. The only jaw-dropping moment came after the opening of the second act when we meet "Peachy," a young, handsome, German-Jewish rascal played with swishy gaiety by a tall, lanky young Chinese-American in a platium-blond wig
. Now, I appreciate ethnically-blind casting, and the kid was good -- but good lord! When so much emphasis is placed on the character's high society breeding and Germanic countenance - putting a Chinese kid in a Sandy Duncan wig and directing him to act like a Sunday brunch fruit bar is more cruel than inclusive. The snifled snickers in the audience were audible.
Rather than this, I'd love to see the same cast bite the bullet and just do
Brighton Beach Memoirs. Cast the Chinese kid as Eugene, and for the love of god, let him use his real hair. That'd be awesome.
