The Sweet Science vs. the Stradivarius - The New York Times

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December 6, 2012THEATER REVIEW

The Sweet Science vs. the StradivariusBy CHARLES ISHERWOOD

Plenty of punches are thrown in the forceful new revival of Clifford Odets’s “Golden Boy” that opened onThursday night at the Belasco Theater. Eyes are blackened, uppercuts fly back and forth, and by the end of theplay, the young boxer hero, Joe Bonaparte (Seth Numrich), is staggering across the stage, delirious andpractically bathed in blood.

But the blows that truly stun are the ones we cannot literally see, the jabs to the soul that Joe inflicts onhimself, torn as he is between the urge to make it big as a boxer and the desire to be the artist he feels he wasmeant to be.

Throughout this blistering Lincoln Center Theater production, directed by Bartlett Sher and featuring a superbcast of almost 20 actors — a rare feast on Broadway these days — we watch in anguished anticipation as Joestruggles with a defining question..

Do you spend your life trying to shine in a world that values only the mighty dollar and the power it brings, orseek instead to fulfill a humbler, more humane destiny? “Truthful success,” as Joe’s Old World Italian fatherputs it, remains as elusive a goal today as it did when “Golden Boy” first opened on Broadway at the sametheater 75 years ago.

The question was hardly academic for Odets, whose early successes for the Group Theater (“Waiting for Lefty,”“Awake and Sing!”) were marked by a fiery, left-leaning idealism. By the time he wrote “Golden Boy,” Odetshad tasted popular acclaim and its honeyed fruits: a lucrative visit to Hollywood and a glamorous marriage tothe movie queen Luise Rainer. He found the flavor to his liking.

Although “Golden Boy” charts the story of a young man who must choose between a career as a violinist, forwhich he has been training since childhood, and boxing, which he has impulsively taken up as a quicker routeto the big time, Odets was spilling his own blood onto the page, too. He sometimes disdained the play as beingwritten expressly to achieve a commercial hit — by 1937 the Group Theater’s fortunes were in question — buthis discomfort may also have arisen from the knowledge that he was writing a parable of his own conflictedlife. In its most powerful scenes the play has a tortured, keening quality that cuts sharply through thesometimes formulaic story line.

Mr. Sher directed a similarly galvanizing production of “Awake and Sing!” for Lincoln Center Theater severalyears ago. The skills he evinced in that rewarding revival are on view here, too: a knack for making Odets’svernacular language feel like fresh mint instead of stale corn, and a gift for cutting to the emotional quick of aconventionally structured melodrama.

As the young hero, who is determined to make himself over into the kind of man the world reveres, Mr.Numrich (“War Horse”) moves with an antic grace in the play’s early scenes, bopping around the stage with

The Sweet Science vs. the Stradivarius - The New York Times

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animal spirits as he seeks to charm the manager Tom Moody (a fine Danny Mastrogiorgio) into giving him achance in the ring. There is music in the way Mr. Numrich moves that hints at the lyric temperament Joe oncefelt as a salvation (“With music I’m never alone when I’m alone”), and now feels as an inhibiting burden.

In the play’s most quietly captivating scene, Joe opens his heart to Moody’s girlfriend, Lorna (YvonneStrahovski), on whom he has quickly developed an overwhelming crush, revealing the sensitivity that has kepthim from being true to himself.

“People have hurt my feelings for years,” he says. “I never forget. You can’t get even with people by playing thefiddle. If music shot bullets, I’d like it better — artists and people like that are freaks today. The world movesfast, and they sit around like forgotten dopes.”

But as Joe throws himself into the brutalizing fight world, it is he who seems to be slowing down. Mr.Numrich’s Joe is slowly drained of the buoyant spirits that gave him a captivating glow early in the play.Conflicted and disillusioned, he becomes a machine preserving his energies for the ring, with little spirit leftover for living his life.

The process is watched from a distance by his loving father, played with impressive delicacy by a sad-eyed,soft-spoken Tony Shalhoub. Handily surmounting the burden of dialogue written in hokey Italian-American-ese (“I feela good, like-a to have some music. Hey, where’s-a my boy, Joe?”), Mr. Shalhoub infuses hisperformance with an elegiac tenderness that never descends into the maudlin. The crucial scene in which Joeimplores his father to give him his blessing on his new career — and is refused — is played with an unforcedemotional rigor that makes it all the more moving.

The icily beautiful Ms. Strahovski, making a striking Broadway debut, brings out the velvety heart beatingunder Lorna’s cool, hardened-steel exterior. Slinging Lorna’s tart wisecracks with the expertise of a 1930s B-movie star, she also manages to turn her borderline stereotypical character into a rounded human being who isalmost as tortured by Joe’s plight as he is.

The rest of the large cast fills out the play’s smoky fight-world ambience impressively, no doubt aided by theatmospheric sets by Michael Yeargan, the sharply cut period duds by Catherine Zuber and the starkly dramaticlighting by Donald Holder, all working at the top of their games.

As the neighborhood philosopher from next door, Jonathan Hadary emits sour bulletins from Schopenhauerwith precise, funny inflections. Danny Burstein (“South Pacific,” “Follies”) gives an understated but affectingperformance as Joe’s trainer, Tokio, who alone among his cronies understands how fragile their newly mintedchampion’s self-esteem is: “Your heart ain’t in fighting ... your hate is,” he gently admonishes Joe.

“Golden Boy” is at times dragged down by predictable plot mechanics that obscure the ripped-from-the-guthonesty that glittered more fiercely in earlier Odets plays. Some passages are too bluntly written, tapping outthe play’s moral message in telegraphic language that makes you wince.

“Lorna, I see what I did,” Joe cries out in the climactic scene, after a tragic accident in the ring. “I murderedmyself, too!”

But even the play’s pulpier excesses (the vaguely homosexual investor Eddie Fuseli, played by an oily AnthonyCrivello) are brought home with conviction by the cast. And Mr. Sher effectively spotlights the play’s emotional

The Sweet Science vs. the Stradivarius - The New York Times

http://theater.nytimes.com/...ater/reviews/golden-boy-directed-by-bartlett-sher.html?ref=theater&_r=1&pagewanted=print&[12/7/2012 10:54:54 AM]

center in Joe’s agonizing fluctuations between pride and shame, tenderness and rage.

Exulting after his comeback in the play’s climactic fight, Joe crows: “How do you like me, boys? Am I good oram I good?” The last question doesn’t really have the joyous sound of arrogant rhetoric: the poor kid has beensearching his soul for the answer since the play began, and he still hasn’t found it.

Golden Boy

By Clifford Odets; directed by Bartlett Sher; sets by Michael Yeargan; costumes by Catherine Zuber; lighting byDonald Holder; sound by Peter John Still and Marc Saltzberg; fight direction by B. H. Barry; managingdirector, Adam Siegel. Presented by Lincoln Center Theater, under the direction of André Bishop and BernardGersten. At the Belasco Theater, 111 West 44th Street, Manhattan; (212) 239-6200, telecharge.com. ThroughJan. 20. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes.

WITH: Michael Aronov (Siggie), Danny Burstein (Tokio), Demosthenes Chrysan (Lewis), Anthony Crivello(Eddie Fuseli), Sean Cullen (Drake), Dagmara Dominczyk (Anna), Ned Eisenberg (Roxy Gottlieb), BradFleischer (Pepper White), Karl Glusman (Call Boy), Jonathan Hadary (Mr. Carp), Daniel Jenkins (Barker),Danny Mastrogiorgio (Tom Moody), Dion Mucciacito (Sam), Seth Numrich (Joe Bonaparte), Vayu O’Donnell(Driscoll), Lucas Caleb Rooney (Frank Bonaparte), Tony Shalhoub (Mr. Bonaparte), Yvonne Strahovski (LornaMoon) and David Wohl (Mickey).

Frederick Neumann, Actor and Director, Dies at 86 - NYTimes.com

http://theater.nytimes.com/2012/12/07/theater/frederick-neumann-actor-and-director-dies-at-86.html?pagewanted=print[12/7/2012 10:55:16 AM]

December 6, 2012

Frederick Neumann, Actor, Director andInterpreter of Beckett, Dies at 86By BRUCE WEBER

Frederick Neumann, an actor and director whose affinity for Samuel Beckett’s works and his friendship with the manhimself helped forge the distinguished New York experimental troupe Mabou Mines, died on Nov. 27 at his home inKingston, N.J. He was 86.

The cause was complications of diabetes, his son, David, said.

In some regards, Mr. Neumann had the motley résumé of many a working actor, with small roles in Hollywood films,guest appearances on television series and a foray or two on Broadway. But his main impact was away from thepopular track — Off Broadway or Off Off, frequently in the audience-challenging realm of experimental theater.

In 1971 he joined a fledgling troupe consisting of the director JoAnne Akalaitis, the writer and director Lee Breuer, thecomposer Philip Glass and the actors David Warrilow and Ruth Maleczech.

Calling themselves Mabou Mines — the name came from a town in Nova Scotia where the group spent a workingsummer — they produced a series of works that, in the parlance of the time, might have been considered less theaterthan performance art or conceptual art, generally involving the Minimalist music of Mr. Glass.

It was the company’s attachment to Beckett, however, that established it as a theater troupe. By 1990, Mabou Mineshad produced eight of Beckett’s works — including six not originally written for the theater that had their worldpremieres with the company.

Mr. Neumann had met Beckett at a museum in East Berlin in 1976, and their ensuing friendship encouraged theplaywright to entrust him and the company with those nontheatrical texts.

“Fred, as an actor, could appear at the same time avuncular and congenial and warm and cuddly — and alsodangerous and brutal, quite threatening,” Ms. Akalaitis said in an interview this week. “Behind all that was the mindof a truly cultivated man, interested in literature, who had a long relationship with Beckett that he treasured.”

Mr. Neumann, who appeared in most of the Beckett pieces, directed three of the adaptations. One was “Mercier andCamier,” a kind of novelistic forerunner to “Waiting for Godot.” Written in 1946 (though not published until 1970), ittells of two mismatched pals, the title characters — Mr. Neumann played Mercier — on an aimless journey “towardssome unquestioned goal.”

The others were “Company,” a slim volume of fictionalized, autobiographical episodes that Mr. Neumann and his wife,Honora Fergusson, created for the stage together; and “Worstward Ho,” a dense monologue about existence that Mr.Neumann adapted for four performers, including himself as the narrator.

“The theme is, of course, Beckett’s old tune — man is born astride of a grave,” Mel Gussow wrote in his review for TheNew York Times, “with the difference, in Mr. Neumann’s interpretation, that the narrator is already standing in hisgrave. The piece ends with the sun, which appears to be rising. On the other hand, this could also be a setting sun. Inkeeping with the spirit of the author, the stage version of ‘Worstward Ho’ leaves the final analysis to the audience.”

Mr. Glass wrote music for the first two pieces, but Beckett drew the line at “Worstward Ho,” which had its premiere atthe Classic Stage Company in New York in 1986, three years before his death.

“With all due respect to Philip,” Mr. Neumann recalled Beckett’s saying, “no music, for pity’s sake. It’s my last gasp.”

Frederick Neumann, Actor and Director, Dies at 86 - NYTimes.com

http://theater.nytimes.com/2012/12/07/theater/frederick-neumann-actor-and-director-dies-at-86.html?pagewanted=print[12/7/2012 10:55:16 AM]

Frederick Carl Neumann was born on May 17, 1926, on Sugar Island, on the eastern tip of the Upper Peninsula ofMichigan. His father left his mother, Freda Wooten, when the child was an infant. Fred, the oldest of her eightchildren, had three stepfathers — “a couple of them were scary,” Mr. Neumann’s son said — and grew up largely inFlat Rock, Mich., near Detroit.

He joined the Army Air Forces during World War II and was trained as a tail gunner, but never saw combat. Duringhis service he attended classes at the University of Utah and was on campus when Orson Welles and Paul Robesonperformed “Othello.” Mr. Neumann had a small part — “a spear carrier or something,” his son said — and from thenon was hooked on the theater. After the war he lived in Paris, Rome, London and elsewhere abroad. With Mr. Breuerand Ms. Maleczech, he staged Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children” in Paris.

Mr. Neumann’s film credits include “The Prince of Tides,” an adaptation of the Pat Conroy novel directed by BarbraStreisand, and “Reversal of Fortune,” about the Claus von Bulow murder case, directed by Barbet Schroeder. Ontelevision he appeared on “Law & Order” and “Spenser: For Hire.”

On Broadway he appeared in 1979 as Sir Thomas Vaughan in “Richard III,” starring Al Pacino, and in 1985 as PietWetjoen (“the general”), a barfly, in “The Iceman Cometh,” directed by José Quintero. His credits off Broadwayinclude “Cymbeline” and “The Tempest” at the Public Theater, both directed by Ms. Akalaitis, and David Rabe’s“Goose and Tom-Tom,” also at the Public.

In “First Love,” by Charles Mee, at the New York Theater Workshop, he and Ms. Maleczech gave strikingperformances as septuagenarian lovers who enact an entire affair, from first encounter through besotted courtship toanguished heartbreak — including a remarkably persuasive scene of simulated coitus.

Ms. Fergusson, Mr. Neumann’s wife, died in July. Besides his son, David, a choreographer, Mr. Neumann is survivedby several stepbrothers and sisters. Another son, Christopher, died in 1999.

In a 1979 interview, Mr. Neumann discussed the turning point of his theatrical life: “Somebody by the name of JamesJoyce — not the James Joyce — hauled me off on Jan. 3, 1953, to the Théâtre de Babylone,” he recalled. “It was thefirst performance of ‘Waiting for Godot.’ ”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 7, 2012

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of a picture caption with this article misstated the name of one of Samuel

Beckett’s works. It is “Worstward Ho,” not Westward.

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