The Best Man - Broadway Revival

[Reza]

Mr. Chairman, the Great State of Nostalgia ...

by Charles Isherwood New York Times 4/2/2012.

Yards and yards of patriotic bunting stun the senses as you enter the
Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, where a revival of "Gore Vidal's The Best
Man" opened on Sunday night. Television monitors displaying
black-and-white footage hang from boxes that frame the stage, and the
usher handing you your program wears a festive boater with red, white
and blue trim. The aim is to give the audience a sense of being
present at a presidential nominating convention in Philadelphia in
1960, where the play is set.

I suspect the producers could have spared themselves the expense of
all this you-are-there paraphernalia. By the time the curtain came
down on this starry but sluggish production, and a nominee had been
formally announced, I did feel as if I'd endured a particularly
fractious and constipated evening at a political convention. Need I
add that acquiring this experience has never been one of my great ambitions?

Mr. Vidal's drama about backroom deal making and the withering of
America's political discourse first opened on Broadway in 1960, back
when party conventions in election years were still suspenseful
battles for delegates and not ceremonial coronations of preselected
candidates. There has been talk that this year's campaign for the
Republican nomination might go down to the wire, old-school style,
which adds a small fillip of fresh topicality to this production,
directed by Michael Wilson and featuring a glittering dais of stars,
including James Earl Jones,Angela Lansbury,John Larroquette and Eric
McCormack. (The previous Broadway revival also opened during an
election year, in 2000.)

Unfortunately a thin veneer of currency isn't sufficient to
revitalize a drama that feels positively quaint, despite Mr. Vidal's
winking cynicism about the political arena and his undeniable
prescience about future trends in American politicking. He was
certainly on target in noting the corrupting influence of television
cameras on the tone of political campaigns and the rise of pandering
populism as a crucial element in the playbook of any politician
hoping to make headway in a presidential contest.

But anyone following politics with even the slightest peripheral
vision is acutely aware of how radically the landscape has changed.
The toxins Mr. Vidal was identifying in 1960 as hovering threats on
the democratic horizon are now confirmed facts of political life, so
that this once-trenchant drama -- concerning a battle for the
nomination between a high-minded, deeply moral candidate and his
canny, cutthroat rival -- feels like a civics lesson drawn from a
long out-of-date textbook.

Mr. Larroquette (a Tony winner last year for "How to Succeed in
Business Without Really Trying") and Mr. McCormack (television's
"Will & Grace") play the contrasting characters dueling for the top
prize of the carefully unnamed political party. William Russell (Mr.
Larroquette) is the patrician candidate who exemplifies the ideals
Mr. Vidal clearly favors in a man and a president: intelligence,
probity, a Harvard degree and a healthy distaste for the grim
business of currying the favor of voters by coddling their baser
instincts. (His campaign manager, expertly played by Michael McKean,
has to restrain him from dropping too many erudite references to the
likes of Bertrand Russell and Oliver Cromwell at his news
conferences.) He's no saint, however: long estranged from his wife,
Alice (Candice Bergen), Russell has a reputation for philandering, a
detail that must have seemed daring in 1960 but inspires a yawn in
the post-Clinton, post-Edwards era.

Joseph Cantwell (Mr. McCormack) is the ambitious senator who pulled
himself up by his bootstraps, attended a state school and has no
qualms about using any and all means available to gain an upper hand
over his more well-connected rival. This means smearing Russell by
revealing his past history of psychological frailty.

Cantwell is clearly meant to represent the degenerative tendencies in
American politics of Mr. Vidal's era (which have only metastasized
our own), but I have to admit that from a theatrical standpoint the
cool savagery embodied by Mr. McCormack's Cantwell, all camera-ready
smiles and animal energy, proves to be far more appealing than the
tormented nobility of Mr. Larroquette's Russell.

Mr. Larroquette gives a restrained performance, doling out Russell's
wise musings -- on the anathema of personality politics, on the
importance of leading men as opposed to following polls, on the
relentless artifice involved in campaigning -- with a studied air of
pained, weary wisdom. But the character comes across as alternately a
dispenser of high-toned, dryly ironic jokes or a lecturer on ethics.
Mr. McCormack's slippery Cantwell may be repellent in his
ruthlessness, but at least he's not a snore.

Ms. Bergen, making a rare stage appearance, looks a trifle stiff as
the long-suffering wife, but she hits her comic marks with crisp
efficiency, delivering Alice's sardonic asides with the same brittle
edge she brought to her performance on TV's "Murphy Brown." The
slight air of discomfort Ms. Bergen radiates certainly suits the
character, who shares her husband's innate distaste for the
indecorous business of glad-handing.

As Cantwell's upstart Southern belle wife Mabel, Kerry Butler looks
luscious in Ann Roth's well-turned costumes, but she pushes her
character's kittenish sexuality and crass cattiness a little too
close to caricature. Jefferson Mays makes an effectively sweaty
impression as a squirrelly former Army mate of Cantwell's who is
corralled by Russell's campaign manager into revealing a secret in
the senator's past he hopes to use to neutralize Cantwell's plan to
go public with Russell's medical history.

But the audience warms most to the veterans onstage. Ms. Lansbury, a
welcome presence in many a recent Broadway season, makes every moment
of her stage time count as Sue-Ellen Gamadge, a chatty and genial but
steely party operative given to dictating to candidates and their
wives what the female voter does and does not appreciate. The role is
small, but Ms. Lansbury embodies her character with such style that
she is as vivid a presence as any when she's onstage, and manages to
nail a sure laugh merely by lowering a newspaper.

The great Mr. Jones is provocatively (if not preposterously) cast as
Arthur Hockstader, a former president from the South whose
endorsement both candidates hope to win. It is obviously a trifle
absurd to suggest that an African-American would have achieved the
presidency before the civil rights movement had even gained steam.
And since no one else onstage is black, I'm not sure Mr. Jones's
presence can be classified as color-blind casting.

But no matter: this consummate actor digs into his role with a relish
you can surely sense from the back row of the balcony. He all but
swamps the stage with Hockstader's hearty bonhomie and zest for the
machinations of backroom deal making, but also succeeds in inflecting
his character -- in the last rounds of a losing battle with cancer --
with a moving sense of his mortality.

He also earns robust laughs with some of Mr. Vidal's piercingly funny
lines collapsing the distance between the politics of
mid-20th-century America and today. "The world's changed since I was
politickin'," he observes in a conversation about religion with
Russell, after Russell confesses he isn't a believer. "In those days
you had to pour God over everything, like ketchup." (Apparently the
world's changed back, Arthur.)

But the play more often strikes postures that feel antiquated even in
their idealism, as when Russell responds to a question about the
importance of polling with a tidy little lecture about the role of
government in a properly functioning democracy.

"I don't believe in polls," he says. "Accurate or not. And if I may
bore you with one of my little sermons: Life is not a popularity
contest; neither is politics. The important thing for any government
is educating the people about the issues, not following the ups and
downs of popular opinion."

Noted.

Gore Vidal's The Best Man

By Gore Vidal; directed by Michael Wilson; sets by Derek McLane;
costumes by Ann Roth; lighting by Kenneth Posner; music and sound by
John Gromada; projections by Peter Nigrini; hair design by Josh
Marquette; technical supervision by Hudson Theatrical Productions;
production stage manager, Matthew Farrell; company manager, Brig
Berney; general manager, Richards/Climan, Inc.; associate producer,
Stephanie Rosenberg. Presented by Jeffrey Richards, Jerry Frankel,
Infinity Stages, Universal Pictures Stage Productions, Barbara
Manocherian/Michael Palitz, Kathleen K. Johnson, Andy Sandberg, Ken
Mahoney/The Broadway Consortium, Fifty Church Street Productions,
Larry Hirschhorn/Bennu Productions, Patty Baker, Paul Boskind and
Martian Entertainment, Wendy Federman, Mark S. Golub and David S.
Golub, Cricket Hooper Jiranek, Stewart F. Lane and Bonnie Comley,
Carl Moellenberg, Harold Thau and Will Trice. At the Gerald
Schoenfeld Theater, 236 West 45th Street, Manhattan, (212) 239-6200,
telecharge.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.


WITH: James Earl Jones (Former President Arthur Hockstader), John
Larroquette (Secretary William Russell), Candice Bergen (Alice
Russell), Eric McCormack (Senator Joseph Cantwell), Kerry Butler
(Mabel Cantwell), Jefferson Mays (Sheldon Marcus), Michael McKean
(Dick Jensen) and Angela Lansbury (Sue-Ellen Gamadge).