This Day in Theater History (Shaw’s ‘Saint Joan’ Hailed as Career Zenith)

Dec. 28, 1923—Even though critics had derided the most recent play of George Bernard Shaw as too verbose and long, the Anglo-Irish playwright’s new comedy-drama was in much the same vein: Saint Joan, which premiered at New York’s Garrick Theatre.

Instead of driving audiences away, however, the six-act (with epilogue), 3½ hour comedy-drama-historical epic about Joan of Arc proved to be a great success. It was acclaimed as the capstone of his nearly three-decade career as a dramatist, propelling him towards the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925.

At the same time, this success boosted the faith of the playwright in—as well as the box-office take of— the most influential producing company of the 1920s and 1930s, the Theatre Guild, which became the major American sponsor of new work by not only Shaw but also emerging homegrown dramatists such as Eugene O’Neill, Philip Barry, Maxwell Anderson, Robert Sherwood, Sidney Howard, and William Saroyan.

The Guild—which pioneered the subscription plan as a means of assuring a constant stream of avid playgoers more disposed to experimental, challenging fare—had done well with Shaw's Heartbreak House in 1920. But with Back to Methusaleh, a five-play series that represented the closest the playwright came to science fiction, the company lost $20,000—a failure that Shaw attributed to the Guild's management rather than to himself.

In contrast, the Guild's board of directors was more enthusiastic about Saint Joan. But, as the play approached its premiere, the board became concerned that the same issues that plagued its predecessor would hinder the success of this new entry. 

More was riding on the American success of the dramatist whose wife playfully nicknamed "The Genius." The London production of Saint Joan, starring one of Shaw’s favorite actresses, Sybil Thorndike, ended up being delayed until March 1924, so the Guild’s staging became the de facto world premiere, and news about its effectiveness would be transmitted overseas.

As was his wont, Shaw conducted his business with the American theater from across the Atlantic Ocean. 

Despite the importance of America to Shaw’s long-term commercial viability (it represented his largest source of income from 1894 to his death in 1950), the playwright did not visit the nation until 1933, and in general regarded it, according to L. W. Conolly’s Bernard Shaw on the American Stage, with “a toxic mix of contempt and mockery."

Alhough Katharine Cornell, fast acquiring a reputation as one of the greatest American stage actresses, passed on this initial production, the Guild board of directors ended up delighted with the blue-eyed Brooklyn beauty who took on the title role: Winifred Lenihan, who made of it a career triumph.

First after the dress rehearsal, then again after opening night, the Guild noticed that some attendees, especially from the suburbs, were departing early. Their initial cables urged Shaw to cut some of the dialogue to reduce that, but they received no reply. 

Only after the company management prevailed on the 25-year-old Lenihan to send her own cable with a similar request did the playwright respond. They might not have wished they had sent all these messages when they saw Shaw's follow-up.

To Ms. Lenihan, the playwright’s cable was short and ironic: “THE GUILD IS SENDING ME TELEGRAMS IN YOUR NAME. PAY NO ATTENTION TO THEM.” The organization’s management must have winced at his longer, more lacerating letter to them: “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves for getting a young actress into trouble with an author like that…. You have wasted a whole morning for me with your panic-stricken nonsense, confound you!”

In the end, it didn’t matter: the public ignored reviewers who complained about the length by purchasing tickets. Despite his waspish transatlantic exchanges with the Theatre Guild's management, Shaw elected to stay with it as the principal American agent for his plays, with a total of 15 plays under its aegis.

Although Shaw wrote over 60 plays, Saint Joan ranks among his most popular, probably trailing only Pygmalion (which has the benefit of not only inspiring the musical My Fair Lady, but is also logistically easier to mount, with fewer characters and sets).

Over the centuries, Joan has provided fodder for a lengthy parade of novelists and dramatists, including William Shakespeare, Voltaire, Friedrich Schiller, Mark Twain, Bertolt Brecht, Jean Anouilh, and others. But it’s Shaw’s depiction that has captured the popular imagination the most.

In the early postwar period, Saint Joan exerted an unusual appeal for colonial audiences that, like France in Joan’s time, was feeling the stirrings of nationalism. 

Yet even then, in the McCarthy period, it was also seen as a broadside against intolerance, and more recently has appealed to those who sympathize with her plight at the hands of men who hope to squash what Shaw ironically termed “unwomanly and insufferable presumption.”

It is a curious fact of Joan of Arc’s posthumous appeal that two religious skeptics like Twain and Shaw could be so powerfully drawn to the story of this saint. Leave aside the odd contention, in Shaw’s preface to the play, that Joan was “one of the first Protestant martyrs.”

Remember instead: the recollection of Theatre Guild founder Lawrence Langner, in his 1963 memoir, GBS and the Lunatic, that Shaw attributed the enormous speed with which he wrote the play to Joan herself: “As I wrote, she guided my hand, and the words came tumbling out at such a speed that my pen rushed across the paper and I could barely write fast enough to put them down."

In 1934, Shaw predicted correctly, “It is quite likely that sixty years hence, every great English and American actress will have a shot at ‘Saint Joan,’ just as every great actor will have a shot at Hamlet.”

 Among those who have played Shaw’s version of the Maid of Orleans: Katharine Cornell (catching it on the rebound), Wendy Hiller, Zoe Atkins, Judi Dench, Uta Hagen, Joan Plowright, Lynn Redgrave, and Kim Stanley.

I myself have seen two productions: one at Manhattan's Paley Center for Media, a 1967 "Hallmark Hall of Fame" TV presentation starring Genevieve Bujold; the other a 2018 Manhattan Theatre Club performance with Condola Rashad in the title role. 

Both productions shortened the text—an eventuality that Shaw dourly predicted in the preface to the play, when he noted that "well intentioned but disastrous counsellors" would have their way "when I am no longer in control of the performing rights."

Quote of the Day (George Bernard Shaw, Proposing ‘A Financial Symphony’)

“Why not a Financial Symphony? Allegro: Impending Disaster, Lento maestoso: Stony Broke, Scherzo: Light Heart and Empty Pocket, Allegro con brio: Clouds Clearing.”—Anglo-Irish Nobel Literature laureate George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), June 29, 1932 postcard to English composer Sir Edward Elgar, quoted in F.W. Gaisberg, The Music Goes Round (1942)

Shaw, a music critic before he became a playwright, certainly did not feel bashful about suggesting to “Pomp and Circumstance” creator Elgar—in semi-retirement, following the death of his wife a dozen years before—what his next musical subject would be.

Elgar didn’t take him up on it. But he did accept the commission for a symphony that Shaw strongly urged the BBC have him do. That work was unfinished at Elgar’s death from cancer in 1934.

But his extensive 130 pages of notes enabled British composer Anthony Payne to finish the job over 60 years later. Symphony No. 3 in C Minor ended up being performed 25 years ago this week, to considerable acclaim.

When Shaw contributed his puckish idea to Elgar, the world was in the grip of a worldwide depression. Considering the repercussions of that economic collapse—not just the rise of Nazism in Germany, but also the starry-eyed wonder many intellectuals in the West would hold for the Soviet Union in those years—it definitely took a while for the “Clouds Clearing” movement to develop.

If a “financial symphony” were created today in line with Shaw’s concept, I’m afraid that the result could be every bit as discordant as what happened during his time and Elgar’s.

(By the way, if you want to hear how Payne completed Elgar’s project, listen to this YouTube clip of the performance by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.)

Quote of the Day (George Bernard Shaw, on Elections as ‘A Moral Horror’)

“An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.” —Anglo-Irish playwright and Nobel Literature laureate George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Back to Methuselah (1921)

So it was, again, this year, a century after Shaw wrote these words. And it wasn’t even a midterm election, let alone a Presidential one.

Shaw was correct about the shamelessness and self-abasement displayed by those running for office. But he could not conceive that, by the time he died nearly 30 years later, a worse kind of “moral horror” would be triggered in vast stretches of Europe, by Fascists and Communists—intimidation of candidates and interference with the right to vote—or that now, similar blights on democracy would crop up on both sides of the Atlantic.

Theater Review: Bernard Shaw’s ‘Caesar and Cleopatra,’ Presented by the Gingold Theatrical Group, NYC

Over the course of his roughly five-decade career as a playwright, George Bernard Shaw pushed against the boundaries of contemporary thought and the conventions of drama. A pioneer who widened the scope of what could be mounted onstage, he survives—barely—in this age hard-put to tackle his large-scale plays featuring multiple characters who circle, flirt, debate, wound, and charm over and over and over again, with the whole as impervious to production costs as to modern audiences’ attention spans.

At New York City’s Off-Broadway venue, Theater Row, the Gingold Theatrical Group (GTG) offered a seminar in how to handle “G.B.S.,” as he liked to sign himself. 

Caesar and Cleopatra, which concluded its run a week ago, is the story of an education of a young queen. Forget about the conqueror-and-seductress saga familiar from film and TV: the young Cleo we first see here is little better than a child, so any notion of sex between the two is—well, creepy.

I started reading Shaw in my tweens, and I fairly raced through his collected works. It took some time before I saw them performed, and I doubt I could now abide a literal translation of this material from page to stage.

Produced in 1898, Caesar and Cleopatra illustrates why: the original Prologue, featuring Cleopatra’s loyal but domineering nurse Ftatateeta, goes on for several pages with the character alone on stage. The playwright’s “alternate” first scene is only a bit better: slightly shorter, but with characters secondary to the main action.

In contrast, the GTG highlights Ftatateeta (embodied, in all her haughtiness and formidability, by the marvelous Brenda Braxton) as a kind of Greek chorus, but whisking playgoers far more quickly into the action. It was emblematic of what would follow: not a leisurely trip down the Nile, but a two-hour hurtle through invasion, civil unrest, assassinations, and regime change.

Shaw’s detailed instructions for elaborate sets and inclusion of common soldiers and aides may have inadvertently encouraged earlier productions to treat this as a costume drama rather than a comedy of ideas.

The GTG’s David Staller would have none of that. The director pruned spear carriers and landscape alike. (For instance, the Ptolemy of the original conception—a boy-king who rails against sister Cleopatra as he repeats the instructions of his eunuch adviser—becomes an amusing Charlie McCarthy-like dummy). In the end, Staller brought into sharper focus the Nobel Literature Prize laureate’s concern with male-female relations, colonialism, war, and the proper use of power.

Never unafraid to claim that Shaw was superior to Shakespeare, the Victorian playwright was unafraid to revise the Bard’s strongman-in-the-making into a ruler who won men to his side by the judicious use of mercy as by force of arms. It’s a conceit, to be sure, but an object lesson he thought his countrymen could use as they puzzled over how to administer a worldwide empire.

Robert Cuccioli wore this rhetorical tunic lightly, exuding all the irony of a politician and man of the world who has seen it all and is now unillusioned by the spectacle that continues to pass before him. (“Taxes are the chief business of a conqueror of the world,” he tells the fuming Egyptians who meet with him.”) He was as amused by Cleopatra’s crush on his handsome young officer Mark Antony as he is exasperated by her thoughtless and violent abuses of her new-found power.

He was at his best teaching the girl not just the stagecraft of power (how to carry oneself, how to command), but also the philosophy behind it (why vengeance just sparks an endless cycle of dangerous recrimination).

As Cleopatra, Teresa Avia Lim masterfully executed the crucial character arc of the play: from a girl searching for her cat and terrified of Roman soldiers to a young woman who assiduously (if ambivalently) absorbed all Caesar’s lessons in governing.

Shaw is not performed with anything close to the regularity that he should be, so I jump on any production when I have a chance. I had not been previously aware of the GTG, whose programs include a Shaw New York annual festival and a related monthly reading series. I will have to catch their offerings in the future.

Theater Review: ‘My Fair Lady,’ at Lincoln Center

My Fair Lady may well be my favorite Broadway-originated musical. (For musicals that began life on the big screen, I reserve top honors for Singing in the Rain.) It’s not just that the “book” borrows heavily and appropriately from George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, but that its songs—most of which entered the Great American Songbook long ago—long ago seeped into my memory. Seldom have wit and heart become so conjoined in the entire history of musical theater.

Those two qualities are what I have come back to, again and again, in thinking of how much I enjoyed the revival of this great musical—with the passage of time, still one of the half-dozen greatest in the history of that art form, in my opinion—now taking place at Lincoln Center. The show had already been running there since spring, and I counted myself lucky it was still around for me to enjoy it. 

As I write this review, it’s still open, but even the best things in life don’t last forever, so I urge anyone who hasn’t seen it yet—heck, anyone who has one of those days when they feel down at the mouth—to run out and buy a ticket.

Not unlike the 1964 Oscar-winning film adaptation starring Rex Harrison (repeating his Broadway triumph) and Audrey Hepburn, the show at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater is handsome, even highly stylized. The costumes by Catherine Zuber are beautiful (especially in the scenes at the Embassy and the Ascot races), and the sets by Michael Yeargan, which move the action rapidly from scene to scene (particularly in Henry Higgins’ house on Wimpole Street), are a marvel of economy in stagecraft. 

But it is in fidelity to the book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and the music by Frederic Loewe that this show is best served. Over the past few decades, changing attitudes toward sexual roles, race and ethnicity have led a number of producers to embark on ill-advised “revisals,” in which playwrights are commissioned to perform drastic surgery on shows’ “books” (the spoken, non-sung portions, often called the “librettos”). 

More often than not, these changes, rather than enhancing the value of the songs that drew backers to the show in the first place, call unnecessary attention to themselves through their anachronistic interpretations.  

But director Bartlett Sher sidestepped that danger. He left the libretto, from what I could see, almost entirely intact. But, without changing a single word, he has changed the interpretation of its famous ending (“"Eliza? Where the devil are my slippers?"). In his non-traditional way, he has adhered closer to Shaw’s original, almost perversely non-conformist spirit than any prior production.

The cast differed somewhat at this performance from the start of its run last April. Not having seen the show when it first settled in at Lincoln Center, I can’t say whether the replacements constituted an improvement, but the actors certainly filled their roles ably.

Michael Williams stepped in for Mark Aldrich as Lord Boxington, and, in a role with far greater visibility—and greater potential for triumph or disaster—Adam Grupper—the understudy for Norbert Leo Butz (Alfred P. Doolittle) and Allan Cordenur (Col. Pickering)—subbed capably for the latter.

Other cast changes were longer lasting. At this performance, Becca Ayers took on the multiple roles of Mrs. Hopkins, Henry Higgins’ maid, as well as understudy for Mrs. Parsee and an ensemble member. I would have loved to have seen Diana Rigg as Mrs. Higgins, but how could I complain about my longtime stage favorite Rosemary Harris (perhaps best known as Aunt May in the Tobey Maguire Spiderman film trilogy) in the role?

The most significant cast change involved Laura Benanti, who took over the role of Eliza Doolittle from the acclaimed Lauren Ambrose. From having seen her in the Roundabout Theatre Company’s terrific revival of the musical She Loves Me (see my review here), I knew Ms. Benanti was a performer with considerable vocal prowess and acting range. 

True, in her late 30s, she is a full two decades older than the Cockney flower girl she’s portraying (as well as the actress who made her reputation in the original musical, Julie Andrews). She’s even a couple of years older than co-star Harry Hadden-Paton. 

But producers have found a way forever to make audiences forget about age-appropriate casting for Eliza. The first Eliza, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, was 49 years old when she originated the role in the original 1913 production of Pygmalion. Even on the big screen, where age is harder to disguise, Audrey Hepburn was 35 when she won the coveted role. It helps that musical-theater enthusiasts (especially opera fans) have long been asked to engage in far more startling suspensions of disbelief.

What this production has, in Ms. Benanti, is an artist with the maturity to understand and convey Eliza’s struggle for autonomy; of her pride in not simply passing for a “lady” but also learning a new language to help her do so; and of her fury in being bullied and dismissed not just by her no-account father but by the conniving bully like Higgins and even the seemingly thoughtful Col. Pickering.

In other words, this is more than a show where attention is more balanced than before between Eliza and Higgins; this is a production which, like never before, belongs to Eliza and the actress bringing her to life in the 21^st century. 

In its fall 2007 production of Pygmalion starring Jefferson Mays as Higgins and Claire Danes as Eliza, the Roundabout opened my eyes to what had long seemed preposterous: that a happily-ever-after ending for the professor and his pupil would not only have been a stretch, but even preposterous. 

The Lincoln Center production pushes that notion even further. Hadden-Paton’s Higgins could be an Edwardian counterpart to Dr. Sheldon Cooper of The Big Bang Theory: an intellectual man-child with nearly zero emotional intelligence—and, thus, a long-term indifference to how he might sound to others. This Higgins might be missing a good deal of the charm that Harrison brought to the role, but it does underscore that the professor’s emotional journey will take longer than Eliza’s.

More than a decade ago, I took special delight in the Tony Award-winning performance of Norbert Leo Butz in the Broadway musical Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. But he may have exceeded that here as Alfred P. Doolittle. The actor (who has now turned the role over to the equally estimable Broadway veteran Danny Burstein) made of Eliza’s father a role to behold. Leading his bar mates in his two big numbers, “With a Little Bit of Luck” and “Get Me to the Church on Time,” he is as irresponsible a scamp who ever lived. But you can’t help loving his brio—and chuckling on his predicament after an unexpected windfall leaves him sputtering about the dangers of “middle-class morality.”

With his majestic voice, Jordan Donica demonstrated with the big number given to the young aristocrat Freddy Eynsford-Hill, “On the Street Where You Live,” the great, beating unconditional love that has been missing from Eliza all this time under the thumb of her father and Higgins. Donica’s unabashed joy is enough to convince the audience that, with all his faults (as someone who’s never worked a day in his life, how can be expected to provide for her, let alone himself, if they marry?), he presents Eliza with a credible alternative to life with Higgins.

Sophisticated and hilarious, My Fair Lady continues to repay musical theater lovers’ attention. Even as Eliza delivers a curtain response to Higgins that leaves the linguistics professor uncharacteristically speechless, Benanti and Co. leave the audience walking on air.

Quote of the Day (George Bernard Shaw, on a Common Failing of Young Men)

“Like all young men, you greatly exaggerate the difference between one young woman and another.” — Munitions manufacturer Andrew Undershaft, in Anglo-Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Major Barbara (1907)

Quote of the Day (George Bernard Shaw, on How ‘The Loneliness of God is His Strength’)

“Do not think you can frighten me by telling me that I am alone. France is alone; and God is alone; and what is my loneliness before the loneliness of my country and my God? I see now that the loneliness of God is His strength: what would He be if He listened to your jealous little counsels? Well, my loneliness shall be my strength too; it is better to be alone with God; His friendship will not fail me, nor His counsel, nor His love. In His strength I will dare, and dare, and dare, until I die.”—Anglo-Irish playwright (and Nobel Literature laureate) George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Saint Joan (1920)

The image accompanying this post shows Canadian actress Genevieve Bujold in the title role of Saint Joan, in the Hallmark Hall of Fame TV production from 1967.

Theater Review: Bernard Shaw’s ‘Saint Joan,’ Presented by the Manhattan Theatre Club

Saint Joan, which closes on Broadway on Sunday, arrived when the nearly century-old tragicomedy by George Bernard Shaw could be seen in a new light. This has less to do with the production capably but not sensationally mounted by the Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC), and more with the gender warfare of the moment.

You want a leader constantly having to face down men who underestimate or even condescend to her? Well, here is one who truly, to borrow the favorite verb of Mitch McConnell, “persisted”—whether by leading an army to victory on the battlefield or by being burned at the stake.

Despite themselves, even battle-hardened, cynical French soldiers realize that there is, as a few put it in the first act, “something about her.”

In one of the six scenes of this nearly three-hour play, Shaw has two adversaries--a French Cardinal and an English earl with precious little interest in religion--move toward an unexpected alliance through their mutual interest in stopping an even more unlikely common enemy, a French teenage farm girl, Joan of Lorraine. The adolescent—better known to posterity as St. Joan of Arc—threatens them as the representative of two new forces in history, what the Anglo-Irish playwright, in a case of puckish anachronism, terms “nationalism” and “Protestantism.”

The Archbishop of Rheims observes, not without anxiety, that “there is a new spirit rising in man; we are at the dawning of a wider epoch.” Joan, as the unwitting emblem of that "new spirit," is a threat to the medieval power structure.

But, while Shaw’s initial listeners might have nodded in agreement at that scene, as well as Shaw's observations on the cluelessness of career male military leaders (who had, only a few years before, sent countless young men to their death in WWI) and on intolerance. 

But the prime movers at the MTC are far more interested in a different struggle taking place after intermission. This struggle involves Joan, a woman of strength and determination who had lifted the siege of Orleans, now finding her strategy of carrying the flight to the English questioned anew by the men who had scoffed at her initial plan to raise the siege of Orleans in the Hundred Years' War.

As Joan, Condola Rashad has the only major female role in Shaw’s play. (Mandi Masden, playing the Duchess de la Tremouille, is on and off quickly.) She must interact with 17 different male actors and, as Joan, contend with each of them. Her Tony Award nomination is well-deserved, as she conveys the simplicity and purity that are at once the source of her strength in leading men to victory and of her endangerment in an ecclesiastical court shadowed by power politics.

Though Tony voters have singled out Rashad, a couple of other cast members also deserved consideration: Jack Davenport, as the cynical power player Earl of Warwick, and Patrick Page, making the most of two roles: the strutting military peacock Capt. Robert de Baudricourt and The Inquisitor, an ecclesiastical judge as intent that Joan receive a fair trial as he is fanatical in insisting that the charges against her are in and of themselves worthy of invoking the death penalty. 

I had forgotten just how long this play can be, no doubt because the only prior version I saw—a 1967 Hallmark Hall of Fame special, with Geneviève Bujold in the title role—clocked in at a TV-friendly two hours. Brooking no criticism for straining playgoers’ and critics’ preferences for shorter fare than the 3 1/2 hours he projected, Shaw airily noted in his preface to the play that “'what matters is not the absolute length of time occupied by a play, but the speed with which that time passes.”

Director Daniel Sullivan has steered a middle course between the playwright’s demands and the audience’s desire for different play lengths, bringing in the production at two hours and 45 minutes. He’s also added touches that bolster his interpretation without being inimical to the playwright’s intention (e.g., Page as Baudricourt confronts Joan bare-chested in an empty attempt to overwhelm her with machismo).  

But Shaw does Sullivan no favors with his dialogue-heavy text. Walter Bobbie (who plays the Bishop of Beauvais, Cauchon) noted, in a thoughtful post-show “talk back,” that Shaw was a “narrative essayist” who planted surprising theatrical touches in what were essentially dramas of ideas.

But much of the early going—particularly the scenes between Cauchon and Warwick, and between Joan and the soldier Dunois—consisted of static standoffs. It was only in the second half of the play, when Joan realizes she won’t have the support of the men she championed and, after her capture, goes on trial for heresy, that the full dramatic potential of the play as mounted by the MTC is achieved.