For all its brilliant insanity, my favorite moments in the Marx Brothers’ film oeuvre come when Groucho breaks the cinematic fourth wall and gives the camera one of his gloriously ambiguous stares. He’s usually just told a groaner of a joke, but his take isn’t a wink-wink of a look. It’s at once aggressive and puzzled, as if he’s expecting a hurled tomato but wonders where it will come from. At the same time, it’s an in-your-face double-dare to the audience, which seems to say, “Go ahead. Try. Just try to figure out what’s going on in my screwy cerebellum. Just try.”
Doing his own brand of the mustachioed Marx at the Skylight Opera’s A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine, Norman Moses (with Ray Jivoff and Benjamin Howes) has the Groucho glare down pat, and it’s even more hilarious and harrowing because it’s live. He walks to the stage edge, takes a good long theatrical beat, and you feel like something, anything might happen. Moses has played this part several times, so he’s had time to take his Groucho beyond a vocal impersonation. It’s in his soul, and he relishes every line and smooth double take.
As good as he is, Moses isn’t the star of the Skylight show. Hollywood/Ukraine is really an ensemble piece, and the one assembled by director Pam Kriger is first rate. The Brothers Marx don’t appear until Act Two—the capper to an evening-long tribute to the movies of the 1930s. In Act One, Kriger’s nonet pays tribute—review-style—to the comforts and clichés of the golden age. The full-throttle, tap-danced tribute to the Hollywood Production Code of 1930 is the best known number, and Kriger’s tappers (including a first-timer or two) are great fun to watch. But the highlights come in solo and duet form. Ray Jivoff and Carol Grief make the case for “Thanks for the Memories” as a great American song, using its simple lyrics to tell the entire story of a marriage. And Melinda Pfundstein is a perfect embodiment of the Hollywood starlet as American rags-to-riches-to-rags saga, capturing it in a full-belt song that really stops the show.
It seems odd that the theater should pay tribute to the industry that sped its decline. But now that Broadway has made an industry of cannibalizing hit movies, it’s nice to see Hollywood/Ukraine–a Broadway hit way back in 1980–look back to the days when the movies freely stole from the theater, Tin Pan Alley songs, Busby Berkley routines, and Groucho, too.
Review- “Hollywood/Ukraine” at the Skylight
For all its brilliant insanity, my favorite moments in the Marx Brothers’ film oeuvre come when Groucho breaks the cinematic fourth wall and gives the camera one of his gloriously ambiguous stares. He’s usually just told a groaner of a joke, but his take isn’t a wink-wink of a look. It’s at once aggressive and puzzled, as if he’s expecting a hurled tomato but wonders where it will come from. At the same time, it’s an in-your-face double-dare to the audience, which seems to say, “Go ahead. Try. Just try to figure out what’s going on in my screwy cerebellum.…
