by Walter Kerr
The New York Times - December 26, 1971
So far as I am concerned, they can throw away the rest of Inner City and just let a lady named Linda Hopkins stand there all night, tapping one foot slightly, opening her composed mouth to let miraculous sounds come out of it, reaching out her arms to the balcony as though to complete its curve and make the whole world come full circle, shaking her head very slightly in deep private worry as she stalks to the portals, done with a song. She is magnificent. She is also a person, not a poster.
Most of Inner City is composed of posters, real ones and people who seem to have been scraped from billboards. Cardboard cutouts of crooked Congressmen are lowered from the flies, shadowy Magritte figures slip through receding tile walls, enormous Gaugin heads loom over young mothers who live in housing projects higher than the elevator goes. Adapted from a volume of latter day lyrics by Eve Merriam, "The Inner City Mother Goose", the new entertainment at the Barrymore is a Tom O'Horgan collage which does indeed manage to catalogue every conceivable urban complaint - the drug scene, cheating grocers, telephone recordings, geraniums that die in their window-boxes - but which does so with a minimum of wit. Its animated human figures are constantly preaching; but the preachments are straightforward slogans that might as well have been tacked up on walls ("There are crowds but you're always alone," "There's not enough space and I can hardly breath") and you yearn, after a time, for a line with some sass and surprise to it.
But not while Miss Hopkins is handy. Miss Hopkins opens the evening, rocking in strict rhythm to a sleepy-street beat, stopping to chat about the neighborhood stores that have had gala openings and quick closings, and you not only know at once that you like her, you are sure you're going to like it.
She is then kept under wraps until about the middle of the first act, when she softly, sadly begins to speak of one of her many men (the one "who relaxed me all out") and gently drifts into a tune that tells of her desperate middle-of-the-night needs. her desperation is controlled, solemn, honest; she never presses an inch beyond what she truly means; she pauses to listen for wavelengths that will tell the God's truth. Then she lets pain escape her, pain in the shape of a musical strain pitched so high that piccolos could not reach it; there aren't any octaves up there. She uses a trick that is no longer fashionable, dropping her voice from quivering song to intimate speech while a dreamy bar piano keeps her company; and you don't care about fashions any longer, you care about what she might have to say. She ambles away in a bathrobe, finally, stocky, confident, containing her own power and sorrow.
Thereafter she is again under wraps - while her chatterbox and sometimes strident companions rap around her - until virtually 10 o'clock. At the last possible moment she is once more unleashed, this time to make the evening's only hopeful statement ("I Believe") with an organ in the pit sounding less ample than her own effortless tones. It's not really the song that's hopeful; it's rather vague about what anyone can look for in today's unnatural jungle. What's hopeful is herself, firm, warm, head up. I wish that adapter/director O'Horgan had not at this point decided to help the lady out. With his customary talent for never letting better than well enough alone, he supplies her with seconding voices from the stage boxes, trying to develop a hand clapping response that is simply an intrusion on what we are all too happy to be listening to. But Miss Hopkins survives, and will.
No, I would not throw everything else out. An attractive, faintly rueful girl named Paulette Ellen Jones appears early in the second act to describe the day she rescued a bloody stranger on her doorstep, cleaned his face as best she could, sent him on his way and then hurried to work, late, but somehow conscious of having lived for a moment. Suddenly there is a long trembling pause, which Miss Jones sustains perfectly through our puzzlement, before her lip begins to quiver and her eyes glaze over. I won't describe what follows, but it is the work of a young actress of extraordinary intuition and authority; the direct, simple passage has the impact the show has been looking for and only rarely finds.
For the most part Inner City is all true and lamentably trite. The nursery rhymes, which keep promising inspired kickers, are given easy, off-the-top endings: "Fee, Fi, Fo Fum, I smell the blood of violence to come." "Tom, Tom, Uncle Tom's son, it's getting harder to find one." "If you haven't got a half a dollar, God mug you." The jokes, which are generally and safely kept at arms length by rapid accompaniment from the pit, can't get beyond "Mayor Lindsay is a John, the Statue of Liberty is Humphrey in drag." The sociology, which is with us all the time, is penny-plain, linguistically flat: "Every day, in every way somebody's making a deal," "Knock him down and kick him around and that's law and order," "It's so easy to get a gun and shoot anyone." The visual illustrations are literal and without endings: while a member of the company is reciting instructions for getting through the streets without losing one's shirt, another is stealing the silver bag tucked beneath his arm. These things are merely done; there isn't much fun in them.
I should say that the staging is, by Mr. O'Horgan's standards, modest, even reserved. The raked stage is flanked by receding black portals and, for a good bit of the time, kept free of decoration. The accent is on the performers, the lyrics are invariably clear, helen Miller's agreeable score can be heard as melody, not beat alone. (The phrase for "If wishes were horses," well sung by Delores Hall, is especially felicitous.) There is an occasional painterly image that evokes a time of day or a place in space: oblivious men in topcoats shuffling through canyons of red brick, reading their newspapers.
And there is, just to keep the franchise, the usual O'Horgan waste. A huge mousetrap is hauled across the stage floor. Three unsteady masked figures in what seem butterfly shrouds wave their arms in counterpoint for a moment or two. An American flag is composed of ashcans. At the end of the evening the curtains part to reveal an enormous white structural sculpture made up of birdcages, bicycles, dressmakers' dummies, automobile doors and ironing boards. None of these products of Mr. O'Horgan's pop-art dreams need have been wrong as such. It's simply that he doesn't use them. He plants them onstage as objects unrelated to what the company is doing at the time and lets them rest there, heavy, expensive, extraneous. (A few members of the company do begin to clamor, feebly, into that final structure but quickly retreat from it as though it might not be safe.) If the director can encourage half-jokes in passing about organic foods, he might give half a moments thought to organic staging. he might even have contributed the cost of his jungle-gym to some inner city, somewhere. The show can do nothing with it.
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