Word: horganitis
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That the production works-as it does, for the most part, brilliantly-is the result of the triangulated talent: the real Lenny Bruce's savage eloquence, the dynamism of Actor Cliff Gorman in the title role, the high theatrical imagination of Director Tom O'Horgan. The script by Julian Barry draws largely from Bruce's original material...
Anti-Church Mélange. O'Horgan, who honed his free-flowing, choreographic style of staging at off-off-Broadway's Cafe La Mama and in the productions of Tom Paine, Futz and most famously Hair, emerges in Lenny as one of the top directors of the U.S. theater. He manages to meld Bruce's sleazy world of one-night stands, his marital hopes and horrors, his helpless, raging entanglement in the courts, and even his vaulting fantasies into a fluid continuum up, down and around the multilevel stage. Lenny was a microphone man; mikes perpetually...
...death did put his life into perspective for some; the surprising result now, five years later, is a Bruce boomlet. Tom O'Horgan, following his production of Hair, planned to do a film of Lenny's life; the project stalled and O'Horgan reworked it as a Broadway play, scheduled to open this week. Writer-Director Fred Baker decided to produce a multimedia homage off-Broadway. Meanwhile a crude movie biography opened in New York to capitalize on the still-growing revivals...
...Horgan's Lenny uses Bruce, played by Cliff Gorman, as a symbol to illustrate how America silences her rebels. Abetted by elaborate theatrical masques and imaginative staging, Lenny attempts to be a frenzied morality play, acting out Bruce's wildest fantasies and using his own words. Says Playwright Julian Barry, who played in a band that accompanied Lenny in the '50s: "To me the whole play is like Lenny's day in court." Adds O'Horgan: "I want to tell people something about this guy who kept trying to tell the truth. Some...
...courts are also experiencing a Bruce revival. His estate and the producers of Lenny obtained an injunction halting the off-Broadway production before it opened. At the same time O'Horgan and his producers are being brought to court by, among others, Lenny's exwife, on a variety of charges involving the Broadway play. Bruce would have appreciated the irony of legal wrangling over his commercial remains. He might even have turned it into a good monologue...