Word: lutes
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Lute Song (adapted from the Chinese Pi-Pa-Chi by Will Irwin & the late Sidney Howard; music by Raymond Scott; produced by Michael Myerberg) is the season's loveliest production and most charming failure. A retelling, with music, dances and pageantry, of a 500-year-old Chinese classic, it never quite catches the inner glow of art or the outward stir of theater. There should have been either less spectacle or less story. As it is, the old tale is retold at considerable length, but loses much of its flow and human feeling through gorgeous interruptions and sumptuous distractions...
...Lute Song tells of Tsai-Yong (Yul Brynner), a provincial young student who leaves his wife (Mary Martin) and parents to make his mark in the world. He becomes a famous magistrate, is forced to marry an autocratic prince's daughter, is forbidden to communicate with his family. His parents die, cursing him, during a famine, but his wife remains staunchly faithful. She is at last reunited with Tsai-Yong by the princess, and remains in the palace as No. 1 wife...
Real hero of Lute Song is famed, all-too-infrequently busy Scene Designer Robert Edmond Jones (Emperor Jones, Green Pastures), whose sets and costumes are often things of splendor. They tremendously enhance the movement as well as the looks of the play-the wedding and burial scenes, the exotic dances, a captivating Imperial March. The best of Composer Scott's incidental music has color also, and one or two of the little songs he has written for Mary Martin have a reedy charm. Actress Martin, straying far from the My Heart Belongs to Daddy sort of singing that made...
Even without a thorough grounding in the classical Chinese theatre, one feels that "Lute Song" has preserved the essential spirit of a lyrical drama with a simple, fairy tale-like atmosphere unfamiliar to must American theatre goers. The unadorned plot--a story similar to Chancer's "Patient Griselda"--remains intact through the translation and condensation into one-third the original length, as do elements of Confucian ethics and what appears to be satire of Buddhist ritual...
Producer Myerberg appears to have sunk a small fortune into "Lute Song" It is well produced, directed, and acted, and the play is a good one. It does not appear, however, at this early stage, that a public weaned on "Good Night Ladies" or "Carousel" will be enthusiastic over a production as unusual as this...