Word: twains
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With this one-man show, Jack Aranson has joined a select and illuminating company, that of John Gielgud in Ages of Man, Siobhan McKenna in Here Are Ladies, Emlyn Williams as Charles Dickens and Hal Holbrook in Mark Twain Tonight . Moby Dick is the most formidable task...
...dealing with Twain's Huckleberry Finn in the story theatre manner is a much more ambitious project. It's rather like going at a glacier with a pick axe. Not that Twain's story is unmanageable. It's simply that its familiar episodes continually threaten to overwhelm the staging techniques that Bergreen uses to bring the ungraceful narrative to life. Few of his scenes take on an independence of their own and, as a consequence, the audience is left viewing something that looks more like conventional drama than improvisation (and more like high school pageantry than anything else) without experiencing...
Bergreen has reorganized-and necessarily simplified-Twain in order that Huck's gradual recognition of the nigger Jim's humanity and, more than that, friendship provide a thematic structure. In counterpoint are arranged those episodes ashore in which Huck discovers the prevailing inhumanity of most other pre-Civil War, Mississippi Valley traditions. Perhaps because for many in the audience, suspense is precluded by knowledge of the book, while, for the rest, the bare precis that remains appears emotionally shallow, Huck's journey down the Mississippi lacks even the rudimentary sense of adventure that Tom Sawyer would demand of such...
...lighting and Bob McCoy's piano accompaniment (while the latter seems too often intrusive in the rowdier episodes) are suggestive of the lonely, moral equilibrium that Huck can find only on a raft in mid-river. Fletcher World's Jim, although characterized with an understated dignity and authority that Twain himself hardly could have imagined, delivers a couple of especially effective soliloquys. These are the moments when all the magical elements of the story-teller's art coalesce. But they are numbered...
...what about a cast? Producer Twain thought, rightly (after the film), that James Mason was wrong for Humbert. Richard Burton was an early choice, but after one musical (Lerner's Camelof), Burton decided: "I have no desire to repeat this fascinating but exacting experiment." In his place will go John Neville, 45, a first-rank British actor. "When I was first approached," he admits, "my feeling was that I didn't see how it could be done with taste...