Word: vereen
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...doesn't walk, he oils himself across the stage. He doesn't jump, he takes off like a small but carefully guided missile. If there should ever be another power failure on Broadway, Ben Vereen could light up the Imperial Theater with one or two snaps of his electric, ring-encrusted fingers. In Pippin, a new hit musical (TIME, Nov. 6) with many standout parts, Vereen's M.C. stands out from all the others...
...Vereen plays him, the M.C. is a kind of failed Mephistopheles, a combination of Joel Grey's decadent host in Cabaret and vaudeville's old-fashioned song-and-dance man. His eyes dance, roll, and turn somersaults in an amused self-parody, but they are too bright to be decadent and too playful to be evil. He tries to tempt and waylay Pippin, the show's Candide-like hero, but it is obvious that he is having too much fun to take the devil business seriously. "It began as a very small part," says Pippin...
Heaven-bent might sound better, considering Vereen's background. Not only was his father a deacon at Brooklyn's Concord Baptist Church and his godfather a traveling Baptist preacher, but Vereen studied six months in a Manhattan seminary. "I was always being saved," he says of his upbringing, "getting on my knees and ridding myself of the demon." Though he quit the seminary and later had what he calls a "little lovers' quarrel" with the church, he says he went into the theater "because it allowed me to reach people in so many capacities, to build...
...school were poorer than poor-"I was skinning by on my belly," he says-his talent got him into Manhattan's famous High School of Performing Arts. That led after graduation to a job as an understudy off-Broadway, and that led absolutely nowhere. For a year, Vereen worked in the mail room of a motion-picture company, vainly hoping that somebody would notice his loud on-the-job singing, then he landed a spot in a small-town Pennsylvania production of West Side Story. There he found his first and, so far, only experience of discrimination...
...other. It is a form of double vision. The sight of the people dancing makes play-goers see the people who are dying with a disconcerting clarity. And from Cabaret comes the master of ceremonies who dominates and observes the show like a seeing-eye god. Ben Vereen moves through the role of M.C. like a meteor. His near equal is Leland Palmer, a dervish of a dancer, who plays a kind of inflectively Jewish stepmother to Pippin...