DVDs: Award Winners
Along with names like Geraldine Page, Kim Stanley, and Maureen Stapleton, Julie Harris is invariably listed among the finest American actresses to have emerged on Broadway after World War II. Indeed, some consider Harris the foremost leading lady of her generation, and she earned a record five Tony Awards. Of her best performances, those in I Am a Camera as the non-musical Sally Bowles and The Member of the Wedding were preserved on film, while several others The Lark, The Last of Mrs. Lincoln, Little Moon of Alban were captured on television.
Late in her career, she starred in a national tour of Driving Miss Daisy and did The Glass Menagerie for Roundabout and The Gin Game for National Actors Theatre. But for an actress of her gifts and stature, Harris had few great Broadway roles, spending much of her time in lightweight, forgettable fare that ranged from the enjoyable A Shot in the Dark, Forty Carats to the weak or worse Break a Leg, Voices, Mixed Couples, Ready When You Are, C.B.!, The Warm Peninsula. There was even a flop musical, Skyscraper 1965, with Harris also getting the chance to sing in June Havoc's short-lived play-with-songs, Marathon '33.
Harris earned her fifth Tony for her performance in The Belle of Amherst 1976, a solo piece about celebrated American poet Emily Dickinson, fashioned for the star by William Luce and staged by one of Harris's favorite directors, Charles Nelson Reilly. Luce would have three more solo shows produced on Broadway: Lillian, with Zoe Caldwell as Hellman, in '86; Lucifer's Child, with Harris as writer Isaak Dinesen, in '91; and Christopher Plummer as Barrymore, in '97.
The Belle of Amherst played 116 performances at the Longacre Theatre. But it was the sort of role with which Harris had a profound affinity, so she held onto it and toured it to various venues after New York. Happily, she also preserved it for television, in a taping before a live audience, and it's now out on a Kino DVD.
Smoothly integrating into the narrative a good deal of Dickenson's verse, The Belle of Amherst finds Emily, at fifty-three, a shy, eccentric recluse and spinster living with her sister Lavinia at their home in Amherst, Massachusetts. In two acts and ninety minutes, the play has Emily shifting back and forth in time between 1845, when she was fifteen, and 1886, the year of her death.
Dressed in her customary bridal white, Emily expresses how profoundly, even physically, she is affected by words. She discusses her austere father, her brief attendance at Mount Holyoke College, and her feelings about organized religion. Emily recalls her one serious suitor, and the deaths of her father and a nephew. At the age of forty, her poems are rejected by the Atlantic Monthly. But before she dies, she will have seven of them published anonymously.
Burning with that inner flame that made her such a luminous performer, Harris makes these commonplace events seem crucial. It's hard to imagine The Belle of Amherst with another actress, and it's good that this performance is available to be seen again.
THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE 20th Century-Fox
Muriel Spark's 1961 novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie introduced to the world one of those larger-than-life heroines who was bound to have a career on stage and screen. Adapted for the theatre by Jay Presson Allen Forty Carats, Tru, the Cabaret screenplay, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie had its stage premiere in London in 1966, with Vanessa Redgrave in the title role, directed by Peter Wood.
Two years later, Broadway saw the play, and it made a star of Zoe Caldwell, who won a Tony for her uproarious performance, under the direction of Michael Langham. The Broadway Brodie ran a year but, unlike Redgrave, who was followed in London by Anna Massey and others, Caldwell was never replaced.
Following the Broadway run, I saw three ladies play Jean Brodie in summer stock: Betsy Palmer was passable, Kim Hunter lacked sufficient humor and eccentricity, but Tammy Grimes was just right. In the '90s, London had two revivals of the play, first with Patricia Hodge, then at the National Theatre, starring Fiona Shaw. For the latter production, Allen revised her script, bringing in more of Spark and eliminating the original stage framework that had a writer interviewing a nun who turns out to have been one of Miss Brodie's pupils at the Marcia Blaine School in 1930s Edinburgh.
There was an excellent, seven-part 1978 television miniseries of Spark's book, starring a marvelous Geraldine McEwan. And then there's the 1969 film version, directed by Ronald Neame and with a screenplay by Allen, which sticks very closely to the play while also eliminating the convent framework and offers a star performance that any stage revival would be hard pressed to equal. Just as Caldwell had taken the Tony for her Brodie, Maggie Smith won a much-deserved Academy Award for the film.
But then Jean Brodie is one of the juiciest roles written for an actress in the last fifty years. Outrageous, inspiring, self-dramatizing, and self-destructive, Jean flaunts conservative authority, eschewing traditional teaching methods to instill in her pupils adoration for the things that she admires, which range from paintings by Giotto to Fascist political leaders. Like Auntie Mame, she's a dynamic leader and free spirit. But Miss Brodie can also be dangerous, attempting to have her girls live out aspects of her life that she dared not enact herself.
Shot on location in Edinburgh, the film version of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie has just been released on DVD, and it remains a grand record of the piece, centered around Smith's virtuosic, often hilarious performance. Equally strong is veteran Celia Johnson Brief Encounter as the headmistress with whom Brodie locks horns, and Smith's husband at the time, Robert Stephens, as the art instructor. And Brodie's pupils were all sharply cast, with particularly fine work from Pamela Franklin. But it's Smith's picture, and she offers an unforgettable portrait.
Might The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie be worthy of a Broadway revival, say by Roundabout? Might Natasha Richardson be interested in trying on another of her mother's great stage roles? Perhaps, but then the film version almost makes a stage revival unnecessary.
LOVERS AND OTHER STRANGERS MGM
Speaking of 1968 Broadway plays that were made into films, you may also wish to check out Lovers and Other Strangers. As a play, it was an evening of four distinct comic sketches by Renee Taylor and Joseph Bologna that lasted seventy performances at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre and featured Taylor in the cast.
Things worked better in the 1970 film version, when the playlets were woven together around a wedding in the screenplay by Taylor, Bologna, and David Zelag Goodman. The enjoyable cast includes a sublime Bea Arthur replacing Kaye Ballard, just prior to her television fame, and Diane Keaton in her film debut. As Arthur's husband, Richard Castellano repeats the role he played on Broadway, and there are such other theatre folk as Bob Dishy, Harry Guardino, Anne Meara, Anne Jackson, Marian Hailey, and Cloris Leachman, the latter also poised to become better known, via TV's "The Mary Tyler Moore Show."
Playing the young bridegroom hero is Michael Brandon, who recently created the title role in the London production of Jerry Springer: The Opera and, one assumes, is likely to repeat it on Broadway. Seen today, Lovers and Other Strangers has about it more than a dash of TV comedies like Love, American Style and The Love Boat. But it's fast-moving and enjoyable, and Arthur whose character's words of wisdom include "dying is no picnic" and "life is for the living" is priceless.
Two bits of trivia: Arthur's role coincidentally, called Bea was created in the Broadway version by Helen Verbit, who had understudied Arthur's Yente in Fiddler on the Roof. And when Arthur goes to confession in the movie, the priest who hears her is played by Conrad Bain, who, two years later, would play Arthur's neighbor on her "Maude " series.
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