DVDs: Dramatic Lost Treasures
No Tony Awards telecast would be complete without excerpts from the nominated musicals. But the Tony programs have had a less consistent history when it comes to presenting excerpts from non-musical plays. It is, of course, much easier to offer a number or medley of numbers from a musical than it is to attempt to encapsulate a play in a single, relatively brief scene. In some years, the Tony show has offered substantial sequences from dramas and comedies. In other years, the program has offered only brief excerpts or some unusual concept for presenting a taste of the non-musicals. Some years, the Tony telecast has simply avoided non-musical excerpts altogether.
Acorn Media has already released on DVD three volumes of Broadway's Lost Treasures, consisting of musical numbers from the various national Tony Awards telecasts that began in 1967. Each of these Lost Treasures programs has also been aired by PBS. As a pledge bonus offered during last summer's PBS telecast of Broadway's Lost Treasures III, a DVD was offered consisting of excerpts from non-musical plays as seen on the Tony telecasts. This program, entitled The Best of the Tony Awards: The Plays, has not been telecast, nor has it been commercially released. But, in addition to its status as pledge bonus, the DVD is now being distributed by Netflix, the internet DVD service. It has been rumored that the Plays DVD could also turn up as a bonus when the Broadway's Lost Treasures discs are eventually grouped in a boxed set.
I recently rented from Netflix the sixty-eight-minute Plays DVD, which commences with an introduction by Harvey Fierstein. Thereafter, it features no hosts or grouped sequences, as on the Lost Treasures discs, just a continuous display of scenes, with voice-over introductions.
The program begins with Howard Sackler's The Great White Hope, starring a monumental James Earl Jones in a role modeled on real-life boxing great Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion. Jack is facing "the fight of the century," but must also confront racism because of his relationship with his white girlfriend Jane Alexander. The fairly lengthy excerpt captures Jones' explosive, larger-than-life performance. Jones and Alexander can also be seen in the film version.
From the 2001 Tony-winning revival of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, we see mental institution inmate McMurphy Gary Sinise attempting to raise the spirits of Chief; confronting Nurse Ratched; and undergoing shock treatment. This is followed by a droll sequence from Peter Shaffer's Lettice and Lovage 1990, featuring a confrontation between the play's two Tony winners, Maggie Smith as the eccentric tour guide of an historic home in Britain, and Margaret Tyzack as the stern administrator who is firing her because of her flamboyant theatrics.
We get a piquant excerpt from David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly 1988, the true story of a French diplomat who carried on a twenty-year affair with a Chinese opera singer who was, in fact, a male spy masquerading as a woman. John Lithgow as the diplomat and B.D. Wong as the impersonator meet and offer contrasting views on the Butterfly story. From Lee Blessing's A Walk in the Woods 1988, and a production preserved in its entirety by PBS, we get a Cold War meeting between an American negotiator Sam Waterston and a Soviet diplomat Robert Prosky.
Annette Benning and Timothy Daly are lovers on a beach in the scene from Tina Howe's Coastal Disturbances 1987, in which Benning imagines the history of the location, and Daly buries her up to her neck in sand. Probaby the most obscure of all the plays featured on the disc, Brian Friel's Lovers 1969, was set in Northern Ireland. We see the scene in which middle-aged lovers Art Carney and Anna Manahan The Beauty Queen of Leenane are disturbed by the upstairs rumblings of the woman's bed-ridden mother.
Before and after this curiosity, we have scenes from two Wendy Wasserstein plays. 1993 was the year the Tonys chose to present excerpts from the nominated plays as if the actors were reading the script at a rehearsal. So the excerpt from The Sisters Rosensweig begins with David Dukes as a stage manager, setting up the scene. While one would have preferred the actual scene, on its feet and in costume, we do at least get a taste of Madeline Kahn's uproarious, Tony-winning performance as sister Gorgeous. Then there's a strong, if too brief, scene from The Heidi Chronicles 1989, in which Heidi Joan Allen confronts her former boyfriend Peter Friedman at his wedding reception.
From 2001, there's an amusing scene from Charles Busch's The Tale of the Allergist's Wife in which houseguest Michele Lee proposes a menage à trois to husband-and-wife Tony Roberts and Linda Lavin. The scorching scene from David Mamet's Hollywood satire Speed-the-Plow 1988 requires the presence of only two Joe Mantegna and Ron Silver of the play's three cast members. The cast member not seen was, of course, Madonna, who would be replaced in Speed-the-Plow by an unknown Felicity Huffman. Then, from Ken Ludwig's backstage farce Lend Me a Tenor 1989, Tony-winner Philip Bosco and Victor Garber are frantically awaiting the arrival of an international opera star for a Cleveland gala performance of Verdi's Otello.
Perhaps the most valuable feature of this disc comes next, scenes from four plays from August Wilson's celebrated cycle. In The Piano Lesson 1990, Charles Dutton's Boy Willie is at the kitchen table, dreaming of buying a piece of farm land by selling an old family piano. S. Epatha Merkerson and Rocky Carroll are also in the scene. From Fences 1987, we see father and son James Earl Jones and Courtney B. Vance in a powerful scene in which the father attempts to teach his son about expectations in life.
Wife Viola Davis tries to explain to husband Brian Stokes Mitchell why she is choosing to abort a child in the scene from King Hedley II 2001. And from one of Wilson's best, Joe Turner's Come and Gone 1988, Delroy Lindo is a man at a boarding-house table who has "forgotten his song" and is in search of his identity.
The DVD concludes with three actors offering soliloquies, all as seen on the 1990 Tony telecast. The expert Kevin Kline delivers Hamlet's advice to the players. In a speech from Long Day's Journey Into Night, Len Cariou is the father, lamenting how he sold his artistic soul for easy stage success. And concluding the show is Morgan Freeman, in the seven-ages-of-man speech from As You Like It.
Several of these clips illustrate the difficulty of attempting to conjure the essence of a straight play with a single scene. Musical numbers stand on their own more easily than do many of these non-musical scenes. And some of these scenes are simply too brief to convey much of the sense of a particular play. Still, this Best of the Tony Awards: The Plays DVD ranks as an intriguing bonus to the Lost Treasures series.