A review of the last revival of The Front Page
November 24, 1986
STAGE: 'THE FRONT PAGE,' AT THE VIVIAN BEAUMONT
By FRANK RICH
AS everyone who's seen ''The Front Page'' knows - and is there anyone who hasn't seen ''The Front Page''? -it's one play that will never receive a negative review in a newspaper. That's because Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur wrote about newspaper people as newspaper people liked to think of themselves and still do, no matter that humming computer terminals have replaced rattling typewriters, that the discovery of a ''love nest'' rarely merits an extra anymore, or that cities like Chicago no longer have eight dailies engaged in cutthroat competition for the big scoop. ''The Front Page,'' to borrow from Shea Stadium parlance, is newspapering like it oughta be. Not even a critic as uncompromising as Joseph Cotten's Jed Leland in ''Citizen Kane'' would be so foolish as to question the work - part farce, part melodrama, all cartoon - that is the Rosetta stone of his and his colleagues' romantic self-image.
To see Hecht's and MacArthur's 1928 valentine to the press now, in Jerry Zaks's attractively cast and appropriately slam-bang revival at the Vivian Beaumont, is also to appreciate it as a play. Well, not as a play exactly - but as an efficient machine (once cranked up) for manufacturing mirth. As Walter Kerr memorably wrote on the occasion of the last Broadway appearance of ''The Front Page,'' in 1969, plays of this American vintage were meant to be machines: ''A play was like a watch that laughed.'' As recent revivals have demonstrated, ''The Front Page'' still ticks louder and faster and funnier than equivalent Broadway contraptions manufactured a decade (''You Can't Take It With You''
or two decades (''Arsenic and Old Lace'' after it.
One knows that the old thing is going to work at Lincoln Center early on, when Jeff Weiss, the Off Off Broadway maverick who went legit last season in the Kevin Kline ''Hamlet,'' appears as Bensinger, the man from The Tribune. Bensinger is the fussbudget of the newsroom at the Chicago Criminal Courts Building -that dread animal, a neat reporter who thinks of himself as a poet, no less. Mr. Weiss, his mouth razor-blade-thin, simply can't wait to pull out his bottle of disinfectant and zap any offending germ in the vicinity of his roll-top desk. He does so with a snap of the wrist so wicked it could induce whiplash. When subsequently mocked by colleagues for his prissiness, he responds with an ''Oh shut up!'' - withering and yet defensive - that Jack Benny might have admired.
Arriving minutes later, but no less welcome, is Richard Thomas, the Hildy Johnson of this outing. Mr. Thomas, a benign presence, is not the obvious choice for the role of a brash star reporter who enters ''stinko'' and soon thinks nothing of trading his prospective mother-in-law (the formidable Beverly May) for the story of a condemned anarchist's jailbreak. But as he's proved several times on stages in several cities in recent seasons, Mr. Thomas isn't the juvenile he's mistaken for - he seeks out acting challenges and rises to them.
Affecting a mustache and an all-purpose Windy City ethnic accent, he soon becomes the swaggering mug required, far more desperate to please the managing editor he's supposedly just quit forever, Walter Burns, than the fiancee whom he's promised to meet at the 11:18 P.M. train for New York. (The usually thankless role of the fiancee is played by Julie Hagerty, whose determined appeals to reason in the face of chaos make humorlessness a howl.) Once John Lithgow's Burns joins Mr. Thomas in Act II, the real marriage of the evening is complete. Whether the tall Mr. Lithgow is trying to detain the deserting Hildy by tossing him on the floor (''At a time of war, you could be shot for what you're doing!'', or sadistically plotting Bensinger's humiliation, or feigning sentimental enthusiasm for Hildy's marital plans (''I was in love once, with my third wife'', he provides comic ruthlessness of a high style. Be assured, too, that Mr. Lithgow delivers the play's immortal curtain line with such bravura finality that one can easily forgive the Beaumont's lack of a curtain.
Like many good newspapermen, Burns regards politicians as his sworn enemy, and this ''Front Page'' is especially acerbic in its portraits of the bumbling, platitudinous Chicago officials who cross him. Richard B. Shull, forever wincing as if life were one long embarrassing encounter with a whoopee cushion, plays the incompetent sheriff ''Pinky'' as the exact kind of backroom ''moron'' that he's called - moronic enough to permit a jailbreak but not so stupid that he neglects to hire his relatives at city expense for the search party. The scene in which he and Jerome Dempsey's windbag Mayor try to bribe Bill McCutcheon's slow-witted, reprieve-bearing gubernatorial messenger is as clownish as any scenario on the Watergate tapes.
Indeed, dated as the Hecht-MacArthur portrayal of newspapering may sometimes seem - one does hear rumors these days of reporters who have actually bettered the play's going pay scale of $70 a week - its cynical view of the political circus remains pertinent. The ward heelers of ''The Front Page'' lie and pander to voters as shamelessly as contemporary pols and are as adept at exploiting capital punishment and radical conspiracies to self-aggrandizing ends. Nearly every scene bristles with the still-extant realities of politics in an urban society of racial and class divisions.
Mr. Zaks properly maintains a frisky tone, even so. ''The Front Page'' is not foolproof - witness the logy 1974 Billy Wilder film version -and it really must move. Mr. Zaks keeps everyone running, although one might question whether he needs a set deep enough to accommodate a marathon. Tony Walton has designed a cigar-hued newsroom within a mammoth gray courthouse - a handsome edifice whose imposing size and gloom smack a bit of Marienbad. Both the designer and Mr. Zaks conquered the Beaumont's problematic stage more resourcefully when their ''House of Blue Leaves'' passed through last spring in transit to Broadway.
Aside from the usual lulls during the by-now ritualistic plot exposition and resolution, the evening's only other significant blemishes are both anachronisms: the opening invocation of a Frank Sinatra recording of ''Chicago'' is more redolent of 1960's Las Vegas than of the 1920's Chicago found in Willa Kim's nostalgic costumes, and, worse, only wimpy amounts of tobacco smoke becloud the poker-playing reporters of the Lucky Strike era. Not the least of the romantic newsroom notions propagated by ''The Front Page,'' after all, is that one becomes a newspaperman precisely because it's hazardous to one's health. THE BIG SCOOP THE FRONT PAGE, by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur; directed by Jerry Zaks; set by Tony Walton; costumes by Willa Kim; lighting by Paul Gallo; sound, Otts Munderloh; production manager, Jeff Hamlin. Presented by Lincoln Center Theater, Gregory Mosher, director; Bernard Gersten, executive producer. At the Vivian Beaumont, 150 West 65th Street.
McCue...Trey Wilson; Endicott...Bernie McInerney; Schwartz...Lee Wilkof; Murphy...Ed Lauter; Wilson...Charles Stransky; Kruger...Ronn Carroll; A Woman...Amanda Carlin; Frank...Philip LeStrange; Bensinger...Jeff Weiss; Woodenshoes Eichorn...Jack Wallace; Diamond Louis...Raymond Serra; Hildy Johnson...Richard Thomas; Jennie...Mary Catherine Wright; Mollie Malloy...Deirdre O'Connell; Sheriff Hartman...Richard B. Shull; Peggy Grant...Julie Hagerty; The Mayor...Jerome Dempsey; Mr. Pincus...Bill McCutcheon; Earl Williams...Paul Stolarsky; Walter Burns...John Lithgow; Tony...Patrick Garner; Carl...Michael Rothhaar; Policemen...
Richard Peterson and Patrick Garner.
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