Theater: Pop Parody

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The Beauty Part, by S. J. Perelman. People used to listen to a Beethoven symphony without trying to identify with the composer. But in the age of do-it-yourself culture, everyman is his own self-discovered, self-expressing genius, though the self being expressed is frequently about as artistic as a defective drain. This is the play Humorist S. J. Perelman apparently began to write, and there are hints of it still ("Every housewife in the country has a novel under her apron"). Followed through, this might have led him to a bitingly comic examination of a serious question: Are democracy and culture ultimately compatible?

Instead, he has confected a poor little rich boy's Candide: Lance Weatherwax' adventures in that supposedly best of all possible worlds, the realm of dedicated acolytes of the arts. Lance (Larry Hagman), who is as handsome and unworldly as Rice Krispies and inherited millions can make him, finds, to his chagrin, that artists cannot wait to sell their souls to him or any other handy Mammon. This is scarcely fresh news and only fitfully amusing.

What vitiates Perelman's wit is over-specialization. He has always been a deftly ironic autopsist of what is dead in language. But he is a coroner more of the written than the spoken cliche, so that The Beauty Part sounds as if it were printed on the stage rather than performed on it. Parody is, at best, a parasitic form, no stronger than the host body it is fastened to, and in this case the host is junky novels, flea-brained Hollywood scenarios, self-help journals, and ad jingles. Pop culture is turned into pop parody, and the fun runs thin.

The comic Hercules of the evening is Bert Lahr, who performs six mighty comic labors in six parts. His funniest role: a senile ice-cream tycoon whose favorite political flavor is Birch. Lahr creases his wrinkles, crosses his eyes, and shows all of his time-honored wizardry with the japes and antics of burlesque.