Television: Midwinter Night's Dreams

(2 of 3)

THE TAMING OF THE SHREW (PBS, Jan 26, 8 p.m., E.S.T.) It is a bad sign when a producer feels he must apologize for Shakespeare, but that is precisely what Jonathan Miller does at the beginning of this play, the 13th in the BBC's Shakespeare series. The Taming of the Shrew is sexist, he says, but it was, after all, written almost 400 years ago. Miller's patronizing tone may explain the flaw of this otherwise worthy production: it is not fun. The scenery is stunning, the direction fine, and Sarah Badel and John Cleese are engaging as Katharina and Petruchio, the shrew and her tamer. But more might have been expected of Miller, who showed his lively wit in Beyond the Fringe, and Cleese, mainspring of the Monty Python troupe. They may be doing a play from the 16th century, but they need not have left their sense of humor in the 20th.

— Gerald Clarke

I REMEMBER HARLEM (PBS Feb. 1-4) Take the A train to 125th Street, and there it is: the black capital of the U.S., a city within a city. Harlem is not the biggest black community in the country, but it is the most important, and even today there are memories of the golden days when tourists came from all over the world for a night at the Cotton Club or the Apollo Theater. This four-part series is both a history and a celebration of those storied blocks of uptown Manhattan, a fascinating scrapbook of a lost and almost forgotten time.

Blacks found a haven in Harlem about the turn of the century and soon made it their own, displacing the other ethnic groups that had been there before them. By the early '20s, it was a lively center for writers, singers, dancers and composers: Langston Hughes, Ethel Waters, Josephine Baker, Eubie Blake and Paul Robeson. Bessie Smith occasionally dropped in, and there was enough talent, much of it unknown to the folks downtown, to fill the stages of a dozen theaters. The expansive, tree-lined streets were safe, and on a Sunday, Seventh Avenue was a promenade for strollers. That Harlem survived, more or less, through the '40s. Even the subsequent arrival of teen-age gangs failed to change things very much; the teen-agers were interested only in hurting one another.

The real decline began later, when the drug dealers and muggers came on to the scene, and it gathered frightening speed after the riots of 1964. The '60s and '70s also saw civil rights protests and parades and attempts to resurrect the lost spirit. Yet only now, on the cusp of a new decade, are there tentative signs of another Harlem renaissance.

William Miles, the Harlem-born writer and producer of the series (who was responsible in 1977 for the splendid World War I documentary Men of Bronze), is obviously in love with his subject. Instead of an ordinary documentary, he has fashioned a kind of oral and visual history, with long interviews with those who remember (including one ancient man who recalls the famous buzzard of '88). Occasionally the interviews take their own good time—and the viewer's—as Miles lets his oldtimers wander too far down history's obscure bypaths.