Consider Frank Ferrante, the leering Capt. Spalding, "the noted African explorer," Groucho's most celebrated creation. "What? From Africa to here, $1.85?" he protests as he is hoisted on a litter by a pair of Africans in a most anticipated entrance. Next on is Robert Michael Baker (Chico) as Signor Emanuel Ravelli, a musician who explains, in perfect nonsense, his unaffordable rates for not playing and for not rehearsing. Les Marsden (Harpo) follows as the silent Professor of whatever it is he professes to be. It is Zeppo, soon to disappear from the brothers' act, the "fourth of the Three Musketeers," as one song goes, who introduces the lunatic three to the terminally social Mrs. Rittenhouse's Long Island manse, smashingly designed by Michael Anania. Rittenhouse is throwing a soiree to welcome Spalding and to unveil a pricey, world-famous oil painting, "The Hunt," which was donated by Roscoe W. Chandler, the philanthropist, who is really a Czech fish peddler, Abie Cabibble.īefore long, there are three such paintings, counting the original, floating about in and out of the frame, being folded and unfolded in and out of the Professor's baggy pockets.Īdd such duplicitous characters as a pair of wicked sisters Hives, the head butler with a swindler's past, and a couple of "making whoopie" subplots. Rittenhouse, a debutante, and Wally Winston, "a tabloid dirt disher." One involves Arabella, the daughter of Mrs. In a perfectly giddy supporting cast, John Hoshko has Zeppo's part - Jamison, Spalding's secretary - and Carol Swarbrick acts the ineffable Margaret Dumont role, Mrs. Rittenhouse, with skillful comic restraint.
Michael Lichtefeld's sparkling choreography, which is, throughout, intrinsic to the delirious goings-on, erupts at times in mid-dialogue. In what must be a major release after creating the dances for the dour "Secret Garden," Mr. Lichtefeld has also come up with snappy, elaborate production numbers, show stoppers all. Kaufman's and Morrie Ryskind's original script and selections from the 1930 film adaptation, which was mostly nonmusical, include one classic Marx Brothers non sequitur and routine after another. Try to figure out Spalding's invertedly logical theory on the economic viability of the seven-cent nickel. Or the Professor's card-sharking caper.Īltogether, the new stage "Animal Crackers" is more tightly structured than the screen version. In its irresistibly wacky way, it winds down to a bittersweet ending that has the Professor flattening the whole company and himself with Flit spray, and they all fall down.
"Animal Crackers," produced by the Paper Mill Playhouse, Brookside Drive, Millburn. Box office: (201) 376-4343.Artaud on the Marx Brothers By Antonin Artaud 12: Wednesday through Sunday at 8 P.M., Thursday at 2 P.M. The first film with the Marx Brothers that we saw over here was Animal Crackers which, although it had been universally acclaimed as being something out of the ordinary, seemed to me to be a device that used the screen to generate firstly a special form of magic which is unattainable in conventional relationships between words and images, and secondly, albeit in a characterised form, a certain level of poetry which is detached from the spirit and which could be described as surrealism.
This kind of magic is very difficult to explain, mainly because it is not inherently bound up in the cinema. But neither is it part of the theatre and for this reason a possible explanation lies within certain successful surrealistic poems. The poetic quality of a film such as Animal Crackers could satisfy the definition of humour if this word had not long lost its sense of integral liberation and detachment from all reality in the mind.