Theatre in Review: Last Call (New World Stages)

	Helen Schneider, Lucca Zuchner. Photo: Maria Baranova

If nothing else, Last Call is a chance to meet two outstanding women of the German theatre. The director Gil Mehmert opted to cast the male lead characters of Peter Danish's play with actresses, a gambit that, in practice, seems not at all gimmicky. Indeed, it's interesting to see how these gifted performers take on two of the most formidable figures in the twentieth-century classical music world. Don't be surprised if, after a few minutes, you forget they are female.

Helen Schneider is Leonard Bernstein, at seventy still striking poses suitable for album covers and offering moral judgments with the finality of Moses, still spoiling for an argument with a colleague and/or the opportunity to stroke an attractive young waiter's arm. Lucca Zuchner is Herbert von Karajan, at eighty pouring greedily over the contents of a score he has conducted more than a hundred times, always ready to cut a rival down to size. Whatever one thinks of Last Call, Schneider and Zuchner are fully believable as a pair of maestros in winter, physically diminished yet still capable of drawing blood when exercising their claws.

Less convincing is Last Call itself, the kind of boulevard entertainment that, a few decades back, would have turned up on Broadway (probably with a couple of British stars). Based on an actual encounter between the two conductors in the Blue Bar at Vienna's Hotel Sacher in 1988, it is little more than a compare-and-contrast study, exploring the men's opposing aesthetics and their moral choices. Danish has all the facts at hand (plus, I think, a few whoppers), and his bullet points are neatly arranged. Barbs are traded, arguments are staged, and a few confidences are shared -- all without rising to the level of drama.

It's amusing when Bernstein introduces von Karajan to a waiter as "the second-greatest conductor in the world." (No prizes for guessing his superior.) He can tell a good story on himself, for example recalling when the conductor Karl Bohm told him, "Maybe now when you conduct, you will stop waving your arms like a monkey!" Von Karajan is filled with mordant observations, noting that Bernstein's overemotive way with the musical scores he considers "sacred" amounts to "falsifying documents." He aims directly at Bernstein's moral vanity, noting how he dismissed Vienna as a sinkhole of antisemitism until he cut a deal with the city's opera company, agreeing to conduct Wagner in exchange for a production of Trouble in Tahiti. "Now," he adds, "it is practically your second home!" Accompanying their ire is a touching fragility as each details the physical ailments that have made it challenging to lead an orchestra.

Still, Danish never digs too deeply into his characters, and Last Call is often gabby rather than incisive. Bernstein complains about Joan Peyer's scandalous biography and Harold C. Schonberg's acerbic New York Times reviews, but we hear nothing about his wildly complicated private life, especially his troubled marriage to Felicia Montealegre. His attempts at wit are flabby and in need of a tone-up. "Unfortunately," he tells von Karajan, "you lack the two fundamental qualities necessary to succeed on Broadway. You're not Jewish and you're not gay. Lucky for me, I'm both!" (Gee, I've never heard that one before; have you?) "Is there ever a time you don't get in the last word?" snaps von Karajan. "Try playing Scrabble with Stephen Sondheim," Bernstein cracks. In the umpteenth example of a playwright using a certain musical as an easy punching bag, he says, pontificating, "I had high hopes for musical theatre. I believed it could eventually surpass opera in depth and complexity. But what's the biggest show on Broadway? Cats!" (Lenny, now and forever, we feel your pain.)

More interesting is the portrait of von Karajan, who has spent the postwar decades trying to live down his membership -- for career reasons, not ideology -- in the National Socialist Party. ("You've managed to last twenty minutes before you brought up the Nazis!" he growls at Bernstein. "A new record!") Not one to let a grudge go, he still simmers over the night in 1955 when Bernstein declined to go backstage at La Scala and congratulate him on his handling of Carmen. Even more wounding is the memory of a Carnegie Hall performance when the audience turned hostile, for which he blames Bernstein. (As it happens, he has a point about that one.) Still, the script shies away from complex questions about, say, his marriage to a woman officially deemed Jewish.

It's little more than a tit-for-tat, I'm-right-and-you're-wrong evening, ultimately concluding that everybody has made mistakes and must live with his regrets. It's a surprisingly bromidic approach although classical music fans may relish the chance to relive all the old gossip. (Some of which, including the hint that von Karajan was a closet case with multiple facelifts, is pretty wild and wide of the mark.) Anyway, the stars deliver far more than the script seems to offer. (Zuchner in particular has a way with even the weakest zinger. Bernstein, insisting that he isn't obsessed with being Jewish, says, "Don't forget I wrote Mass!" "How could I forget?" von Karajan snaps back. "I laughed for days!") Also, the countertenor Victor Petersen is charming as the waiter keeping tabs on the men, gracefully eluding Bernstein's handsy maneuvers, and, at one point, slipping into full drag to deliver a bit of Carmen in a tribute to Maria Callas.

The production could also benefit from some Broadway slickness. Chris Barreca's set doesn't fully convey the plush, luxuriously upholstered interior of the Blue Bar; also, the decision to use the full width of the stage (there is no masking) leads to some odd blocking choices: Sometimes one character, sitting at the stage-right bar, must loudly share a secret with his counterpart seated at a table at far stage left. Even if they are the only two men in the room, it's a strange way to converse. Austin Switser's projections, of Times Square and the interior of La Scala (plus English surtitles when the dialogue turns to German), are hard to make out on the dark blue upstage wall. Michael Grundner's lighting is solid, especially when cueing the characters' monologues. Rene Neumann's costumes are entirely convincing; the actors' wigs are especially impressive. Lindsay Jones' sound design includes some discreet miking of the actors along with selections from Brahms, Bizet, and Gershwin.

Just good enough to be mildly disappointing, Last Call amounts to a reasonably lively exchange of wisecracks and countercharges designed to amuse those already in the know about the peccadillos and moral blind spots of these two monumental figures. As drama, it's synthetic, but its two stars are the real thing. --David Barbour