No Madness in these Marxes

Anyone who has loved the Marx Brothers a lot is bound to like Minnie's Boys a little. The musical, based on their early lives, is only fitfully amusing and tunefully nondescript. But it is just ingratiating enough to capitalize on audience good will, the unnumbered happy hours during which people have watched and remembered the zany antics of the brothers on film.

There are pitiably few zany antics in Minnie's Boys, a reflection of several basic errors in conception and construction that the musical never overcomes. In essence, the Marx Brothers were absurdists, comic illogicians who disrupted routines, tipped the daily balance sheet of existence awry, and exploded surprises like firecrackers. By contrast, the musical is a routine Broadway blueprint of the oft-repeated show-biz saga. Here it all is--indigent beginnings, ineffectual father, indomitable, solicitous and insufferable stage mother, fleabag hotels, one-night stands, the big chance with the kingpin producer, a smash hit at vaudeville's old Valhalla, the Palace, and at the final fadeout, on to Hollywood and immortality. The plot is as inflexibly mythic as the stock western.

Minnie's Boys does not present the birth of stars, merely the birth pangs of stars. It is a little like watching a boy finger-painting and then brushing a few crude daubs on a canvas, after which these scenes are assembled in a show called Mama da Vinci's Boy Leon. Few people are likely to want to see the ordeal of apprenticeship onstage, the step-by-step trial of talent, and the stumble-by-stumble inevitability of error. In Minnie's Boys that is pretty much what the audience is condemned to observe. Only once, in the office of the vaudeville-circuit impresario, Edward F. Albee (Roland Winters), does the authentic Marxian madness break the authentic Marxian madness break out with props and malaprops zinging through the air to demonstrate what has been missing all along.

The show might have built more impact from a brazen dynamo in the role of Mama Minnie Marx, `ala Ethel Merman in Gypsy. As it is, Shelley Winters ambles through the part rather than animating it. She seems preoccupied, as if she smelled something burning in the oven rather than in her.

While the actors do a creditable imitation of the famed brothers, it is Lewis J. Stadlen as Groucho who achieves inspired mimicry. He has the best lines. (Groucho always did.) He has all the rest too: the eyes and eyebrows that whip up and down like window shades, the fluent crouch, the quick leer and the quicker wit of an urban bordello cavalier. He is a great credit to the show and--the ultimate compliment--to Groucho.

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