Theater: Dramarama on Drury Lane

Kean (book by Peter Stone; lyrics and music by Robert Wright and George Forrest) casts Alfred Drake in the role of Edmund Kean, the early 19th century Shakespearean tragic actor of Drury Lane fame. The hero pursues a nightlong quest for identity, and the theatergoer may wonder why the case was not turned over to Mr. Keene, Tracer of Lost Persons. This lavishly mounted, richly costumed wide-stage dramarama is the most elaborate fiasco of the new theater season.

Kean defeats every proposition it advances. It claims that Kean was a great lover, but Alfred Drake never plays a love scene. Every encounter he has with the two women in his stage life, a Danish countess (Joan Weldon) and a middle-class would-be actress (Lee Venora), is fashioned as a farcical skit.

To see Kean play King Lear, said Coleridge, “is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.” To see Alfred Drake, in his one lamentable lapse of the evening, act Othello is to read Shakespeare by the flash of a lightning bug. Drake is more than a star; he is a galaxy. Whether he is profile-preening for an expected lady love, slashing the air with his fencing foil, or parrying insults with the Prince of Wales, he has all the darkling dash, swagger and brio of a Renaissance man. He pours his voice like nut-brown ale through a melodic sieve of a score.

This three-hour book was quarried by Peter Stone from a play by Jean-Paul Sartre, who dug his drama out of Alexandre Dumas père. Long after chronic boredom has set in, Actor Drake is made to muse:

O Shakespeare, how much kinder author You had been Had you but written me a role called Kean. But instead of the Bard, Drake has been given a Stone.