Special Report - Noel Coward and Osama Bin Laden Don't Mix

Noel Coward and Osama Bin Laden Don't Mix
May 24, 2002
by John Bloom

NEW YORK, May 24 -- Luis, the suave maitre d' at Barbetta, looks around the al fresco garden of his 96-year-old Piemontese restaurant and tries not to let the emptiness of the place affect his jovial manner.

"Cancellations," says Luis. "We had so many cancellations." Barbetta has one of the most beautiful dining terraces in New York, with gnarled hundred-year-old trees arching over it, bordered with magnolia, wisteria, oleander, jasmine and gardenia, the whole scene dominated by a marble fountain rimmed by Renaissance cherubs.

Tonight I can have any table I want. Only two are taken.

"Alerts!" says Luis, rolling his eyes. He obviously has very little use for the Dick Cheneys of the world. What he means is: The tourists are fleeing the island.

I've just come from the Richard Rodgers Theatre a block away, where Emma Fielding and Alan Rickman are a triumph in Noel Coward's "Private Lives," and normally this would be the height of the after-theater rush. Instead all the cars and trains and buses are rushing back to New Jersey, Long Island, Connecticut. The latest terrorist alert wasn't quite bad enough to waste a $75 theater ticket, but it WAS alarming enough to return home as quickly as possible.

I don't mean to sound like the mayor in "Jaws," but I think New York got a raw deal.

The rather loud announcement that the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge might be terrorism targets over the Memorial Day weekend couldn't have been made at a worse time. Memorial Day is when the New York tourist season takes off. The Tony Awards are always around that time. Fleet Week, with sailors all over the city, is going full tilt--although for the first time in years there are no public tours of the big warships. And as if they hadn't done enough damage with the original announcement, there were additional vague warnings about the subways being dangerous as well.

The most famous bridge, the most famous landmark, and all the tunnels--that's about all it takes. New Yorkers don't call tourists "bridge-and-tunnel people" for nothing. Just when it seemed like New York had made a major comeback, it was all wiped out in a three-day period.

New Yorkers increasingly feel manipulated and irritable when the alerts come down. And in this case, there were basic commonsense problems with the warnings. First of all, putting heavy blanket security on just the bridge and the statue shouldn't be that difficult when you have a police force of 20,000 and the National Guard in town.

Second, it would be pretty damn hard to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge unless you did fly a plane into it. The main suspension pillars are on the mainland, in plain sight, and inaccessible. If you want to blow up a bridge, the Williamsburg Bridge is the one to go after. It's the shoddiest bridge in the country, with crumbling decks, rusty supports, and lanes so narrow that the cab drivers would like to see it sink into the East River anyway.

Third, the Statue of Liberty is so tiny--only five or six people can stand in the crown at a time--that the body count on that particular act of terrorism would be lousy. I know, I know, it's supposed to be symbolic, but something tells me Al Qaeda thinks in numbers greater than single digits.

Finally, there's the fact that all this information apparently came from Abu Zubaydah, the terrorist who was in charge of blowing up the Millennium celebration but got captured instead. In fact, he's mostly famous for blown assignments, and he's been in custody so long that how could he even know anymore what the plans are?

The biggest symbol of New York's comeback--at least prior to the weekend--was the robust box office on Broadway. Partly this is because Mayor Giuliani was a big Broadway booster, begging the theaters to hang in there as a symbol of the city's unity. It also helped when New York state ponied up $2.5 million to buy Broadway tickets and give them away to tourist shoppers, policemen, firemen and others as a way to make sure the Great White Way stayed great and white. It took eight months, but Times Square was once again alive, and doing business good enough to make the Off-Broadway theaters bitterly jealous. ("Hey, we're the ones downtown near Ground Zero. Where's our handout?")

A week ago I revisited "Les Miserables," which was on such shaky ground after 9/11 that most people thought it would be the first big "warhorse" show to actually close. And what was remarkable about the crowd--most of them from out of town--was not so much that they were there, but that they still seemed to respond to what might be perceived as an unfashionable message in these law-and-order times.

If you think of Javert as John Ashcroft (could there be a better parallel?) and Jean Valjean as John Walker Lindh (the actor playing him even looks a little like Lindh), then the ending of this musical is about as politically incorrect as you can get, not to mention being full of eighties homilies about poverty and homelessness. Yet the crowd was on its feet and cheering what I've always thought was a lame finale number in which the chorus blathers about hope and promise and a brave new tomorrow. It's really the only flaw in the whole play, but it must pay off emotionally because they were buying it.

And then, a week later, I checked out the yin to the "Les Miz" yang--Noel Coward, once the most unfashionable of playwrights, thought of as a dilettante and a poseur, now dazzlingly revived in a production that garnered universal rave reviews even though, for my money, it was a little too sluggish. The stars were milking dramatic moments, when the essence of doing Coward is to treat everything as light as a soufflé, letting jokes flit past so rapidly that the repartee registers a beat late. There are no punch lines in Coward, just one big crescendo of droll sophisticated observations. And yet these actors had found their moments, and they were by God determined to play them.

I have to say, though, that mine is a minority view. This audience--mostly New Yorkers, mostly older--loved everything from the gorgeous art deco sets to the pratfalls of Sybil's Paris maid. The whole moral of the play--to the extent it can be said to have one--is that, no matter what, we must continue to be flippant and cheerful and hedonistic because that's what saves us from madness.

And it was a message very well received by these jaded New Yorkers. A few of them even stood for the curtain ovation, and New Yorkers don't stand for anything. They were in the mood to be jolly and heedless this night. They were in the mood for a 72- year-old comedy about not taking responsibility for anything except your ability to be amusing.

And this one audience, at least, did not head for the bridges and the tunnels after it was over. They spread out through the restaurants along 46th Street and took their seats for dinner and wine and conversation. After you've experienced Noel Coward, you can't really think about Osama Bin Laden for a while.

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