REVIEWS ...
Monday, March 5, 2001
Star's a perfect fit for role in 'Adam Baum and the Jew Movie'
By Jack Zink, Theater Critic
The title Adam Baum and the Jew Movie is a bigger joke than the play it represents. In fact, it may be the only joke associated with Daniel Goldfarb's 95-minute story about a movie mogul set during the peak of the Hollywood studios' golden era.
Director Joseph Adler is presenting the regional premiere of Goldfarb's 1999 off-Broadway comedy-drama at the GableStage in Coral Gables. It's a comedy without jokes, and a drama without pain. To pull off a trick as difficult as that, Adler needs a very specific kind of actor -- someone classically trained, with all the tools of oratory, body language and discipline formal training requires. David Kwiat is that actor.
Kwiat also is blessed also for the role of Samuel Baum with a hawk's beak of a nose, furry cat tails for eyebrows and a scarecrow of a frame. But those are mere appurtenances to a giant, shapeshifting mouth filled with twin rows of teeth like all-white piano keys.
Kwiat is an Al Hirschfeld drawing come to life, that giant mouth both defining and expressing Adam Baum and the Jew Movie. It propels the script's caricature across an arc of parody before heading into a steep dive toward the bedrock of unflinching drama, landing as gracefully as a swan at the finale.
The voice that emanates from the mouth blends an echo of formal Elizabethan verse with the overwrought poetic resonance of a politician on the stump, the timing of a standup comic and the twisted accent of an Eastern European immigrant.
Sam Baum is a Hollywood studio mogul in 1946, one of the Jewish immigrants who built the movie factories that put the American dream in motion. He is a millionaire, a corporate shark (watch those teeth) and a fatherly pussycat all in one.
Sam is grateful to be an American and proud to be a Jew. But he knows that to some people, those are mutually exclusive labels. And in the wake of World War II, he feels it's time for a movie about anti-Semitism.
Realizing that a purely dramatic, realistic film told from a Jewish perspective would be box-office poison, Sam hires successful, WASP-ish comedy writer Garfield Hampton Jr. (Wayne LeGette) to filter the message through the prism of mass entertainment. The writer, unfortunately, takes his assignment seriously.
While treating the script with the dedication of a scholar, Hampton fails to recognize his own subconscious racism and succumbs to it. LeGette portrays this subtle, important distinction with a cool effectiveness that's nearly the equal of Kwiat's bluster.
To give the writer some personal insight into his ethnic assignment, Baum invites Hampton to his son Adam's bar mitzvah. The title's joke is referred to just once: Adam (14-year-old Jason Edelstein in a textured performance) is taunted by his school pals because his name sounds like &atom bomb.& The seemingly offhanded moment opens up the play's interior, revealing the richness of the Baums' culture and the thin but dangerous veil of racism in the American society around it.
The story takes place in Sam Baum's oversized studio office and in his den at an obviously palatial home, both rendered stylishly simple by set designer Rich Simone. Costumes by Anne Toewe, lighting by Jeff Quinn, and especially the sound and technical designs by Nate Rausch and Osvaldo Palacios add gloss to the production.
Adam Baum and the Jew Movie has nothing new or profound to say about ethnicity or cultural relationships. Goldfarb's dramatic achievement lies in his ability to painlessly wrench the audience's perspective around to an unexpected angle to see and appreciate such issues more clearly. Adler's direction locks the viewer's focus to that angle, and Kwiat's overwrought, but never over-the-top, performance is the coup de grace.
Jack Zink can be reached at jzink@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4706.
