HOLOCAUST PLAY SUCCEEDS IN BERLIN

We keep reading that Germans don’t want to hear about the Holocaust. How to explain the success of “Ghetto”?

Written by an Israeli, Joshua Sobol, the play had a big run in West Berlin last fall and has recently opened in Hamburg. It concerns a Jewish theater troupe that performs in a Polish ghetto until the very eve of its liquidation by the Nazis, and it is based on an actual case.

“We expected to have protest, but there weren’t any,” a representative of the Free People’s Stage in West Berlin told Susan J. Smith of the Associated Press.

“The play presents the sad irony of actors who sang and danced while waiting to die and audiences who, on the night before they were deported, put on their best clothes and went to the theater,” Smith writes.

The play studies the SS officer who commands the ghetto and the dilemma of its leaders as to whether to bargain with him to save at least some lives. (Los Angeles saw a play on that dilemma in the 1970s, Harold Lieberman’s “Throne of Straw.”)

“The enthusiastic response to ‘Ghetto’ may be partly due to the passing of time,” Smith writes. “Two-thirds of West Germans are too young to have been involved in the gruesome events recalled by the play.”

In France, the talk is of the American who has actually dared to direct at the Comedie Francaise. Stuart Seide of Brooklyn, N.Y.--the first American director to work at the Comedie--chose three Feydeau one-acts as his debut, figuring that he might as well do something quintessentially French.

The reviews were mixed. Francois Chalis of France Soir was snide. “Miracle at the Comedie Francaise. Somebody has managed to make Feydeau boring. That feat has been accomplished by an American implanted in France. . . .”

But Le Matin’s Gilles Costaz liked the American’s understated approach to the material and implied that M. Chalis was a chauvinist whose attack merely testified that he had “nothing else to say.”

In Rome, the talk concerns an avant-garde theater company that killed and dismembered a horse during a recent performance. Roberto Bacci, artistic director of the Magazzini Criminali company, said that the horse was due to be slaughtered anyway (the performance took place in a slaughterhouse) and that it had been presented to an audience “with the critical background to understand it.”

Variety reports that the New York State attorney general is “reviewing the finances” of the Shubert Foundation, which is the parent of the Shubert Organization, Broadway’s biggest landlord.

The inquiry involves the question of whether the salaries of the Shubert Organization’s leaders, Gerald Schoenfeld and Bernard Jacobs, are too high. Each is rumored to make more than $500,000 a year.

Without confirming that figure, Schoenfeld and Jacobs issued a statement to the effect that they were worth what they were getting. (“The compensation of Shubert management is in all aspects appropriate and reasonable, considering management’s extraordinary qualifications, dedication and accomplishments.”

The state claims an interest because of the linkage between the Shubert Foundation, which is technically a charity, and the profit-making Shubert Organization. A source described the investigation as “not outside the routine.”

QUOTE OF THE WEEK. Director Seide, asked whether an American can direct Feydeau: “You don’t have to be Polish to play Chopin.”