‘Nervous Set’ Revives the Beatnik Era

Beatniks (remember them?) are back in Jay and Fran Landesman’s vintage 1959 rock musical, “The Nervous Set,” newly opened at the Heliotrope Theatre in Hollywood.

“I come from an independent, low-budget film background” (“Assault of the Killer Bimbos”), said producer/star Patti Astor. “I realized no one was going to give me a million dollars to do a movie, but I probably could get the money to do a play. At the time I was in a theater group; the people in it were bringing in the worst domestic twaddle. Watching two people stand around haranguing each other is not my idea of entertainment.”

Introduced to the idea of reviving “Nervous Set”--which she’d previously known only through its original cast album--Astor and her partner Anita Rosenberg did extensive rewrites, “because the women in the script were real doormats, non-existent characters.” They also added some original quotes by Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and encouraged the five-piece band, Skinny Daddy-os, to “put their own touch” on Tommy Wolfe’s 31-year-old score.

The story centers on the trials of a young, good-guy editor at Nervf magazine (in real life, the Landesmans were habitues of Greenwich Village’s beat scene, where he published the magazine Neurotica). Astor plays the glamorous Sari Shaw, a “career girl/swinging babe,” who comes to party and is caught up in the scene. “There’s such a parallel to New York in the ‘80s,” she stressed. “All of us living downtown, really broke, struggling to succeed without selling out.”

Stuart Rogers directs.

THEATER BUZZ: “Greater Tuna” (at the Westwood Playhouse), Joe Sears’ and Jaston Williams’ quick-change two-man comedy about a collection of oddball residents of Tuna, Tex., has acquired quite a following, as it moved around the country during the past 10 years. Two of the new fans are President and Mrs. Bush, who caught the duo’s performance at the Kennedy Center last December, then followed that up with an invitation to the White House for breakfast the next morning.

According to Sears and Williams, when Barbara Bush saw them out of their show duds (which include male and female fashions), she appreciatively drawled, “You boys clean up real good.” Her hubby was so impressed with the pair that he invited them to perform at the White House for the National Governors’ Conference meeting on Feb. 25. “Where are you going next?” he asked them. According to the show’s producer Charles Duggan, when the duo replied that Los Angeles was their next stop, the President remarked, “I’ll try to come by and see it.” So keep a lookout . . . .

CRITICAL CROSSFIRE: “Starlight Express,” Andrew Lloyd Webber and Richard Stilgoe’s rockin’ roller-skating musical is playing at the Pantages Theatre during its national tour.

Said Sylvie Drake in The Times: “This show is all about what hits the eye and to a lesser extent the ear. It is not about what hits any deeper regions of the psyche. ‘Starlight Express’ doesn’t reach there. But taken at sheer face value, it’s a kick.”

Complained Daryl H. Miller in the Daily News: “The musical fantasy about trains derails more often than it stays on track, and it doesn’t build up steam until the very end of its journey. . . . The show feels more like concert than a piece of musical theater.”

Said the L.A. Weekly’s Tom Provenzano: “Webber’s musical homage to the toy trains of a boy’s imagination is as spectacular as his ‘Phantom of the Opera,’ but eschews the latter’s morbid gothic beauty for an athletic bacchanalia of visual and aural stimuli that tests the limits of live theater.”