Mindlin's advisors should have trusted his theatrical instincts more. Though gentle and subtle like his personality, those instincts produced some vivid moments when animated by his quick intelligence, wit, and oceans of tolerance and good will.
Basically a New Yorker who became a Hollywood press agent, Mindlin considers himself lucky to have been sent around the world in the company of celebrities, whose names he admits to shamelessly dropping.
He goes from tales of Streisand ("You're not Barbra Streisand, are you?" "I'm not?") to snapdragon stories about Hellman and Bacall with some choice Lennie and Jennie stories thrown in (such as Bernstein's mother shouting when she met Anita Louise that she named her daughter Shirley after her).
One of the joys of all the theatre elements is that, with imagination, they can take you anywhere. Unfortunately, Mr. Mindlin wasn't helped much by his director. She gave him a pleasingly attractive set and astonishingly authentic props, good lights and sound (designed by Chad Spies), and probably a brilliant audience. But everything seemed to be in service to variety and glitz, as if she didn't honor the inherent drama in Mindlin's soul to transport us beyond the everyday.
Thus lighting changed the afternoon to night, but for no reason. Music choices made no sense. Scene divisions were arbitrary. Nothing special was done with costumes. The major visual was a specially lighted Rolodex, a hard prop to dramatize. A theatre seat was lusciously but inexplicably draped stage right, but only used for an alternate direction to take the actor.
Though stuck in a figurative armchair (it might have been a lectern), Mindlin nevertheless mimed certain things quite well: a squatting Vietnamese, a peasant spitting at the evil eye, an old woman fleeing George Bernard Shaw's cane, or Shaw's wink and Irish accent. Mindlin did his accents humorously, but walked away from virtually every punch line in identical fashion.
One saw what could have been in an anecdote about an anti-Semitic racehorse which struck a politically sharpened, dramatic, hilarious, and poignant dagger into the heart of English bigotry.
When Mindlin hit the nail on the head like that, he was everything he could be. If the show could multiply such moments by fifty, this production would excel.
Copyright 1999 Marshall Yaeger