From Dusk Till Dawn With Quentin Tarantino

Director Quentin Tarantino is in talks to star on Broadway as the lead actor in a revival of the 1966 stage thriller "Wait Until Dark," which was turned into a movie starring Audrey Hepburn and Alan Arkin a year later. "It's something he's interested in," Tarantino's spokeswoman said Friday noting, however, that no deal had been signed. Producers Alan N. Lichtenstein and Robert Young are planning a 30-week run for the production, starting in the spring; it is not clear whether Tarantino would star for the entire run. Tarantino's next directorial effort, "Jackie Brown," is due in theaters Dec. 25. -- Los Angeles Times

The current Broadway revival of Wait Until Dark is an embarassment to just about everyone concerned. There's nothing wrong with Michael McGarty's busy, plot-serving set; and two fine actors, Stephen Lang and Juan Carlos Hernandez, make the best of what they've been given. The lighting--literally non-existent, by the way, during long stretches in the second half--is adequate. But the staging is weak, the fights are unconvincing, the two lead performances by high-profile celebrities Marisa Tomei and Quentin Tarantino are poor, and the play itself is creaky, dated, inept, and ludicrously unmotivated. Why did anyone want to revive this third-rate potboiler? And why on earth didn't the producers shut down this mess during its (poorly reviewed) pre-Broadway tryout?

Wait Until Dark concerns Suzy, a young woman who recently became blind as a result of a car accident, and how she is terrorized by a gang of thugs who believe that hidden in her apartment is a child's doll which contains an enormously valuable stash of heroin. The doll was given to her husband by a woman he befriended on a recent trip out of town; he innocently agreed to bring it to New York where she would later retreive it. But we learn early in the play that she has since been murdered--without getting the doll back--by Harry Roat, the psychopathic gangster who is now terrorizing Suzy.

Harry and his henchmen concoct an elaborate scheme to get Suzy to tell them where the doll is hidden (which she of course does not know). Later, when Suzy does know where the doll is, she concocts an equally elaborate plan to trap Harry. No one in this play behaves rationally; everyone in this play behaves like a character in a cheap horror film, which is to say that they do absurd, obviously stupid things with alarming regularity, solely to push the idiotic plot forward. Playwright Frederick Knott was trying, perhaps, for a Hitchcockian thriller where an innocent person must prove herself after circumstances force her into an unforseen, dangerous situation. The effect here, though, especially in the final scenes when spunky Ms. Tomei is battling the milquetoast Mr. Tarantino, is more reminiscent of Home Alone.

I am told that the film version of Wait Until Dark is quite good, particularly because of Alan Arkin's chilling performance as the evil Harry Roat. Quentin Tarantino, director of Pulp Fiction and several other films, is no Alan Arkin; his bland, almost relaxed take on Harry reminded me of Perry Como. I do not think that Mr. Tarantino is responsible for the excessively weak script (which, to be fair, is as much a function of our having seen this sort of thing so many times in the movies; it might have been fresh when it was written in 1966).

I do, however, think that Mr. Tarantino is responsible for gettng this whole misbegotten project started, and for keeping it going. The answer to the questions I posed in the first paragraph is, obviously, "for the money." Wait Until Dark is doing excellent business, despite near-universal critical pans. Fans are willing to dish out up to sixty bucks to see the noted auteur up close. He's not worth it; neither is this substandard show. If you only see one Broadway show this year, please please please don't let it be Wait Until Dark. I'd hate for you to think that that's what they're all like. -- Martin Denton