The premise of Café Resistance seemed promising and timely. This play with music concerns a Paris nightclub-bordello commandeered in 1939 for the use of occupying Nazi officers, and of the lives and responses (resistant or collaborative) of its ladies of the evening. Civilized people everywhere are duty bound never to forget this era and milieu, and artistic evocations can help keep these urgent historical memories alive.
Sadly, Café Resistance is ineffective as a reminder of important history, and worse, misbegotten in just about every way. Indeed its cumulative failings – script, storyline, direction, acting – astonish as well as disappoint. I see bad plays and bad productions often enough in my line of work, but the depth of talent in the New York theater scene usually ensures at least some admirable performances from the cast.
Here the acting ranges from wooden and awkward to inappropriate and excessive. The French accents are half-hearted, overdone, or at best marginally passable. To name one example, Sandra Leclercq (a French native) plays Marguerite, the bordello’s owner, with not only a strong and hard-to-decipher accent but with atrocious overacting that makes the character seem airlifted in from another play entirely, if not a completely different theatrical tradition.
More importantly, in general the actors make little effort to give their characters relatable connections with others, not that they have much in the clumsy script to work with.
Offensive Stereotypes?
Indeed the problems go well beyond diction. The central character, Louise (Marlain Angelides), is put in charge of the bordello when Marguerite flees the city. Why? Because Louise is the only denizen with a good head for numbers. Why? Because she’s secretly Jewish? Well, so she is!
She even has a little boy whom she has managed to place with a farming family for protection. But amid the wartime developments she loses track of him and doesn’t know whether he’s alive or dead. This story element could have been affecting. We even meet little Jacques (played charmingly by Luka and Niko Zylik) and get to know him a bit. But it’s hard to empathize with Louise when she’s played so limply.
Better performances wouldn’t have helped much, though. The show is directed as if no thought had gone into pacing. Quick scenes and clumsy scene changes leave us scratching our heads. Awkward choreography is shoehorned in, and songs emerge inappropriately – strangely, mostly American Songbook standards, rather than French pop hits of the time. In one bizarre scene, a Spanish character – cringingly named Castanet! – breaks meaninglessly into a flamenco number for the Nazi general – who, like his compatriots, is played as a tired old codger rather than an efficient and murderous fascist. (These are the least convincing Nazis I’ve ever seen on stage or screen.)
Another woman is named Mortadella. I thought I’d misheard, but no, that’s correct. Say what?
Occupational Hazard
The pianist and violinist who provide the live music are capable musicians who deliver appropriate atmosphere and accompaniment. But with a couple of exceptions, the singing is as bad as the acting. Louise has a nicely arranged but weakly sung “Dream a Little Dream.” Another duet, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” is actually a pretty strong musical number featuring Caitlin Zerra Rose, whose singing and acting bravely rise above the material. But like everything else, the song is delivered by characters about whom we know – and therefore care – little or nothing.
One wonders how it was that during the putting together of this production no one spoke up and said, “This just isn’t working.” Evidently no one did. The result is a rarity in the lively Off-Off-Broadway scene: a bad show with no redeeming graces.
Oh, and it’s nearly three hours long. Maybe that’s the one sense in which Café Resistance really evokes the Nazi occupation of Paris.
Café Resistance by Roberto Monticello is at Theater for the New City through April 27.
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