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Theatre Review: “I Can Get It for You Wholesale”
By
Published: Oct 31, 2023
Category:
Theater
Movie week? I interrupt it for a good reason: I saw a play last night that impressed me more than X, an award-winner we left at intermission, and Y, which held us captive until we were limp with inexpressible resentment. It’s “I Can Get It for You Wholesale,” and it’s at the Classic Stage Company, 136 East 13th Street, until December 17. For the good but not great NY Times review, click here. To buy tickets, click here.
Coincidence… or cosmic plan? Sometimes it’s hard to tell. Monday, for example, was Opening Night of “I Can Get It For You Wholesale,” an adaptation of Jerome Weidman’s novel and play by his son, the playwright John Weidman, who was my college classmate and is my forever friend. I didn’t know the book or the play, nor did I know much about the main character, a young Jew who’s tired of making $15 a week pushing racks of clothes around the city’s Garment District. Harry Bogen wants to make money, and make it fast. He doesn’t particularly care who he has to use and what lies he’ll need to tell. He’s one seriously unpleasant guy — if you have a problem with ambitious Jews, he’s the kind of stereotype who gives Jews a bad name.
I had met Jerome Weidman once, in 1967, when he was on a steady path to 22 novels. l. I didn’t know that he had published “Wholesale,” his first novel, when he was 24, and that Barbra Streisand made her Broadway debut in the play, and that Hemingway wrote Weidman to say he was the American Balzac. In the way of the young and callow, my focus was on myself — I was 21 that year, and had a book deal with Viking, and though memory mercifully fails, I’m sure I was borderline obnoxious. Half a century later, I still knew nothing about the play I was about to see.
Monday morning, Montauk friends had posted a series of images on Facebook: the Nazi symbol spray-painted on buildings near the beach. It was appalling. It was also a set-up: any loud reaction would reduce the offended Jews and their allies to the same schoolyard level as the bigots and haters.
That afternoon, two hours before the play began in New York, there was a rally in Montauk. Speakers called it an anti-hate rally. Nothing more? No, because the point was to counter hate and darkness with love and light.
Good, smart thought. Modestly calm, I took my seat in the theatre’s first row. Calm lasted only a few seconds — the play was largely a slap across the face. Harry Bogen needs to raise money to start his own delivery company. He gets most of it from two friends. His share? He’ll find a way. So you know right off: the kind of personal betrayal you’d never consider is a nothingburger to him. He gets the money and launches the company. It’s an instant success. It becomes a fashion company. Another success. And every cliché becomes his truth: he can’t tell the difference between company money and his own.
The musical numbers, often inspired by traditional Jewish holy music, are strong. The love scenes are touching, even if they’re not sincere on his side. And the loyalty of Miss Marmelstein — you can easily picture the 19-year-old Streisand fiercely defending Harry — is close to total. What didn’t compute for me was an image of John Weidman, sitting at a computer, typing out such ugly scenes.
I had profiled Weidman in Harvard Magazine a decade ago.His was a charmed story, After Harvard, facing the draft, he taught for a few years at a New York public school. Then he headed to New Haven to join Clarence Thomas in the Yale Law class of 1974. Realizing that the law was not for him, he wrote two letters, seeking an internship. The first went to Bowie Kuhn, commissioner of Major League Baseball, who blew him off. The second — to Broadway producer-director Hal Prince — had a postscript: “I have an idea for a play about the opening of Japan; can we talk about it?” His reasoning: “I majored in East Asian history.-I thought I knew something no one else did. I had no ambition to write a play. I had no training. I just thought: I can do this while I’m at Yale.”
Prince met with Weidman for 15 minutes before giving him a contract (and $500) to write a play. In the summer of 1973, he completed a draft of “Pacific Overtures.” Prince decided it needed to be a musical — and convinced Stephen Sondheim to turn the play into one. Weidman didn’t stop to think —at least not too often—that he was working with two giants of the theater. “Pacific Overtures” opened in 1976. Reviews were mixed. But the marquee said it all: Prince. Sondheim. Weidman.
Weidman and Sondheim became friends. Periodically, they met to kick around ideas. In the late ’80s, Sondheim mentioned his interest in the men who have tried to kill a U.S. president. Weidman was equally intrigued; their collaboration became “Assassins.” It polarized reviewers, as did “Road Show,” his third collaboration with Sondheim. He has been nominated for the Tony Award for best book for a musical three times and has won a Tony for the dance musical “Contact.” For his work on “Sesame Street,” he’s won a dozen Emmys. And, for a decade, he was president of the Dramatists Guild. For all the awards and honors, he’s shockingly modest. “I like writing dialogue,” he told me. “I like the solitary part. I like collaborating. I just really enjoy the work.”
Jerome Weidman wrote about the “rough underside of business and politics and daily life in New York.” His son only knew that underside second-hand. But much of the dialogue in “Wholesale” is nasty — bark and bile. The sense of betrayal is acute. And at the end, there’s no magic kiss to erase the hurt. Someone pays, and you know it isn’t Harry. Has he learned anything? There’s no dialogue to put a button on the moral, but the sharing of bread at Sabbath — who’s in the family circle, who isn’t — was eloquent. And I saw, in that understated moment, how the son honored the father.
