Hello, Sweetheart, Get Me Rethink the Front Page

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Journalists tend to think of the world of The Front Page as a kind of Garden of Eden, an unspoiled idyll of frantic competition and luxuriant dissipation in an era when reporters worried about the price of a shot and a beer, not the tax consequences of a vacation home and an individual retirement account. In the mind's eye, the rowdy tabloid reportage of Chicago in the Roaring Twenties seems vivid, creative and a whole lot more fun than today's sober pursuit of facts and reasoned analysis. But 58 years of interpretation, including three film versions, may have been wrongheaded: a crackling revival at Manhattan's Lincoln Center persuasively makes the case that The Front Page is less a lark and more a socially inflamed piece of press criticism. In this vision, the reprehensible reporters peddle human interest without feeling the least flicker of humanity. They have lost, or abandoned, all spirit of reform.

Director Jerry Zaks makes his intentions plain even before the characters really start talking. From a men's room tucked into the corner of a scabrous press bullpen in a criminal-courts building, out walk a trollop and a policeman adjusting his clothes after what has obviously been a brief but close encounter. Gradually the room fills with journalists who gamble, politicians who steal, gangsters who peddle influence, and an editor who employs leg breakers to circulate his paper. This is a town festering with corruption, and everyone aspires only to scrabble to the top of the dung heap. Life is cheap. When a murderer escapes from the court building's death row, guards outside spray the facade with bullets so wantonly that everyone dives for the floor. When a prostitute who has befriended the murderer finds herself surrounded by journalists threatening bodily harm to make her reveal his hiding place, she leaps from a window. The reaction that emerges loudest: "If she's killed herself, we'll never get the story."

The only reporter in Front Page who shows a residual trace of decency is Hildy Johnson (Richard Thomas), who wants to give the game up for a safe, lucrative job in advertising and marriage to a wholesome, dependable woman. To do so, however, he must abandon the newsman's one true romantic attachment: to the other boys in the pressroom. Seducing Hildy back is his editor Walter Burns (John Lithgow), a consummate user who plays to the reporter's vanity and yearning for power. The 6-ft. 4-in. Lithgow resembles a giant python, fixing victims with his stare, crushing them in his embrace. Johnson repeatedly flares into compassion. But he yields to Burns' blandishments every time, and something goes dead in his eyes. He looks like a recovered alcoholic taking the deadly first drink.

Supporting these superb performers is an ensemble of a quality far more common in London than the U.S. Notable among them: Julie Hagerty, who makes Hildy's fiancee a genuine lure instead of a drippy debutante; Ed Lauter as the nastiest newsman; Jack Wallace as a dumb, obsequious but likable cop; Deirdre O'Connell as the doomed hooker; and Jerome Dempsey as a chillingly venal mayor. Tony Walton's set deftly uses a 65-ft. depth on the Vivian Beaumont stage to convey a cavernous public building in Roman Preposterous style, and Willa Kim's costumes evoke the era without prettifying it. Yet what lingers is not the production's fidelity but its brilliant reconsideration.