Summer Musicals

Mary Antonini as Reno Sweeney and the cast of Anything Goes. (Photo: David Cooper.)

This article includes reviews of musicals at the Shaw Festival and the Stratford Shakespeare Festival as well as at Ogunquit Playhouse in Maine.

Anything Goes opened on Broadway in 1934 and proved to be Cole Porter’s biggest hit until Kiss Me, Kate nearly a decade and a half later; it ran for 420 performances, hefty for the time. But it just escaped turning into a fiasco because the book Guy Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse, writing from different cities, cobbled together was so scattershot that the producer, Vinton Freedley, asked the director, Howard Lindsay, to rewrite it. With the collaboration of Russel Crouse he did so in three weeks, while the show was in tryouts out of town, and that’s the version audiences saw whenever it was produced over the next half-century. Lewis Milestone made a sweet movie of it in 1936 with Bing Crosby and Ethel Merman, (the leading lady of the Broadway production), though I suspect even many Porter devotees don’t know it. (The 1956 M-G-M movie with Crosby, Donald O’Connor and Mitzi Gaynor, has nothing in common with the show except the title and, in the opening section, a shipboard setting.) There was only one major revival, off-Broadway in 1962, which cut a few of the songs and interpolated others from the Porter archive, like “It’s De-Lovely” from Red, Hot and Blue (which has become a permanent addition) and “Take Me Back to Manhattan” from The New Yorkers. When it finally returned to Broadway in 1987, with Patti LuPone in the Merman role, Crouse’s son Timothy and John Weidman rewrote it, staying faithful to the spirit of the original but making their own emendations to the score. This is the Anything Goes that Kathleen Marshall directed triumphantly in a 2011 Broadway revival starring Sutton Foster and Joel Grey, and it’s the one graced by an ebullient production at the Shaw Festival this season (in their Festival Theatre) directed and choreographed by Kimberley Rampersad.

Anything Goes was devised when American musical comedy was in its in-between stage: Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein had written Show Boat seven years earlier and the Gershwins and DuBose Heyward were a year away from opening Porgy and Bess, but the libretti of most Broadway musicals were still mostly light and fluffy romances with comic routines scattered through them. They were better constructed than they had been in the teens and twenties, but they were still within hailing distance of vaudeville, and that spirit was part of their appeal. The plot of Anything Goes is silly but enjoyable – though, truth be told, perhaps some of those routines have grown a tad tired. When Billy Crocker (Jeff Irving), seeing off his boss, Eli Whitney (Shawn Wright), who’s bound on a cruise ship for London, learns that the blueblood he’s fallen for, Hope Harcourt (Celeste Catena), is sailing too, with her mother (Sharry Flett) and her titled English fiancé (Allan Louis), he impulsively stays aboard when the ship sails. Among the other ticketed passengers is Billy’s pal Reno Sweeney (Mary Antonini), a singing, dancing evangelist whom the book writers intended as a musical-comedy take on Aimee Semple McPherson. (That’s the Merman character.) Reno has a back-up group, the Angels – Chastity, Charity, Purity and Virtue – whose vampy style belies their monikers. Also in attendance is a low-level gangster named Moonface Martin (Michael Therriault) in the guise of a minister, traveling with his girlfriend Erma Latour (Kristi Frank). Billy is trying to reconnect with Hope and throw a wrench into her mother’s plans for her while keeping the purser (Jay Turvey) from discovering that he’s a stowaway and at the same time preventing Whitney from finding out he’s on board and not back in the office keeping his eye on Whitney’s stocks.

Moonface becomes his friend and ally, and since the gangster and the evangelist are old friends, this trio is at the center of the show’s comic hijinks. Reno is also in love with Billy; in Crouse and Weidman’s rewrite, that’s the point of her first song, the irresistible “I Get a Kick Out of You.” Since he has to wind up with Hope, the book compensates Reno by pairing her off with the British nobleman, Lord Evelyn Oakleigh. The Shaw Anything Goes is most fortunate in its three leads. Irving has the right combination for Billy, a scamp with the heart of a true romantic who has qualities of roles played in a variety of musicals by Gene Kelly and Bob Hope as well as Crosby. He’s equally at ease in upbeat numbers like “You’re the Top” and ballads of longing like “All Through the Night.” Therriault, the show’s Moonface, is a most entertaining clown, as he was in the Shaw’s For Me and My Girl in 2017, especially when he and Antonini get together on “Friendship” (originally from Du Barry Was a Lady, where Merman performed it with Bert Lahr). Antonini, whom I’d never seen before, is the best thing in the show – a singer with a sultry Big Band style, a fine dancer and a skilled, confident actress. She’s also a clotheshorse who looks smashing in every costume Cory Sincennes has designed for her.

Frank has a wonderfully elastic comedian’s face; she doesn’t get a solo until the eleven o’clock number, “Buddie, Beware,” but it’s worth the wait. On the other hand, Louis, who’s naturally suave, a Sky Masterson type, is all wrong for Lord Oakleigh, and his second-act number, “The Gypsy in Me,” accentuates the miscasting. The ingenue, Hope, is dim as written, but Catena has a lovely voice, showcased in “It’s De-Lovely” and “All Through the Night,” on both of which she duets with Irving, and on a pair of interpolations, “Easy to Love” (from the movie musical Born to Dance) and the fleet, melancholy “Goodbye, Little Dream, Goodbye.” (Here’s the skinny on the origins of “Goodbye, Little Dream, Goodbye.” Porter wrote it for Frances Langford to sing in the 1936 Born to Dance but it wasn’t used. He gave it to Merman during the Boston tryout of Red, Hot and Blue that fall but it was cut. It was finally heard in the London show O Mistress Mine at the end of the year.)

Rampersad has followed Kathleen Marshall’s lead by really digging into the musical numbers, which are the heart of the Porter show. They’re elaborately conceived and danced expertly by a robust ensemble, and the first-act finale, built around the splendiferous title song, is, as it was in Marshall’s rendition, practically a show in itself. (You can feel the pleasure of the audience as they stream into the lobby for intermission; they’re like diners taking a break in the middle of a sumptuous eight-course meal.) When I first began attending Shaw musicals shortly after the millennium I complained that the directors and choreographers, as well as the set designers, could never manage to fill the healthy dimensions of the Festival Theatre stage, but those days are long gone. (Sincennes designed the handsome set as well as the breezy, colorful Depression-era costumes.) Everyone gets to take part in the big numbers, but eight dancers carry the real weight of the choreography, and they’re so damn good that they deserve special mention: Jaden Kim, Jade Repeta, Kiera Sangster and Mikayla Stradiotto as Reno’s Angels and Leslie Garcia Bowman, Taran Kim, Graeme Kitagawa and Éamon Stocks as the quartet of sailors who are foregrounded in the quartet “There’ll Always Be a Lady Fair” in the middle of the first act. (They also back Frank in “Buddie, Beware.”) After Mary Antonini, these eight hoofers were my favorites in the cast of this delectable show.

Liam Tobin and the company of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. (Photo: David Hou.)

In the 1988 comedy Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, a remake of Bedtime Story (1964), Michael Caine and Steve Martin, in the roles created by David Niven and Marlon Brando, are fantastically funny, and they keep the movie afloat up to roughly the halfway point, when the plot mechanics start to slow things down. Caine plays a con man whose specialty is seducing rich women in a Riviera resort, disguised as a deposed prince fighting to get back his country; Martin plays the crass American who figures out his scam and blackmails him into passing on the tricks of his trade. First Caine teaches Martin to be debonair and then he consigns him to the role of his brother, a royal idiot whose job it is to turn off Caine’s mistresses when they threaten to become a nuisance. (This was Brando’s only successful bit in Bedtime Story; Martin’s moron princeling, Ruprecht, incorporates a small hommage to his predecessor.) The teamwork is almost strong enough to keep the comedy going at full speed, but they can’t quite make it through the tiresome arrangements in the second half, when the two con men target a sweetly dippy Glenne Headley and Martin gets stuck in a wheelchair. Still, Martin and Caine are an inspired match: a solidly British working-class actor kicking up his heels as a faux aristocrat and a solidly American vaudevillian just plain kicking up his heels.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is one of those rare movie comedies that improved when it was turned into a Broadway musical. (Legally Blonde is another.) It opened in New York in early 2005, with a book by Jeffrey Lane and a score by David Yazbek, who collaborated again five years later on the stage musical version of Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (which is even better but, alas, didn’t catch on). And at the Stratford Festival (Avon Theatre) the musical is better than it was on Broadway, where John Lithgow wasn’t cast right as Lawrence Jameson (the Caine part) and Sherie Renee Scott was uninteresting as the soap heiress, Christine Colgate, whom the two scam artists, in competition with each other, are trying to seduce into giving up her millions. And Tracey Flye’s direction at the Shaw is zippier than Jack O’Brien’s was on Broadway.

I had a great time at this production, which is not only hilarious but seems to me almost flawless; the choreography by Stephanie Graham isn’t wildly imaginative, but it’s pleasant enough and certainly well executed. The entire cast makes the farce glitter and displays Yazbek’s score to advantage. I sang Yazbek’s praises not long ago when I wrote about Dead Outlaw, and the reappearance of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels gives me a chance to do so again. His songs have wit and variety, not to mention one of the sharpest eleven o’clock numbers I know, “Dirty Rotten Number”), a gleeful duet for the two leading men. I only regret that Stratford cut “Chimp in a Suit,” which Gregory Jbara, as the corrupt police chief who works with Laurence, rendered in a Parisian accent that made a delicacy out of my favorite rhyme in the score, “Buy him a castle / He’ll still be an asshole / And nothing you do will change that.”

The subject of the absent “Chimp in a Suit” is Freddy Benson, the younger con artist who is alternately Lawrence’s pupil and an immovable obstacle with boundless energy. That was Norbert Leo Butz on Broadway, and he was sensational – but no more so than Liam Tobin, the musical-comedy whiz who plays him at Stratford. Tobin has a clown’s broad face and his physicality is inventively funny; he knocks his wisecracks out of the park and his songs are first-rate. Tobin’s Freddy is pure id – a young man who has never grown out of his infantile greed and amorality – and in the actor’s hands the manifestations of the character’s outrageousness are a continual surprise. He and Jonathan Goad, who plays Lawrence, are an ideal opposites match: Goad’s practiced elegance and panache are essence of high comedy. For Lawrence’s initial response to Freddy, Lane has borrowed a line from My Fair Lady that is eternally linked to Rex Harrison (he calls Freddy “so deliciously low, so horribly dirty”), but in some scenes, especially in act one, the actor Goad seems to be channeling is James Mason. I can’t overstate how sublime it is to watch these two actors together.

The tip-top supporting cast features Derek Kwan in the role of André Thibault, the chief of police, and three supremely talented women in the roles of Lawrence’s marks: Sara-Jeanne Hosie as Muriel, who is devoted to him; Michele Shuster as Jolene, the Oklahoma cowgirl; and Shakura Dickson as Christine. One of the kicks in the material is that in various ways all three turn out to be more than – or different from – conventional victims of his conman act. The musical is constructed around the efforts of the two main characters to outwit each other, but the women’s parts are juicy, and every time one of these actresses is introduced into the proceedings the comic stakes rise. Stratford’s Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is a treasure trove of a show.

Robyn Hurder, Sara Gettelfinger, and the company of High Society. (Photo: Nile Scott Studios.)

One of the grandest surprises of the summer was High Society at the Ogunquit Playhouse in Ogunquit, Maine. The 1956 movie is a musical version of Philip Barry’s beloved high comedy The Philadelphia Story, which had been filmed, famously, by George Cukor in 1940 with a sparkling cast – Katharine Hepburn (repeating her stage performance from the previous year) as Tracy Lord, an heiress on the brink of her second marriage; Cary Grant as her first husband, C.K. Dexter Haven, who’s still in love with her; Jimmy Stewart as Macaulay (Mike) Connor, a reporter sent by Spy Magazine to cover the wedding, whose disdain toward the upper class melts when he finds himself falling for Tracy; and Ruth Hussey as Liz Imbrie, his photographer and casual girlfriend. (Stewart won an Oscar for his performance.) The musical remake, set in Newport and moved up to the mid-fifties, isn’t so sparkling. Bing Crosby is too lightweight a presence to stand in for Grant, Grace Kelly (in her final movie appearance before marrying the Prince of Monaco) barely makes a dent in the Hepburn role and Frank Sinatra is notably miscast as the journalist. (Celeste Holm, subbing for Hussey, is the only one in the foursome who’s up to the task.) There are some good Cole Porter songs (and some mediocre ones), including a couple of interpolations from earlier scores, and every time Louis Armstrong shows up as the leader of a jazz band Dexter has booked for the jazz fest, the pictures gets a giant boost. But there’s not nearly enough of him.

However, the movie has its fans, and it was inevitable that sooner or later somebody would want to transfer it to the stage. That occurred in 1997, when Arthur Kopit adapted the screenplay by John Patrick and the material was filled up with Porter songs from all over. The stage version premiered at American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco and played on Broadway for a few months. (Melissa Errico, John McMartin, Marc Kudish, Randy Graff – all Broadway veterans – and a twelve-year-old Anna Kendrick were in the company.) I saw an awful production at the Shaw Festival in 2006 and bailed at intermission. BT McNicholl has adapted the show for Ogunquit and added to the Barry dialogue; the song list switches out half the score that attached to the musical in the late nineties. Kopit altered the setting to Long Island but reverted to the period of The Philadelphia Story; McNicholl has gone back to the time and place of the 1956 film and devised a winning stand-in for Armstrong, a female musician named Cholly Knickerbocker leading a jazz trio that performs Dexter’s songs. (The name is borrowed from a pseudonym shared by a number of society columnists between 1902 and 1942.) Cholly is played with cool elegance by Ari Groover, who sings in a bourbon-whisky alto voice; she’s backed by Troy Valjean Rucker on sax and Katrina Yaukey on clarinet.

In Barry’s play and Cukor’s film, Tracy has an intolerance for weakness in others: Dexter’s drinking problem (which he’s gotten under control by the time Barry brings him onto the stage), her father’s affair with a young dancer. Both these men castigate her for her judgmental nature and her unconscious self-presentation as a goddess on a pedestal; we know that her fiancé, George Kittredge, is the wrong man for her when he describes her in exactly the same terms but means them as a compliment. (High Society cleverly inserts, as a solo for George, “I Worship You,” from Porter’s 1929 hit Fifty Million Frenchmen; we hear it here with an irony that Porter didn’t intend when he wrote it.) The movie musical got rid of Dexter’s drinking; Tracy’s problem with him in High Society is that she wanted him to become a serious composer and dismissed his love of show business as childish Bohemianism. It feels like a dramatic comedown when we listen to Kelly complain about Crosby; it gets mixed up with all the other ways in which the picture feels like a diminishment of its source. But it didn’t bother me at all in the stage transfer, perhaps because the director, Matt Lenz, and the choreographer, Jeffrey Denman, find a style that fits the revised material perfectly. It’s lighter, redolent of romantic comedy, but it still has the brittleness of high comedy. And it has performers who can deliver those marvelous Barry lines.

To start with, Robyn Hurder is ideally cast as Tracy. She has a wonderful singing voice, brassy but not tinny, with a velvety warmth, and she’s up to all the dramatic challenges of the role. Her three swains – Dexter, Mike and George – are played by Max Clayton, Andrew Durand and Charlie Franklin respectively. Clayton reads Dexter as sort of a cross between Bing Crosby and Cole Porter, a mix that seems to embody the production’s modified high-comic approach. It’s a complex part, like Tracy, but Clayton has it firmly in hand: he pulls off the darker notes (specifically his analysis of his ex-wife’s need for an “understanding heart”) and lightfoots it through the romantic parts, which have now been enhanced by ballads like “I Love You, Samantha” and the wistful, airy “True Love” (both from the movie), “After You, Who?” (written from Gay Divorce) and “You Do Something to Me” (from Fifty Million Frenchmen). He’s lightfooted in another way too: he can really dance. Durand, who had just closed Dead Outlaw on Broadway before he stepped into High Society, manages the balance of cynical wit and lyricism that Barry wrote for Mike Connor. This performer has made a hit with me twice this year; he’s the real thing. In The Philadelphia Story George Kittredge is dislikable – a careerist whose class bitterness (he was born poor) undergirds his efforts to climb into the Lords’ social circle. It’s smart of the musical to soften him up and make his shortcomings and his fumbling more comic than unpleasant. Franklin’s performance has much to do with that shift – like the way he rushes around the stage, always arriving a couple of beats too late.

The musical bulks up Liz’s part by giving her both a duet with Tracy’s flirty Uncle Willie (a hilarious turn by Bryan Batt of Mad Men) – “Let’s Be Buddies,” out of Du Barry Was a Lady – and a wistful eleven o’clock ballad, the only tune I didn’t recognize, “It Must Be Fun to Be You,” which Poter wrote for Mexican Hayride and cut during out-of-town tryouts. Morton offers a full-hearted rendition. There’s just a touch of Billie Burke in Sara Gettelfinger’s Mrs. Lord, but she’s also touching, and she and Mike McGowan as her straying husband are a convincing match. (You root for her to take him back.) Finally, the night I saw the show a sweetheart of a young actress named Corinne Sweeney played Tracy’s precocious kid sister Dinah, and every one of her (many) laugh lines landed.

The show uses a combination of the jazz trio and the chorus of domestics to move the set pieces and the story line. This idea is a bonus, particularly because it shows off the vocal and dance skills of the nine hard-working members of the ensemble. Alexander Dodge’s set designs solve most of the problems posed by the many shifts. Not quite all: he overuses the cyclorama somewhat, and the suggestion of the True Love, the boat Tracy and Dexter sailed on their honeymoon, which shows up in a flashback for the “True Love” number, is rather scrappy. The rest of his work is solid, and so are Tracy Christensen’s costumes and Richard Latta’s lighting.

The company of Annie. (Photo: David Hou.)

Besides Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Stratford’s other musical on the docket this summer is Annie. This show, with a book by Thomas Meehan, music by Charles Strouse and lyrics by Martin Charnin, has always been a crowd pleaser; it’s easy to sell it to an audience but it’s far trickier to really make it work. Adapted from Harold Gray’s comic strip Little Orphan Annie, which first appeared in 1924 and ran under that title for half a century, it’s a genuine attempt to reanimate the spirit of some of the movies Hollywood put out in the early Depression years. It’s a wish fulfillment fantasy of the thirties with a hard-boiled veneer: the orphans enslaved to the mean Miss Hannigan are tough and street-smart and the best song in the score, “It’s a Hard Knock Life,” introduces them. The world these little girls inhabit (of course it’s New York City) is full of desperate people and there’s real danger in it; the narrative has links to Oliver Twist and especially, of course, to the musical Oliver!And even when the title character finds a home with the millionaire Oliver Warbucks and his warm-hearted secretary Grace Farrell, she’s not safe, because Miss Hannigan’s lowlife brother Rooster and his girlfriend Lily are conspiring to pass as Annie’s birth parents to get the reward Warbucks has put up and then, it’s hinted at, get rid of the girl. Meehan doesn’t do a very good job of developing this urban-fairy-tale plot or even of showing us how Annie charms Warbucks, but the musical contains enough disparate elements, including the period ones, to keep it interesting. I’ve never seen a good production, though. I missed the original Broadway version, which opened in 1977 and played and toured for years and is said to have been charming. The 1982 movie, directed without much conviction by John Huston – an odd choice, to say the least – is full of performing talent, but except for Carol Burnett as Miss Hannigan and Albert Finney, looking mighty amused, as Warbucks, they’re not used very well, and neither of the TV adaptations is much good, even though Rob Marshall, early in his career, directed the first one. (The second, from 2014, is an abomination.)

The Stratford production, directed and choreographed by Donna Feore, is handsomely designed and staged, but it’s so overblown and insistent that, except for the chorus of orphans and a blessedly restrained Jennifer Rider-Shaw as Grace, it’s an assault. Everyone else on the stage shrieks or belts or shouts, even Dan Chameroy as Warbucks. Feore has coached Harper Rae Asch, who plays the title role, to twinkle non-stop and smile so broadly you think her face is going to crack, and though she can dance and she knows how to put over a number, the music director, Laura Burton, hasn’t worked with her to bring out the sweetness in her voice; the point seems to be to force the audience – at gunpoint, or so it feels – to fall over themselves because she’s cute. Isn’t it a little late in the game to model a child performer on Shirley Temple? It’s not the little girl’s fault; she needs a different kind of director. But I do blame Laura Condlln, who, as Miss Hannigan, is exactly the same in every scene and whose fallback is to turn up the volume. For the part you need a star with a distinctive comic style, like Burnett. (Kathy Bates, who played it in the 1999 TV version, wasn’t right; neither was Katie Finneran in the 2012 Broadway revival.) I know Hannigan is a villain, but if we don’t find her fun to watch, we’re stuck, because she has an awful lot of stage time. I was hoping for some relief when Rooster and Lily showed up; Tim Curry and Bernadette Peters don’t have much to do in Huston’s film, but they do bring their own personalities to vary the tone, and they have a good song, “Easy Street.” But Mark Uhre and Amanda Lundgren just add more mugging to the proceedings. By the end of two and a half hours, I was worn out.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.