Two Musical Revivals: Thoroughly Modern Millie and The Golden Apple

Dan DeLuca and Taylor Quick in Goodspeed Opera House's Thoroughly Modern Millie. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski)

Thoroughly Modern Millie opened on Broadway in 2002 and played for a little over two years, winning the Tony Award for Best Musical. I gave the original production a pass, though, because I had such unpleasant memories of its source, the 1967 movie in which Julie Andrews sang “The Jewish Wedding Song” and Carol Channing, with that corn-husk contralto, performed “Jazz Baby.” (It’s amazing those two numbers haven’t come back to me in nightmares.) Many friends have told me since that the stage version is charming, and the revival at the Goodspeed Opera House, directed and choreographed by Denis Jones, bears them out. Jones staged the dance numbers for the 2015 Encores! version of Lerner and Loewe’s Paint Your Wagon, which I enjoyed very much, and he’s just been nominated for a Tony Award for choreographing Holiday Inn, which began at the Goodspeed. Here his work, built around twenties dance steps (plenty of Charleston and tap), is clever and energetic. A tap executed by secretaries at a trust company seated at their typewriters makes you grin, and a pas de deux on a window ledge (“I Turned the Corner”) – which brings to mind a number from the short-lived but fondly remembered Never Gonna Dance – is the rare novelty dance turn that really soars.

Hither and Yon: Theatre Round-Up

The Cast of Goodspeed's Bye Bye Birdie. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski)

This piece contains reviews of Bye Bye Birdie (Goodspeed Opera House), Alice in Wonderland (Shaw Festival), The Stone Witch (Berkshire Theatre Group), and Romance Novels for Dummies (Williamstown Theatre Festival).

Framed by Daniel Brodie’s nostalgic projections that reminds us what we saw on TV in 1960, the revival of Bye Bye Birdie at the Goodspeed Opera House is a little uneven but quite enjoyable, and I don’t think that the director, Jenn Thompson, can be faulted for most of the problems. Time hasn’t been kind to Michael Stewart’s book, a satirical take on the pop-cultural phenomenon of Elvis Presley and his imitators that felt fresh as the country cartwheeled into the sixties and for at least a few years thereafter. Stewart was inspired by Presley’s 1957 army induction. When Birdie is drafted, Rosie, the quick-witted secretary to his combination manager-songwriter Albert Peterson, comes up with the idea of picking one teenage girl from the legion of Conrad’s fans to receive a goodbye kiss from him on The Ed Sullivan Show, guaranteeing that the song with which he serenades her, “One Last Kiss,” will become a big enough hit to bankroll Albert’s departure from the music business and enable him to marry Rosie – a fiancée almost as long-suffering as Miss Adelaide in Guys and Dolls – and realize his original dream to become an English teacher. The adolescent they pick at random, Kim McAfee, has just become pinned to her jittery boy friend, Hugo Peabody. Conrad’s descent upon her small Ohio town, Sweet Apple, doesn’t just unnerve Hugo; it puts all of the teenagers into a state of hormonal hysteria. Albert’s possessive mother, Mae, who views Rosie as competition, arrives on the scene, too, to block her marital plans.

Goodspeed's Musical Capracorn & Verdi’s Shakespeare at the Met

Duke Lafoon (right), with Ella Briggs, in A Wonderful Life at the Goodspeed Opera House. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski)

Considering the unusual kinds of musicals Sheldon Harnick collaborated on with the late Jerry Bock – Fiorello!, Tenderloin, She Loves Me, The Rothschilds and of course Fiddler on the Roof, all complex period shows with evocative settings – his determination to turn It’s a Wonderful Life into a musical is a little puzzling. Frank Capra’s 1946 movie is so well known that most Americans can probably recite whole sections of the screenplay off by heart, which makes you wonder why anyone would bother adapting it in the first place. And for those of us who aren’t seduced by its all-too-familiar charms, the project just seems untenable. The picture, with its Albert Hackett-Frances Goodrich script (the last of several versions that were floated to RKO, including efforts by Clifford Odets and Marc Connelly), may be the most beloved of all Christmas movies – though, famously, it wasn’t a hit on its original release and didn’t attain its legendary status until the Vietnam era – but it’s also certainly the weirdest. The story may have an angel named Clarence striving to earn his wings and Capra’s usual Christian-flavored populist hokum (the whole town of Bedford Falls turns out at the eleventh hour to save their friend George Bailey from bankruptcy and prison), but there’s a bitterness at its core that’s so jarringly at odds with its depiction of the self-sacrificing hero as to be pathological. Capra crafts sequences of horror and despair that linger in the mind longer after you’ve digested the treacly happy ending, like the one where the alcoholic druggist George works for in his boyhood mixes a lethal medicine by accident for one of his patients (George prevents him from sending it out) or the climactic episode in which Clarence shows George, who’s about to commit suicide, what a cold, heartless town Bedford Falls would have been had he never been born. And in his best scenes Jimmy Stewart gets so deep into George’s anger and disappointment and misery at the way life has cheated him that the upbeat finale simply isn’t convincing.

Diversions: The Drowsy Chaperone and Sherlock’s Last Case

The cast of Goodspeed Opera House's production of The Drowsy Chaperone. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski)

The Drowsy Chaperone is one of the high points in twenty-first-century American musical theatre. First produced on Broadway in 2006 in a rambunctious, irresistible production that is still the best thing director-choreographer Casey Nicholaw has ever done, it’s a parody of a 1920s musical comedy framed, ingeniously, by a commentary by a middle-aged musicals buff known as Man in Chair. The conceit is that this character, who finds most contemporary theatre unsatisfying – and the modern world exasperating – is sitting alone in his apartment, trying to coax himself out of the blues by listening to his favorite show recording, of a silly, lighthearted musical called The Drowsy Chaperone. Bob Martin, who wrote the book along with his fellow Canadian, Don McKellar, was the original Man in Chair; the ebullient, sometimes loony songs are by Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison, and the lyrics often make you laugh out loud – a genuine rarity.

Musical Noir: City of Angels

Burke Moses (center) stars in "City of Angels" at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam

City of Angels is one of the smartest and most literate of modern musicals, though on Broadway in 1990 the production values upstaged Larry Gelbart’s book and the Cy Coleman-David Zippel songs. The show, which Michael Blakemore directed, was such an expensive-looking commodity that it came across as smug, a kind of exclusive club for well-heeled Westchester and Long Island theatergoers. I admired the performances, especially of the two leading men, Gregg Edelman and James Naughton, but it wasn’t until I saw it in a physically pared-down community-theatre edition a few years later that the virtues of the play and the score shone through. At the intimate Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Connecticut, where it’s currently being mounted with the loving care typical of this venue, you can revel in those virtues.

Goodspeed’s Guys and Dolls: Half a Loaf

Nancy Anderson as Miss Adelaide and Mark Price as Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls. (All photos by Cloe Poisson)

When I reviewed the Shaw Festival’s fine production of Guys and Dolls two years ago I observed that this 1950 Frank Loesser-Jo Swerling-Abe Burrows show is the rare musical in which act two is even better than act one. (Most musicals, even terrific ones, are saddled with second-act troubles.) That distinction is abundantly clear in the production currently playing at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Connecticut, where it opens the new season. For the first half, the Goodspeed Guys and Dolls – directed by Don Stephenson, with musical direction by Goodspeed veteran Michael O’Flaherty – is disappointing. The staging feels cramped, especially during the “Runyonland” opening. Tracy Christensen’s costumes are mix-and-match, with a lot of glaringly bad choices: the hot pants on the Hot Box Girls in the farmyard number “A Bushel and a Peck” don’t flatter their bodies, and what the hell is Benny Southstreet (Noah Plomgren) doing in a zoot suit? Much of the acting is overly broad, especially Mark Price’s as Nathan Detroit, and – in roles that are normally understated – John Jellison as Arvide Abernathy and Karen Murphy as General Cartwright, both on the Salvation Army side of the cast of characters. And O’Flaherty must be using the arrangements from the 1992 Broadway revival, which speed up the tempo (at least on some of the numbers). I thought that was a lousy idea then and I still think so. It seems doubtful that the audiences at the Goodspeed would get bored if “I’ve Never Been in Love Before” were played at the tempo Loesser envisioned. This is, after all, one of the great musical-theatre scores, and familiarity hasn’t worn it down.

Musical Comedy Revivals: My Fair Lady and The Will Rogers Follies

Harry Haddon-Paton, Lauren Ambrose, and Allan Corduner in Bartlett Sher's My Fair Lady. (Photo: WNYC)

In Bartlett Sher’s lush, rewarding revival of My Fair Lady at Lincoln Center, Lauren Ambrose gives the best portrayal I’ve ever seen of Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney flower seller transformed into an Edwardian lady. Ambrose, best known as one of the co-stars of TV’s Six Feet Under, has only a smattering of theatrical experience (which includes a fine performance in Sher’s production of Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing! in 2006) and no background at all in musicals, but she turns out to have a pellucid lyric soprano voice and an unerring sense of musical-comedy style.

Three Musicals, Three Eras

Tessa Faye and the cast of Goodspeed's Good News (Photo by Diane Sobolewski)

Of the collegiate musicals that used to be a staple of the Broadway stage, like Best Foot Forward and Rodgers and Hart’s Too Many Girls, Good News!, with its sweet and snappy DeSylva, Brown and Henderson songs, is probably the most enjoyable. (That is unless you count the 1943 movie version of the Gershwins’ Girl Crazy, which changes the setting from a ranch to a rural college.) Good News! opened in 1927 and though its cast of characters is mostly undergraduate, it presents a juvenile version of the Roaring Twenties, with its sorority flappers and freewheeling football players and its air of unrestrained frivolity – its tacit conviction that youth ought to be able to last forever. Vince Pesce’s new production at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Connecticut is true to that ebullient spirit. Typically for a Goodspeed show, it’s expertly sung and danced and the numbers (choreographed by Pesce) are spirited.  One – “The Varsity Drag,” one of the play’s big hits, which comes before intermission – is a rabble-rouser that finds half a dozen clever ways to get the high-stepping ensemble back and forth across the relatively compact space.

The double conflict centers on the feasibility of getting Tait College football star Tom Marlowe (Ross Lekites) into the climactic game against Tait’s traditional competition, Colton, after he’s flunked his astronomy exam. Professor Kenyon (Beth Glover), a Tait alumna, reluctantly agrees to give him a make-up, and his debutante girl friend, Pat Bingham (Lindsay O’Neil), persuades her egghead cousin, Connie Lane (Chelsea Morgan Stock), to tutor him. When, inevitably, Tom and Connie fall in love, he realizes that if he plays he’ll be duty-bound to marry Pat, who’s pinned their engagement to the outcome of the game. Professor Kenyon’s unresolved one-time relationship with the football coach (Mark Zimmerman) and a secondary (comic) love triangle involving the most formidable physical specimen on the team, Beef Saunders (Myles J. McHale), spunky Babe O’Day (Tessa Faye), and a skinny clown named Bobby Randall (Barry Shafrin) round out the romantic entanglements.

42nd Street: Tapping Their Way to Glory

Carina-Kay Louchey and Max von Essen lead the cast of 42nd Street in the "Lullaby of Broadway" number. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski)

You know you’re in for a bright evening when, immediately after Adam Souza and the band finish the overture for the Goodspeed Opera House’s production of 42nd Street the curtain rises just high enough to reveal the legs and fervently tapping feet of a dozen or so expert chorus girls and boys. The opening was the inspiration of the show’s original director-choreographer, Gower Champion, and if the dancers are skilled, a mood of impending joy descends on the audience at the outset. In this case, the dancers are marvelous, and the show that follows in their wake is a first-rate entertainment.

Anything Goes: Cole Porter at the Goodspeed

Desirée Davar (as Erma), and members of the Goodspeed cast, in Anything Goes. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski)

East Haddam, Connecticut’s fabled Goodspeed Opera House initiates its 2016 season with Anything Goes, Cole Porter’s breezy 1934 musical set aboard a cruise ship crossing the Atlantic. And though the Goodspeed voyage, under Daniel Goldstein’s direction, isn’t without its obstacles, overall it’s a pleasurable one. The libretto to Anything Goes was originally written by Guy Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse, though Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse revised it before the Broadway premiere, and over the years it’s been re-revised continually: every time it’s newly mounted in New York it’s tinkered with and the song list altered to add or substitute Porter jewels from other shows. Since the 1962 production (with Eileen Rodgers and Hal Linden), the 1987 production (with Patti LuPone and Howard McGillin) and Kathleen Marshall’s ebullient, deluxe 2011 production (with Sutton Foster and Colin Donnell) have all been recorded, Porter aficionados can check them against each other and evaluate the addenda and omissions. In terms of the libretto, there are three versions – the 1934, the 1962 (by Bolton himself) and the 1987 by Crouse’s son Timothy and John Weidman, which Kathleen Marshall hewed to and which Goodspeed has chosen to produce as well. (If you want to know what the show sounded like in 1934, get a copy of the 1989 EMI studio recording overseen by John McGlinn, who conducts the London Symphony Orchestra behind a disparate ensemble including opera diva Frederica Von Stade and the peerless Jack Gilford.)

A Classic Musical and a Comedy About Musicians: Fiddler on the Roof and Living on Love

Fiddler on the Roof (Photo by Diane Sobolewski).

Working on one of those Goodspeed Opera House sets (designed by Michael Schweikardt) that are small miracles of permutation and economy, Rob Ruggiero’s production of Fiddler on the Roof refurbishes the great Broadway show for a more intimate space without sacrificing its dramatic power, the musicality of its Jerry Bock-Sheldon Harnick score, or the breadth of Joseph Stein’s book. (Parker Esse has reproduced the Jerome Robbins choreography – which, given its distinctness and celebrity, is probably the best idea. I assume it’s also a copyright requirement.) With Adam Heller giving a superb performance as Tevye the dairyman, who carries on informal conversations with God as he hauls his cart through the streets of the Russian town of Anatevka, the Goodspeed Fiddler is all that one might hope.

Screen to Stage: Holiday Inn

Tally Sessions (centre) and the cast of Goodspeed's Irving Berlin's Holiday Inn (Photo:Diane Sobolewski)

Nine years ago Walter Bobbie mounted a stage version of the Irving Berlin holiday favorite, White Christmas, with a book by David Ives and Paul Blake and spiffy choreography by Randy Skinner. It was a charmer – more light-fingered and economical than the overscaled 1954 movie – though in one aspect it erred in not being extravagant enough. At the end, after the two protagonists (the characters played by Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye on screen) dedicated their show to their beloved old army general and the company settled in for the reprise of the title song, the set should have opened up for a real snowy finale. It was a missed opportunity – but a lovely production.

Now the Goodspeed Opera House has put up another theatrical adaptation of an Irving Berlin movie musical, that earlier holiday classic, 1942’s Holiday Inn, the original source of the Oscar-winning song “White Christmas.” Holiday Inn isn’t a great movie, but it’s pleasantly low-key, it stars Crosby and Fred Astaire, and the score also features “You’re Easy to Dance With,” “Be Careful, It’s My Heart,” and “Happy Holiday,” which gets stuck in your noggin. The screenplay by Claude Binyon and Elmer Rice, from an idea by Berlin, is agreeable piffle. Crosby and Astaire are two-thirds of a show-biz trio, and Crosby’s Jim Hardy is engaged to marry the third member, Lila Dixon (Virginia Dale) – or so he believes. The night before he leaves the stage to retire to a Connecticut farm he’s bought, Lila tells him that she’s sticking with Astaire’s Ted Hanover – professionally and romantically. Within a year, farm living defeats Jim; he comes up with a plan to open his new home as an inn-cum-theatre that operates only on holidays, and he lucks onto a leading lady, Linda Mason (the unremarkable Marjorie Reynolds), with whom he falls in love. Then, predictably, Ted shows up, having been jilted by Lila (for a Texas millionaire), in search of a new female dancing partner.

All Shook Up: Grooving on the Elvis Presley Jukebox

Ryan Mac and the company of All Shook Up. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski.)

The current production of All Shook Up, Joe DiPietro’s parodic jukebox musical, at the Goodspeed Opera House is a homecoming of sorts, since the original version, directed by Christopher Ashley, began there in 2004 before opening on Broadway the following year. It never really caught on in New York; it ran for five months and then toured the country in 2006 and 2007. Seeing the show for the first time in its revival at the Goodspeed, I honestly can’t imagine why it wasn’t a hit from the outset. I can’t say, of course, what the current director and choreographer, Daniel Goldstein and Byron Easley, have brought to the show, but the material is charming and the production is inspiriting. The twenty-five songs were all recorded by Elvis Presley (I recognized most but not quite all of them). The musical revamps the low-budget rock ‘n’ roll movie musicals of the fifties like Rock Around the Clock and Don’t Knock the Rock starring Alan Freed, the DJ credited with popularizing rock. (Freed is also the main character of the vivid 1978 film American Hot Wax, where he’s played, memorably, by Tim McIntire.)

Music, Music, Music: The Most Happy Fella, Merrily We Roll Along and Baritones Unbound

Marnie Parris & Bill Nolte in The Most Happy Fella

Six years passed between Frank Loesser’s hugely successful Guys and Dolls and his next Broadway show, The Most Happy Fella, and the two projects couldn’t have been more different. Guys and Dolls was an effort to find a musical-comedy equivalent for the quirky idiom of Damon Runyon’s stories, where gamblers and gangsters are interchangeable (and basically benign), wear fedoras and pin-stripe suits, and speak without contractions. Loesser’s score is lyrical, but it’s comprised mostly of comic numbers – solos (“Adelaide’s Lament”) duets (“Sue Me,” “Marry the Man Today”) the title song, call-and-response numbers  (“Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” and the two Hot Box showgirl tunes), even a counterpoint trio (“Fugue for Tinhorns”). The Most Happy Fella has a lush romantic score, and there’s so much of it that the original cast recording was released in two versions, a single LP of highlights and a complete three-LP set, in the style of opera recordings. Technically the show is an operetta, since it does contain dialogue sections (which were also written by Loesser). And though it may not be up to Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess or Kurt Weill’s Street Scene, the two Broadway musicals that are not only extensive enough but also complex enough musically to qualify as operas, it’s extremely ambitious – and surpassingly beautiful. (In fact, the New York City Opera used to keep it in their repertory.) Loesser based it on a 1924 play by Sidney Howard called They Knew What They Wanted – a hit despite that unwieldy title – that starred Richard Bennett and the legendary stage actress Pauline Lord and was filmed three times over the next decade and a half.

Christmas in Connecticut: Trimming a Moldy Tree

Matt Bogart, Audrey Cardwell and Josh Breckenridge in Christmas in Connecticut. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski)

Christmas in Connecticut shows up on TV every holiday season, but that doesn’t make it a classic. This Jell-o-bland 1945 comedy sits on a wobbly premise. An emphatically undomesticated magazine writer (played by Barbara Stanwyck) writes a fictitious column that presents her as a family woman cooking gourmet meals for her husband on a picturesque Connecticut farm. Her publisher (Sydney Greenstreet, looking like he knows how badly miscast he is), somehow ignorant of the truth, that she’s a single New Yorker who dines in restaurants, compels her to invite a war hero (the hopelessly bland Dennis Morgan) home for Christmas. Since her steady suitor (Reginald Gardiner) just happens to own a farm in Connecticut and she and her editor (Robert Shayne) are friendly with a gifted local chef (S.Z. Sakall), they decide to try to pull off an elaborate charade. Except for Stanwyck, who gives the tepid material the old college try, no one associated with the picture – not the director, Peter Godfrey, or the writers, Lionel Houser and Adele Comandini – could be called remotely distinguished.

The notion of turning Christmas in Connecticut into a stage musical feels desperate, but it’s December and after all, there is a limited number of holiday-themed properties. The result, at the Goodspeed Opera House, is a bargain-basement confection that, like the movie, is set just after World War II but has been tricked up to look like it passes the woke test with the addition of a socialistic naysayer and a gay couple. The book by Patrick Pacheco and Erik Forrest Jackson is even worse than the original screenplay, and the score by Jason Howland (music) and Amanda Yesnowitz (lyrics) is forced and worn from the opening number, which recycles ideas from Leonard Bernstein and Comden and Green’s Wonderful Town. Seven of the eight songs in the first act are belters, culminating in a stupefying novelty number called “Catch the Ornament,” in which the protagonist, Liz (Audrey Cardwell), and her Hungarian chef buddy, Felix (James Judy), invent a game to occupy the ill-fitting dinner guests. Let’s just say that “Catch the Ornament” makes “Turkey Lurkey Time” from Promises, Promises sound like a winner in the holiday-show-songs sweepstakes. Toward the end of act one, they slip in one ballad, “American Dream,” sung by the war vet, Jefferson Jones (Josh Breckenridge), that shifts the tone from fake-cynical to fake-inspirational. We get more of that in the second-act finale, a Christmas hymn titled “May You Inherit.”

Judy Garland Sings: Chasing Rainbows

Ruby Rakos (centre left) and the cast of Goodspeed's Chasing Rainbows. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski)

Ruby Rakos is so good as the teenage Judy Garland, née Frances Gumm, in the new musical Chasing Rainbows: The Road to Oz that she alone justifies the trip to see the production at the Goodspeed Opera House. As a vocalist Rakos can harness both a belter’s power and a crooner’s sweetness; if you think you’ve heard enough covers of “Over the Rainbow” to last a lifetime, you might reconsider when you hear her marry delicacy to emotionality in the show’s finale. In her youth Garland had a remarkable ability to use that powerful, controlled alto to channel a depth of emotion that was startling in an adolescent. (She was sixteen when M-G-M cast her as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz and took her career into the stratosphere.) That’s why, in the musical, her mother, Ethel Gumm (Sally WIlfert), relentlessly promotes her as the little girl with the grown-up voice – though that description shortchanges her other quality, a rousing Midwestern-flavored ebullience that gave her swing numbers, like “Everybody Sing” (from The Broadway Melody of 1938) and “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart” (from Listen, Darling) a soaring, look-ma-no-hands vocal athleticism. Rakos gets all of that without ever trying to imitate Garland; and because she’s a real actress as well as an accomplished singer, she also gets her subject’s vaudevillian wiseacre side and her neediness, that almost frighteningly intense wide-eyed dreaminess. And she can hoof. Not only can you see why she was cast; you can’t imagine a search for a young Judy that could turn up anybody else in her class.

New York Musicals: On the Town and Hello, Dolly!

On the Town at the Barrington Stage

Though they’re best known for writing Singin’ in the Rain, the funniest movie musical ever made, the book and lyric writers Betty Comden and Adolph Green were the most notable proponents – perhaps even the inventors – of the New York musical. During their long-term and prolific collaboration they worked together on On the Town, Wonderful Town, Bells Are Ringing, Do Re Mi and, on screen, It’s Always Fair Weather, all of which unfold against the backdrop of a bustling Manhattan peopled with colorful caricatures of New York types. There’s an exuberance in the way Comden and Green employ specific New York settings: the Greenwich Village of the 1930s in Wonderful Town, the subway in the “Hello, Hello There” number in Bells are Ringing, Stillman’s Gym in It’s Always Fair Weather. Their first Broadway show, On the Town, which just closed in a marvelous production at Barrington Stage in the Berkshires, begins and ends in the Navy dockyard, and in between takes us to Carnegie Hall, the Museum of Natural History, Coney Island and the interior of a taxi driven by a boisterous female cabbie named Hildy. It’s a valentine to the city, seen through the eyes of three young sailors who encounter it for the first time during a twenty-four-hour furlough.

In Pieces: Rags

Sean MacLaughlin, Samantha Massell, and Christian Michael Camporin in Rags. (Photo:Diane Sobolewski)

Rags failed spectacularly on Broadway in 1986, closing after eighteen previews and four performances. Rumors of trouble during the Boston tryouts may have dogged the New York opening, though my recollection is that they focused on the unreliability of the star, opera diva Teresa Stratas in her musical-theatre debut, who kept missing performances. (That’s the reason I didn’t make an effort to see the show – I didn’t want to be disappointed if Stratas, a great actress as well as a great singer, didn’t appear that night.) So I was staggered when, on the advice of a friend, I bought a copy of the original cast album, recorded with Julia Migenes-Johnson substituting for Stratas. It’s not just that the score is lush and thrilling, Charles Strouse’s music inviting comparisons to Jerome Kern and Kurt Weill and Stephen Schwartz’s lyrics displaying a specificity and emotional authenticity that none of his previous work for the theatre could have led anyone to anticipate. It’s also that the story the songs develop and embellish, as the plot synopsis in the liner notes confirms, is a complex and multi-leveled examination of the experience of Jewish immigrants living in New York at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. The book writer, Joseph Stein, was most famous for writing Fiddler on the Roof, and Rags seems intended as an unofficial sequel.The protagonist is Rebecca Hershkowitz, who comes to America with her little boy David to escape the Russian pogroms, though her husband Nathan, who preceded them to these shores, doesn’t know they’re seeking him and she doesn’t connect with him until the end of the first act. In the meantime she works in a sweatshop and is drawn somewhat reluctantly into the life of her new home. The musical is her coming of age, which is prompted not only by the hardship of her time in America but also by the people around her: David’s curiosity and openness to the new world, the anger of her friend Bella Cohen at the poverty they can’t rise above, and the labor organizer Saul, who at first unsettles her and then gets her thinking. (They’re also attracted to one another.) Nathan, it happens, has changed his name to Nat Harris and gone to work for the corrupt Tammany Hall political machine. When they find each other again, he promises to take her out of the slums to a sheltered, luxurious uptown existence, but Bella’s death in the Triangle Factory fire radicalizes her and she leaves Nathan’s world for Saul’s. The finale is bittersweet: Rebecca’s moral triumph and her self-discovery are filtered through the tragedy of Bella’s death and the deaths of her co-workers and mediated by the reprise of the first chorus number, “Greenhorns,” which views the wave of immigrants as mere grist for the economic mill rather than as human beings striving to find happiness. That’s the view that Saul and Rebecca have pledged to fight, and the fight has just started.

Hey, Look Me Over!: Also-Rans

Vanessa Williams and members of the ensemble in Hey, Look Me Over! at New York's City Center. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

Artistic director Jack Viertel’s concept for Hey, Look Me Over!, which opened the twenty-fifth anniversary season of Encores!, was to put together a revue of excerpts from shows that have never been revived in City Center’s beloved series. But to be honest, what you come away from the show with is a pretty good understanding of why you wouldn’t want to see a production of Wildcat (Cy Coleman & Carolyn Leigh, 1960) or Milk and Honey (Jerry Herman, 1961), Sail Away (Noël Coward, 1961) or, God help us, Greenwillow (Frank Loesser, 1960). I’d be more curious about checking out Jamaica (1957), which Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg wrote for Lena Horne, or All American (Charles Strouse and Lee Adams, 1962), which originally starred Ray Bolger, or Herman’s Mack and Mabel (1974), in which Robert Preston played silent-comedy king Mack Sennett and Bernadette Peters played his star and romantic partner Mabel Normand. I’d seen only one of the shows included in the compilation, George M! (1968), which the Goodspeed Opera House produced some years ago, a bio of George M. Cohan that isn’t remotely in the same class as the movie Yankee Doodle Dandy – though it must have been worth seeing on Broadway with Joel Grey. 

Maggie: Musical Melodrama

The company of Maggie sings "Everyone's Gone". (Photo: Diane Sobolewski)

The Canadian musical Maggie, which was birthed at Theatre Aquarius in Hamilton, Ontario and is currently running at the Goodspeed Opera House, is set in Lanark, Scotland between 1954 and 1976. The family whose saga inspired it is that of Johnny Reid, who co-wrote the music with Bob Foster (he also supervised and orchestrated it) and the book and lyrics with Matt Murray. The title character, played by Christine Dwyer, who has to raise three sons by herself after her miner husband (Anthony Festa) dies in a pit accident, is based on Reid’s grandmother. Maggie is a feminist narrative that celebrates the strength of its heroine and places her in the center of a group of other hard-working women, miners’ wives who provide emotional support for each other that their stoic, closed-off men don’t. (Ironically, the exception seems to be Maggie’s husband.)