Gypsy at the Goodspeed: The Vaudeville Spirit

Talia Suskauer and Laura Sky Herman in Gypsy. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski)

You know that Jenn Thompson, the director of the Goodspeed Opera House’s production of Gypsy, has a steady hand on the wheel right from the opening scene. It’s an audition for child acts in a dilapidated Seattle theatre in the grim last years of vaudeville, when the talkies dealt it a long, painful death that coincided with the Depression. The stage is crowded with kids in a variety of garish get-ups and their mothers until Uncle Jocko (Edward Juvier), the ulcerated, borderline creepy, far-from-unbiased comic hosting the variety show, banishes the latter. Then Rose (Judy McLane), who is promoting her little girl, Baby June (Emily Jewel Hoder), bulls her way down the aisle; the rules don’t apply to her. June has a head full of blonde curls and an affected squeal; she’s a nightmarish proto-Shirley Temple, flanked by her awkward older sister Louise (Cameron Blake Miller). Thompson’s staging picks up the show-biz chaos, its comedy and preposterousness and desperation, which finds its most feverish embodiment in Rose, the quintessential stage mother – perhaps the greatest and most original creation in the history of musical theatre.

Summer Musicals: Summer Stock and Gypsy

Corbin Bleu and the dancers in Summer Stock. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski)

Summer Stock, released in 1950, followed a particularly unhappy time in Judy Garland’s life and career – after the deterioration of her marriage to the director Vincente Minnelli, after she made her first suicide attempt and was committed to a rehab center, and after M-G-M replaced her on Annie Get Your Gun with Betty Hutton. Yet it feels like a breather for her: though her weight fluctuated during the filming (in her last big number, “Get Happy,” she’s strikingly trim), her performance is ebullient and unstrained. It was her third and final pairing with Gene Kelly – the others were For Me and My Gal in 1942 (his film debut, after he’d conquered Broadway in Rodgers and Hart’s Pal Joey) and The Pirate, for Minnelli, in 1948 – and his warmth and virility, his earthiness and easy jocularity, always brought out an appealing vaudevillian quality in her. None of her other co-stars was so ideal a vocal match for her, and though it’s great to see her with Fred Astaire in Easter Parade (1948), especially in the “Couple of Swells” number, when she and Kelly dance together they seem to belong to the same club. Summer Stock (which Charles Walters directed) is lightweight, and there’s nothing much in the George Wells-Sy Gomberg script that hadn’t been done in previous backstage movie musicals like the ones Garland and Mickey Rooney co-starred in, or Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn. Garland plays Jane Falbury, who’s struggling to keep her farm from going under, and Kelly is Joe Ross, who persuades her to let him produce a show in her barn. But it never pushes the sweetness or the rural Americana, it has a fine supporting cast (except for Gloria De Haven as Jane’s self-centered sister: her acting is really awful), and Garland and Kelly’s scenes together are endearing.

Back to Coolidge: Nice Work If You Can Get It and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

Matthew Broderick and the Cast of Nice Work If You Can Get It

With the obvious exception of George and Ira Gershwin, no one involved with the new Broadway musical Nice Work If You Can Get It is at his or her best:  not the director-choreographer, Kathleen Marshall (also represented currently on Broadway by her irresistible production of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes), or the two stars, Matthew Broderick and Kelli O’Hara, or the scenic designer, Derek McLane or the costume designer, Martin Pakledinaz.  Joe DiPietro’s book is a limp reworking of the plot of the Gershwins’ 1926 hit musical Oh, Kay! (the original was the work of those skillful musical-comedy wordsmiths, Guy Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse) about the romance of a playboy and a bootlegger whose hooch is stashed in the cellar of his Long Island mansion.  It would have made sense for Marshall to stage a revival of Oh, Kay!, which still has a lot of charm and a delectable score.  (You can hear the score complete, impeccably restored by Tommy Krasker, on a 1994 Nonesuch recording with Dawn Upshaw as Kay.)  Nice Work is a jukebox musical with twenty-one Gershwin tunes shoehorned in, many of them randomly.  Often musicals in the pre-Show Boat days (Oh, Kay! was one of the last, opening just thirteen months earlier) and even afterwards were just vehicles for songs and performers, but as disposable as the dramatic situations may have been, the songs generally fit them.  At least a third of the song cues in Nice Work are about as convincing as the ones in Mamma Mia!:  Billie (O’Hara), the renamed heroine, may be feisty but she’s not the kind of girl who would demand of a would-be lover, “Treat Me Rough.”  And why, exactly, is she singing “Hangin’ Around with You” while (masquerading as a domestic) she serves dinner to Jimmy (Broderick) and his house guests?

Only two of the songs, “Someone to Watch Over Me” (the hit of the original show) and “Do, Do, Do,” have been rescued from Oh, Kay!  The rest come from a variety of other Gershwin scores.  “Do It Again” from The French Doll predates George’s collaboration with Ira (Buddy DeSylva wrote the lyric). “Treat Me Rough” and “But Not for Me” are from Girl Crazy, “Looking for a Boy” and the show’s cabaret-set opener, “Sweet and Lowdown” from Tip-Toes, “I’ve Got to Be There” from Pardon My English.  “By Strauss,” which most Gershwin fans probably remember best from the 1951 Vincente Minnelli film An American in Paris, was a one-off contribution by the brothers to a 1936 musical called The Show Is On.  “I’ve Got a Crush on You” was written for Treasure Girl and then reused in the second version of Strike Up the Band, which is also the source of “Hangin’ Around with You.”  “Delishious” and “Blah Blah Blah” hail from the Gershwins’ first movie score, Delicious, and “Demon Rum” from The Shocking Miss Pilgrim – not made until 1946, nine years after George’s death, and containing songs Ira and Kay Swift dug out of his manuscripts.  The other seven songs are all associated with Fred Astaire, Gershwin’s personal favorite among the interpreters of his own work.  “Fascinating Rhythm” and “Lady Be Good” are from Lady, Be Good! And “’S Wonderful” from Funny Face – the two musicals the Gershwins wrote for Astaire and his sister and first dancing partner, Adele.  “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” and “They All Laughed,” among the last songs George penned, were sung by Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the film Shall We Dance, and Astaire crooned “Nice Work If You Can Get It” in A Damsel in Distress the same year, 1937.  Nice Work’s single contribution to the history of Gershwin performance is its rediscovery of a plaintive ballad called “Will You Remember Me?” that the brothers wrote for Lady, Be Good! but never used.