Theatre Round-Up: The Berkshires, London, New York

Kate Baldwin and Graham Rowat in Berkshire Theatre Group's Bells Are Ringing. (Photo by Michelle McGrady)

If Kate Baldwin had started her career during the golden age of Broadway musicals, composers and lyricists would have competed to write vehicles for her. That’s the first thought that crossed my mind after I left the Berkshire Theatre Group’s production of Bells Are Ringing, in which she takes up the role Judy Holliday created in 1956 (and played subsequently in the charming 1960 Vincente Minnelli movie, opposite Dean Martin). The show, with its Jule Styne melodies – two of which, “Just in Time” and “The Party’s Over,” belong in the show music pantheon – and the effervescent Betty Comden-Adolph Green book and lyrics, was a vehicle from the get-go. Holliday had won an Academy Award for bringing her star-making portrait of Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday from Broadway to the screen, but her subsequent movie roles played up her stridency rather than the quality that made her unique, a dazed canniness. The joke at the heart of Born Yesterday is that Billie, the mistress of a junk tycoon who takes her to Washington and hires a journalist to give her a little cultivation, is a ditz who isn’t as dumb as she looks and sounds. Holliday’s other movies didn’t capitalize on that appealing contradiction, and they didn’t take advantage of all the other things she could do, like put over a number and knock a comedy routine out of the park (she and Comden and Green had started off in a nightclub act called The Revuers) and play the plaintiveness hiding underneath the humor. Bells Are Ringing allowed her to do all of it. She played Ella Peterson, who works for her cousin Sue’s phone service, where she’s made herself indispensable to the lives of customers she knows only by voice and for each of whom she’s developed a different personality. One of her clients is a hard-drinking playwright named Jeff Moss, one-half of a hit duo who’s operating solo for the first time and so terrified that he’s going to bomb that he’s paralyzed by writer’s block. Jeff knows Ella as Mom, the little old lady at the switchboard who hands out advice and encouragement; he has no idea that she’s a young woman who’s been fantasizing about him. When he gets drunk the night before a last-ditch meeting with his producer and unplugs his phone, Ella gets so desperate about saving his career that she sneaks into his apartment to wake him up. Improvising a new character for herself, Melisande Scott, she gets him writing again and he falls for her. But his faith in her (he tells her she’s the first honest person he’s ever known) makes her feel guilty for all the play-acting she’s been doing, and she doesn’t feel she can face him as Ella.

I Could Go On Singing: Giant and A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder

Brian D’Arcy James and Kate Baldwin in Giant at the Public Theater in New York (Photo by Sara Krulwich)

Considering that Show Boat is one of the most phenomenally successful musicals in history, it’s surprising that it’s taken nearly a century for someone to get around to adapting another Edna Ferber novel to the musical stage. Like Show Boat, Giant, which she wrote in 1952, is a vivid soap opera that sprawls across two generations. Ferber has been out of fashion for a long time (though her books are still highly readable); most people who are familiar with the material would know it through the famous 1956 movie version, directed by George Stevens and starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and, in a posthumous performance, James Dean. The giant of the title is Texas, where Jordan “Bick” Benedict (Hudson) brings his Virginia bride Leslie (Taylor) to live on his enormous ranch, Reata: he has to get used to her independent-mindedness and her social conscience and she has to get used to the ways of Texas, which is crass, self-adoring, patriarchal and racist.

The movie, which runs on for three hours and twenty minutes, is uneven in every conceivable way: visually, in the storytelling and in the acting. Stevens was past his prime when he made it; he’d begun to equate length and subject matter with prestige, in that distinctly Hollywood way. (Giant has approximately the same running time as a double bill of his two best pictures, Alice Adams and the Astaire-Rogers classic Swing Time, both of which he made in the mid-thirties.) Still, like the book on which it’s based, Giant is very absorbing, and even though it’s a mammoth Oscar-boosting extravaganza, it doesn’t try very hard to convince you that it’s an important drama. By contrast, the musical, which began at the Dallas Theater Center and made it to New York’s Public Theater last month, is more inflated than the loudest-crowing, most self-righteous Texan in its cast of characters. Moreover, it’s something that you could never call a single one of those Texans: it’s a twenty-four-carat phony.

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.

Two New Musicals: Big Fish and The Landing

Norbert Leo Butz and Kate Baldwin in Big Fish

The new musical adaptation of Big Fish has a deluxe, hyper-bright look and some of the niftiest stagecraft I’ve seen on a Broadway stage. The characters who will pop up later in the stories spun by the hero, Edward Bloom (Norbert Leo Butz), are projected onto witches’ cloaks; a field of daisies – Edward’s gift to the girl of his dreams, Sandra (Kate Baldwin) – is transformed into a 3D backdrop; the set designer (Julian Crouch), the costume designer (William Ivey Long) and the projection designer ( Benjamin Pearcy) assemble witty trompe l’oeil collages. The director-choreographer, Susan Stroman, comes up with fresh ideas for one number after another; her work is a compendium of dance styles. The problem is the uninspired musical at the center of all this visual magic.

Politics and Poker: Fiorello! at City Center

Danny Rutigliano, center, as Fiorello LaGuardia in Fiorello! (Photo by Sara Krulwich)

One of my earliest musical-theatre memories is of seeing Fiorello! on Broadway with my parents in 1960, after it had won the Pulitzer Prize. I can still remember some of George Abbott’s staging, most vividly the big “The Name’s LaGuardia” number in the middle of the first act, where the title character, Fiorello LaGuardia (Tom Bosley), campaigns fervently in English, Italian and Yiddish to secure the Republican vote for a Congress seat in a district nailed down for years by Tammany Hall. It’s a marvelous show-stopper, one of the most memorable pieces in the musicals of the late fifties, like “Ya Got Trouble” in The Music Man and “The Telephone Hour” in Bye Bye Birdie. This musical bio of the man who became one of New York City’s most beloved mayors – the diminutive but fierce character known as the Little Flower – is a terrific show; the original cast recording captures its brio as well as the melodic range of Jerry Bock’s music and the wit of Sheldon Harnick’s lyrics. (It was their first hit, predating She Loves Me by four years and Fiddler on the Roof by five.) So I was in a state of joyous anticipation from the moment Encores! announced that Fiorello! would be the show to open its twentieth season. (The series began with the same musical in 1994, but I missed it.)

Two Musicals and a Two-Hander

The Pirates of Penzance at the Barrington Stage Company (Photo by Kevin Sprague)

Musical theatre buffs are treated these summer days in the Berkshires, where Berkshire Theatre Group and Barrington Stage Company have been mounting exceptionally well produced shows just a few blocks from each other in Pittsfield. Both BTG’s Little Shop of Horrors and BSC’s The Pirates of Penzance are winding down their runs. Pirates, directed by John Rando and choreographed by Joshua Bergasse (the team responsible for the best production I’ve ever seen of On the Town, which began at BTG and transferred to Broadway), revives the version of the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta Joseph Papp had a hit with at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1980. I saw the Papp Pirates in L.A. with Barry Bostwick as the Pirate King, Clive Revill (the original Fagin in Oliver!) as Major-General Stanley, and Andy Gibb and Pam Dawber as the lovers, Frederic and Mabel, and though Wilford Leach’s staging was erratic and the energetic mugging was sometimes a bit much, it was great fun. After years of sitting through G&S shows that dutifully mimicked the D’Oyly Carte traditions, it was refreshing to see a Yankee take on the operetta that parodied an entirely different set of conventions – out of American musical comedy, silent movie comedy and swashbucklers. (I wouldn’t put them on the same level, but the effect reminded me of Peter Brook’s marvelous 1953 film of The Beggar’s Opera, where the sources of the burlesque were twentieth-century operettas and swashbucklers.) The Papp Pirates was televised on PBS, but I’m sure far more people saw the 1983 movie adaptation, a loud, charmless mess that had only one thing going for it: Kevin Kline, who, recreating his stage performance as the Pirate King, sent up Douglas Fairbanks, Errol Flynn and every baritone in American operetta from Dennis King to Howard Keel.

Much as I enjoyed Pirates back in 1981, Rando is a better director than Loach, and his production, though certainly athletic and loaded with music-hall bits, is more graceful, the onstage chaos more controlled. The hamminess – a mainstay of the Papp revision – is perhaps overstated in the first act, and for me, at least, though Will Swenson’s Pirate King and his crew’s flirting with the women in the audience is a surefire crowd-pleaser, a little of that sort of hijinks goes a long way. But the show is extremely pleasurable, and it’s paced like lightning. Swenson digs into his hearty baritone to offer up “Oh, Better Far to Live and Die,” and David Garrison, a musical-theatre veteran whose career began around the time of the Papp Pirates, dispatches “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General,” the most famous of the G&S patter songs, with cool finesse, tossing off a light buck and wing at the top. The otherpatter song, “Now for the Pirates’ Lair” early in act two, performed by Swenson, Jane Carr as the “piratical maid-of-all-work” Ruth and Kyle Dean Massey as Frederic, is just as much fun. Massey, whom Nashville viewers will recognize as Chris Carmack’s on-again-off-again soulful songwriter boy friend Kevin Bicks, is handsome and boasts a well trained voice, and he’s lucky enough to have Scarlett Strallen as his Mabel. She has personality and the wit as well as the chops to pull off a bull’s-eye parody of the typical trilling operetta soprano (on “Poor Wandering One”) – and then in act two, when she’s handed one of those gorgeous Arthur Sullivan arias, “Sorry Her Lot,” she turns around and performs it straight, with genuine feeling. The seven other Stanley daughters, which include a pair of identical twins, Alanna and Claire Saunders, are entirely winning. Phillip Boykin, the barrel-chested bass who was a memorable Crown in the recent Broadway revival of Porgy and Bess, enriches the ensemble in the small role of Samuel, the Pirate King’s lieutenant.

Potpourri: Love Life, Don’t Eat the Mangos and Beckett Briefs

Kate Baldwin and Brian Stokes Mitchell in Love Life. (Photo: Joan Marcus.)

The review of Don’t Eat the Mangos contains spoilers.

The great Jewish Weimar composer Kurt Weill fled Berlin for New York in the early thirties. Nothing he wrote for Broadway earned him the fame he’d garnered as Bertolt Brecht’s collaborator in Germany, but he produced the music for eight shows between 1936 and 1949 (he died in 1950 at the age of fifty while he was working on a musical based on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) with a fascinating range of librettists including Moss Hart, Ira Gershwin, S.J. Perelman, Ogden Nash and Maxwell Anderson. And though the shows were a mixed bag, his music was usually glorious. The 1947 opera he and the poet Langston Hughes fashioned from Elmer Rice’s play Street Scene, set in a Manhattan tenement, may be the most exquisite score anyone has written for Broadway besides Porgy and Bess.

Iconic Shows of the 1960s: Hello, Dolly! and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Bette Midler in Hello, Dolly! at Broadway's Shubert Theatre. (Photo: Julieta Cervantes)

Hello, Dolly! opened in January 1964 and stayed open for just under seven years. It wasn’t the best musical on Broadway in those years – it was no Fiddler on the Roof – but it represented, and continues to represent, the end of the golden age of Broadway musicals. It was a big, brassy star vehicle, built around the rather specialized talents of Carol Channing but flexible enough to be refitted for the long line of older women who made comebacks in the role of the widowed matchmaker Dolly Gallagher Levi. (The source material for Michael Stewart’s book was the Thornton Wilder comedy The Matchmaker.) There was some controversy when Barbra Streisand, at only twenty-seven, inherited the role in the 1969 movie, but her stupendous performance was its lifeblood; the movie, directed in a stifling, museum-piece style by Gene Kelly, would have sunk under its own weight without her. And it contained one of the great moments in movie-musical history: in the middle of the title song – certainly the best-known item in the Jerry Herman score – Streisand, decked out in a golden Gay Nineties gown with feathers on her head, harmonized with Louis Armstrong, whose cover had been as big a hit as the show itself.

The new revival, starring Bette Midler as Dolly and David Hyde Pierce as Horace Vandergelder, the wealthy but parsimonious Yonkers shop owner who is supposedly her client but really the object of her own romantic machinations, arrives with more anticipation than any Broadway show in years. Advance hype aside (and God knows there’s been plenty), how could it not? Midler hasn’t appeared in a book musical since she played one of Tevye’s younger daughters in the original run of Fiddler, before she became famous; aside from the (non-musical) solo performance I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat with Sue Mengers in 2013, her only New York appearances have been in a couple of revues – one of which, Clams on the Half Shell, I was lucky enough to see back in 1975. Her Broadway comeback, at seventy-one, is not going to disappoint her legion of fans. She plays Dolly with one foot firmly planted in the Jewish vaudeville tradition, grinning that famous cat-that-ate-the-canary grin, and the highlight of her performance is indeed culinary: in the middle of act two she dispatches a stuffed chicken with dumplings at a table stage right with hilarious gusto while most of the rest of the ensemble, gathered in a courtroom upstage after the evening’s hijinks at Manhattan’s Harmonia Gardens Restaurant, waits for her to finish so the plot can take its final turn. And she could hardly have landed a funnier scene partner than Pierce, who revivifies a role that has generally brought out little in the men who’ve played it besides a side of undernourished, overbaked ham. Pierce’s first-act number, “It Takes a Woman,” performed with a male chorus, is one of the evening’s surprising highlights – the choreographer, Warren Carlyle, has staged it wittily – and “Penny in My Pocket,” written for the original Horace, David Burns, but cut out of town, has been restored to give Pierce a second-act number.

Playwrights: Benefactors, A Great Wilderness, The Normal Heart, A Little Night Music

Walton Wilson, David Adkins, and Barbara Sims in Benefactors (Photo by Emily Faulkner)

Eric Hill’s compelling production of Benefactors at the Berkshire Theatre Group’s Unicorn space in Stockbridge provides audiences with an opportunity to become acquainted with an intelligent, intriguing text by Michael Frayn that doesn’t receive many revivals. (It won the Olivier Award for best new play in 1984.) The play, set between 1968 and 1970, is a four-hander about the relationship between David (David Adkins), an architect with a commitment to providing housing for the poor, and his wife Jane (Corinna May) and their neighbors across the road, Colin (Walton Wilson), a journalist, and Sheila (Barbara Sims). David and Colin have known each other since university, and when they find themselves living in close proximity the two couples and their children are constantly in and out of each other’s houses. Colin is a difficult man with a contrary temperament and a tendency to belittle his wife; self-effacing, easily intimidated, and somewhat in awe of David and Jane, Sheila barely opens her mouth at first when the quartet gets together for dinner. But she begins to spend more and more time hanging out with Jane during the day, and eventually confides her fears that Colin is going to leave her. To help her develop a life of her own, Jane encourages David to hire Sheila as a secretary – to take over the work Jane herself has been doing for him – and the shift ushers in a new phase of their lives.

Hello, Dolly!: Ogunquit Playhouse Puts On Its Sunday Clothes

Beth Leavel as Dolly Levi and company in Hello Dolly! (Photo: Nile Scott Studios.)

Six decades on, Hello, Dolly! is seen as a prime representative of the golden age of Broadway musicals, but the fact is, that era was rolling into its final years, before rock ‘n’ roll and the bitterness of the Vietnam War wore it down. Jerry Herman and Michael Stewart’s musical adaptation of the 1954 Thornton Wilder farce The Matchmaker, set in Gilded Age New York, lasted on Broadway for seven years and toured for longer, but its producer, David Merrick, turned it into a vehicle with revolving-door stars stepping in to play the marriage broker Dolly Levi, most of them relics from the 1940s. And the musical, with its overweight production values and its thin farce plot – about how the marriage broker Dolly Levi, commissioned by the Yonkers hay and feed shopkeeper Horace Vandergelder to find him a wife, captures him for herself while abetting the courtship of three young couples – grew more arthritic as time pressed on. When Barbra Streisand took over the title role in the otherwise plodding 1969 movie, her astonishing stockpile of talents and unique old-style/new-style presence lit up the fading material like fireworks; she was a godsend. But what contemporary mountings of Hello, Dolly! have shown – from the version at the Goodspeed Opera House in 2013 to the triumphant 2017 Broadway revival to the newly opened one at the Ogunquit Playhouse – is that, liberated from the notion that audiences are paying to watch a guest star in a variety show, it can be a first-rate entertainment.

Three Musicals: My Paris, Anastasia, Presto Change-O

Mara Davi and Bobby Steggert in My Paris, at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre.. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

The music in My Paris is breezy but it gives off the unmistakable whiff of melancholy and regret. It’s on the cusp of light jazz, honky-tonk and folk; it’s reminiscent of the sort of thing Django Reinhardt used to play in Paris in the twenties and thirties, but most of the time it sounds like the music chanteurs like Charles Aznavour and Charles Trenet are famous for. That’s no surprise, since Aznavour himself wrote the score, and even though Jason Robert Brown’s translations saddle it with banalities, sometimes of the self-help brand (one second-act number is called “You Do It for You”), the music is a good enough reason to check out this new musical about Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre. (It was workshopped at the Goodspeed Opera House last summer.)

Hello, Dolly! Redux

Bernadette Peters in Hello Dolly! (Photo: Julieta Cervantes)

I had a great time watching Bette Midler and David Hyde Pierce in Hello, Dolly! last fall, but Bernadette Peters and Victor Garber, who have replaced them in Jerry Zaks’s gleaming Broadway revival, bring something new to the roles of Dolly Gallagher Levi and Horace Vandergelder: heart. Up to now my favorite Dolly has been Barbra Streisand in the otherwise bloated and worn 1969 movie version. She gave a sensational showmanlike performance – like Jimmy Cagney in Yankee Doodle Dandy or Robert Preston in The Music Man. But she was so absurdly young to be playing the widowed Dolly, who fastens on Yonkers shopkeeper Vandergelder as a way to refurbish a life grown dull, that the semblance of naturalism that’s meant to undergird musical comedy, even in something as stylized as Guys and Dolls, vanished utterly and you watched Streisand as if she were starring in her own revue. (And that certainly wasn’t the case with Cagney or Preston.) Peters, who, like Midler, is the right age to play Dolly, gives her a core of vulnerability from the get-go – from the moment she apostrophizes to her beloved dead husband, Ephraim, that she’s tired of living life as she has since he passed on. Both Streisand and Midler played Dolly’s bid for remarriage to Horace as situation comedy and farce; Peters motivates it psychologically.

On the 20th Century: Spiffy Ride

On the 20th Century, the 1978 musical currently being favored with a gold-standard revival by the Roundabout Theatre Company, is adapted from one of the great Hollywood screwball farces of the thirties, Howard Hawks’ Twentieth Century. Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur based their screenplay on their 1932 Broadway show, which had begun life as an unproduced play by Charles Bruce Milholland called Napoleon of Broadway, but the Hawks movie is better than its source. (The Roundabout produced the straight version in 2004, with Alec Baldwin and Anne Heche.) The 1934 film Twentieth Century is often labeled a romantic comedy, but really it’s a hard-boiled comedy like Hecht and MacArthur’s The Front Page and Kaufman and Hart’s Once in a Lifetime; the only love affair the two protagonists, down-on-his-luck showman Oscar Jaffe and his ex-wife and one-time star Lily Garland, now a movie celebrity, conduct is with themselves. Twentieth Century is perhaps the most extravagant and hilarious display of narcissism in the history of movie comedy, and the incandescent spectacle of John Barrymore and Carole Lombard as the dueling egotists – who suggest utterly heartless counterparts to the hero and heroine of Kiss Me, Kate – hasn’t dimmed in the intervening eight decades. The picture is called Twentieth Century because almost all of it takes place on the gleaming art deco train, a landmark of its era, that carries Oscar and Lily from Chicago to New York. Oscar and his hard-drinking sycophants, his press agent (Roscoe Karns) and business manager (Walter Connolly), have thirty-six hours in which to save their wobbly producing enterprise, battered by one expensive, misbegotten flop after another, by convincing Lily, who walked out on Oscar long ago, to sign on for a new show with him.

The musical hasn’t been produced on Broadway since its original 1978 run, when it was directed by Harold Prince and starred John Cullum and Madeline Kahn. (Kahn’s performance on the cast album is remarkable, but she dropped out after only nine weeks and was replaced by Judy Kaye.) The show ran for a year and a half and toured the country, yet despite its success and despite the first-rate book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green (among their best work) and the robust, tuneful and varied Cy Coleman music (his best score except for City of Angels), it’s never enjoyed the reputation it deserves. The Roundabout production, directed by Scott Ellis and choreographed by Warren Carlyle, showcases what’s so special about the musical. The David Rockwell set – a beauty – and Donald Holder’s glistening lighting design even manage to replicate, more or less, the complicated stagecraft of the 1978 version (with its much touted Robin Wagner setting), which includes not only a series of cross-sections of the train but, at a climactic moment (the mid-second-act ensemble number “She’s a Nut”), turns it around so that it travels toward the audience with the “nut,” a devout Baptist named Letitia Peabody Primrose who’s been masquerading as a millionaire philanthropist, implausibly but uproariously strapped to its front.