Mixed Blessings: Stratford Festival's Kiss Me, Kate & The Tempest

The Stratford Shakespeare Festival’s current productions of Cole Porter’s musical Kiss Me, Kate and William Shakespeare’s drama The Tempest highlight the limitations of what can be done with sub-standard material. While the two plays are impeccably, even superbly, directed and acted, they’re still not representative of their creators’ best work.

Cole Porter, Late and Early

Paul Anthony Stewart and Elizabeth Stanley in Kiss Me, Kate at Barrington Stage (Photo by Kevin Sprague)

Any short list of great American musicals would have to include Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate, with its witty, ingenious book by Bella and Samuel Spewack. The Spewacks turn The Taming of the Shrew into a backstage meta-musical about a musical-comedy version of Shakespeare’s comedy starring a once-married pair of gigantic egos whose behavior around each other suggests a modern variant on Petruchio and Katherine’s. You can’t do much to bury the misogyny in Shakespeare’s comedy – unless, like the great English company Propeller, you make it the critical focus of the show, i.e., deconstruct it – but Kiss Me, Kate gets away from it by making the two main characters, Fred Graham (who is also directing the musical within the musical) and his leading lady Lilli Vanessi, equally foolish and equally culpable. They hark back to the protagonists of Twentieth Century (and the musical based on it, On the Twentieth Century), played memorably in the sensationally funny 1934 Howard Hawks movie by John Barrymore and Carole Lombard, and those of the lesser known but also funny 1937 comedy It’s Love I’m After (played by Leslie Howard and Bette Davis).

Classic Post-War American Musicals: South Pacific and Kiss Me, Kate

Joan Almedilla singing "Bali H'ai" to Cameron Loyal and the sailors in South Pacific.

Of the trio of Rodgers and Hammerstein mega-hits from the 1940s, South Pacific (1949) gets the fewest productions. Even Carousel, with its rigorous vocal demands and its onstage carousel, is revived more often. (Oklahoma! seems to show up somewhere every season.) South Pacific has a big, mostly male cast and the machinations of the plot, adapted from stories in James Michener’s World War II novel Tales of the South Pacific, are complicated, especially in the second act, when the two major male characters, a French planter named Émile de Becque and Navy Lieutenant Joe Cable, are carrying on a covert military operation on one of the smaller islands. But it’s the most interesting of the three shows because of its theme and because the Arksansas-born protagonist, Navy Nurse Nellie Forbush, is the most unusual heroine in any musical of its era. Though R&H wrote two of their most relentlessly upbeat songs for her, “A Cockeyed Optimist” and “I’m in Love with a Wonderful Guy,” Hammerstein and Joshua Logan, who co-wrote the book, expose the darker side of her character. She falls in love with de Becque but runs away from him when she discovers that he fathered two children with his late Polynesian mistress. Her story is echoed by Cable’s:  he tumbles for a young islander named Liat but realizes that he could never bring a woman of color home to his family in Philadelphia.

The new production of South Pacific at the Goodspeed Opera House doesn’t balance these challenging elements successfully. It’s not very appealing to look at – the staging is static except when the director, Chay Yew, moves the actors around in parallel lines, and the set by veteran Alexander Dodge is surprisingly scrappy. (The choreography by Parker Esse is better, and Amith Chandrashaker’s lighting design is better still.) And though the voices are good, the acting mostly isn’t. Rodgers and Hammerstein strove toward a greater realism in musical theatre, and though the dialogue doesn’t exactly soar, it tries hard to be gritty rather than synthetic. But here the chorus of Seabees is broad and caricatured and the musical performances are big and self-conscious. The exception is Joan Almedilla as Bloody Mary, Liat’s mother: though Almedilla has a beautiful instrument, she sings the lustrous “Bali H’ai” and even the icky “Happy Talk” to privilege acting values over vocal showiness. The night I saw the show the understudies, Hannah Jewel Kohn and Eric Briarley, were covering Nellie and Émile, and both sang well; I don’t know if the usual leads, Danielle Wade and Omar Lopez-Cepero, have been any more successful in bringing this relationship to life. I would have directed Kevin Quillon as Luther Billis, the clownish sailor who turns out to be an unexpectedly hero, to understate a little more, but he’s fun to watch. The big problem is the young couple, Cable (Cameron Loyal) and Liat (Alex Humphreys):  he’s a cardboard cut-out with a nice voice and she doesn’t even begin to suggest a character.

Broadway to the Small Screen: Early TV Musicals

Keith Andes and Barbara Cook in Bloomer Girl (1956)

In the heyday of live TV (the fifties), weekly and monthly series regularly offered abridged versions of plays, and between 1954 and 1956 one show, Max Liebman Spectaculars (a.k.a. Max Liebman Presents), which aired every fourth Sunday evening, produced ninety-minute adaptations of Broadway musicals as well as variety showcases and a handful of original musicals. (Liebman was better known for producing the inspired Sid Caesar-Imogene Coca sketch comedy, Your Show of Shows, one of the high-water marks of early television.) Surprisingly NBC preserved these musicals on kinescope, and several have surfaced on DVDs from Video Artists International, which has added to its repertory a couple of the early Hallmark Hall of Fame musicals and one from Producer’s Showcase. The result is a treasure trove for musical-theatre aficionados like me – especially since some of these shows have never been picked up by Hollywood (Bloomer Girl, A Connecticut Yankee and Dearest Enemy) and others were seriously altered – plots rewritten, scores decimated – in the movie versions. One Touch of Venus, for instance, reached the big screen with only a handful of the delightful Kurt Weill-Ogden Nash tunes intact; the Victor Herbert operetta Naughty Marietta and the Oscar Strauss import The Chocolate Soldier were retooled as Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy vehicles. (You wouldn’t know from the movie of The Chocolate Soldier that it was originally a musicalization – OK, a bowdlerization – of Shaw’s satirical romantic comedy Arms and the Man.) There is a crummy movie musical called A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court starring Bing Crosby, but the longer title, which replicates the name of the Mark Twain comic novel, alerts owl-eyed movie buffs that it isn’t based on the hit show by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, which was produced on Broadway in 1927 and revived in 1943, at the very end of their collaboration.

From the Musical Theatre Canon: The Music Man, Kiss Me, Kate and Lady in the Dark

Ellie Fishman and Edward Watts in The Music Man. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski)

Meredith Willson’s The Music Man became a classic as soon as it opened on Broadway in 1957, with Robert Preston in the role of “Professor” Harold Hill, the scamming salesman who transforms a pre-World War I Iowa town – and himself – in the course of persuading the locals to purchase instruments and uniforms for a children’s band. Willson, who wrote book, music and lyrics, did as much to develop the archetype of the American snake-oil salesman as Eugene O’Neill had in The Iceman Cometh, though his version was sweeter and came with a bona fide happy ending. (Preston recreated his career performance in the 1962 movie version.) Revivals of the show are generally good news: Susan Stroman’s opened on Broadway in 2000 and ran for two years, and it was so glorious that I saw it twice, once with Craig Bierko playing Hill and once with Robert Sean Leonard, who was even better than Bierko. (Eric McCormack played the role between Bierko and Leonard.) I’m looking forward to seeing Hugh Jackman in the part next season.

In the meantime there’s an exuberant new production at the Goodspeed Opera House, directed by Jenn Thompson and choreographed by Patricia Wilcox, with Goodspeed veteran Michael O’Flaherty doing his usual yeoman service as musical director. The Music Man is the ideal show for Goodspeed – big-boned, spirited, infectious, with a lot of wonderful ensemble numbers that show off the way imaginative staging can make a limited space feel like it’s being expanded from the inside. The choreographic high points of this production are “Marian the Librarian” in act one and “Shipoopi” at the outset of act two. But even the staging of the barbershop quartet numbers, especially “Lida Rose,” counterpointed by “Will I Ever Tell You?,” the most tuneful ballad Willson wrote for Marian (Ellie Fishman) and introduced by the four men (Branch Woodman, C. Mingo Long, Jeff Gurner and Kent Overshown) strolling down the theatre aisle, is tremendously satisfying. The show moves from scene to scene in a graceful arc aided by the scenic designer Paul Tate dePoo III, whose inventions compensate for his single mistake, an unfortunate (and anachronistic) painted backdrop more or less in the mold of the American regionalist Thomas Hart Benton.

Musicals in Revival: Anything Goes & How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

Except for Kiss Me, Kate, no Cole Porter show has been revived as often as Anything Goes, the 1934 shipboard musical he wrote with P.G. Wodehouse, Guy Bolton, Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. Wodehouse and Bolton penned the original script, about a shipwreck; when the cruise ship the S.S. Morro Castle went down in a fire weeks before rehearsals were scheduled to start, marking the worst maritime disaster of the decade. Lindsay, who was also directing, and Crouse quickly refashioned the plot as a romantic farce about a young man who stows away on a ship to stop one of its passengers, the girl he loves, from marrying the man her mother has picked for her and through the device of a purloined passport ends up being mistaken for a celebrated gangster.

The book of the musical as it was finally produced is peerlessly silly, though every time it’s mounted afresh on Broadway someone is hired to tinker with it: the version that is currently intoxicating Manhattan audiences carries credits to Crouse’s son Timothy and Stephen Sondheim’s sometime collaborator John Weidman. Even the Porter score gets treated as a work in progress. All productions include “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “You’re the Top,” “Blow, Gabriel, Blow,” “All Through the Night” and the title tune, and since the sixties “It’s De-Lovely” from Red, Hot and Blue and “Friendship” from Du Barry Was a Lady are common bonuses. The 2011 edition adds “Easy to Love” (which Porter wrote for the film Born to Dance) and “Goodbye, Little Dream, Goodbye” (from an obscure British play called O Mistress Mine) while restoring the often excised “There’ll Always Be a Lady Fair,” “The Gypsy in Me” and “Buddie, Beware.”

Purists may whine, but it doesn’t seem to make much difference what tiny omissions and additions script doctors make to Anything Goes or how the Porter repertoire gets mined, as long as the shape of the original is retained and the mainstays of the score don’t go missing. After all, it’s not Fiddler on the Roof. The Porter songbook is rich in variety but the adjectives we might apply to one of his songs – effervescent, brittle, madcap, flamboyantly witty – would fit any of the others, and only Kiss Me, Kate (indisputably his finest score) is so intricately tied to a dramatic context that its songs can’t be slipped with impunity into other shows. That said, I think that the creative team behind the newest revival, headed by director-choreographer Kathleen Marshall and music supervisor-arranger Rob Fisher, has assembled the most pleasing combination of originals and interpolations yet. And it’s hard to imagine them being performed more delightfully.

Playing the Crowd: Fun Home and Kiss Me, Kate

Cast members of Fun Home, at the Public Theatre. (Photo: Sara Krulwich)

Fun Home, the musical based on the memoir Alison Bechdel wrote in the form of a graphic novel, sold out during several runs at the Public Theatre and has recently opened to great acclaim on Broadway; it’s been showered with Tony nominations and a national tour is on the books. The audience I saw it with cheered every song – the confessional numbers, the self-actualization numbers, the mournful yet rousing protests against the repressed, homophobic society that dooms the narrator/protagonist Alison’s father to life as a closeted gay man, (mostly) remote from his children, and eventually to suicide. In the book Alison doesn’t know for sure whether her dad, Bruce, deliberately stepped in front of a truck just three months after she came out to her parents or if it was an accident. Lisa Kron, the play’s librettist, eliminates the ambiguity; her version of the material gets rid of all the mystery around the character, though perhaps, with a flesh-and-blood actor in the role, his motivations are at any rate less likely to stay hidden. Bechdel’s book is brainy and quirky, but I didn’t respond to it with the enthusiasm many other people felt; I found it a cool, unemotional reading experience. Kron strengthens the dramatic arc – Alison’s sexual and artistic coming of age and her coming to terms with her father’s elusiveness and the overlap in their desires and their personalities – and warms up the story. It’s practically a textbook example of how to put together a successful twenty-first-century musical play, with a sympathetic, forthright lesbian, an older-generation gay dad, a square peg who’s struggled all his life to fit into a round hole, and his put-upon wife, who’s spent all the years of their marriage trying to make him happy but whom he’s closed out. Alison, the narrator, who’s moving into middle age and trying to make sense of her mixed-up childhood – lived in a small Pennsylvania town where her father doubled as funeral home director and high-school English teacher – and her cataclysmic college years, is the ideal heroine for a contemporary liberal audience, while Bruce’s is the perfect symbolic tragedy for an age that wants to embrace sexual diversity and pummel prejudice against a homosexual lifestyle out of existence. You can’t object to the play’s values – but “values” aren’t a theatrical virtue. You might be put off, as I was, by the musical’s triteness and banality, and by the way it pushes the audience’s buttons.

Love As An Open Argument: Remembering Kate McGarrigle

When I heard the news yesterday about the death of Kate McGarrigle from cancer, it really cut to the quick. “It’s like getting kicked in the gut, you know,” Sylvia Tyson remarked upon hearing the news. I know what she meant. Over the years, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, the folk singing siblings from Quebec, had written and performed a distinct body of beautiful songs that had the capacity to share wounds and open sores that their soaring voices could quickly heal. Their temperaments were radically different – Anna the hopeful romantic; Kate the skeptic – but the blending of their differences often created a harmony unique to popular song. Calling the McGarrigle sisters’ material “tart and tuneful,” J.D. Considine in Rolling Stone said their work married “the resonance of folk to the emotional immediacy of everyday life.” What Kate and Anna McGarrigle did was give the genre a different lease on everyday life. They wrote personal songs without resorting to solipsism. They wrote romantic songs without bending to sentimentality. They could be funny and sarcastic without being smug.

Stroman’s Spree: Bullets Over Broadway

Heléne Yorke, Zach Braff and Lenny Wolpe in the musical Bullets Over Broadway (Photo by Sara Krulwich)

Bullets Over Broadway is such a lark that its tepid reviews and poor showing in the Tony nominations feel like a bad joke. The musical isn’t without its flaws. But I’m not sure what the people who put it together – Woody Allen, who adapted the screenplay he and Douglas McGrath had written for the 1994 movie; Susan Stroman, the director-choreographer; designers Santo Loquasto (sets), William Ivey Long (costumes) and Donald Holder (lighting); and Glen Kelly, who adapted the 1920s tunes – could have done to make it much more entertaining.

Call Me Madam: Turn Up the Brio

Jason Gotay and Carmen Cusack in Call Me Madam. (Photo: Stephanie Berger)

When Irving Berlin’s musicals entered the realm of political comedy, he and his collaborators tended to keep the mood light; Face the Music (1932), Louisiana Purchase (1940) and Call Me Madam (1950) are more on the order of spoofs than satires. All three boast delightful scores, so it isn’t surprising that Encores! has produced all three – and, fortunately for us, released cast recordings of them. Its current season began the weekend before last with a revival of its 1995 revival of Call Me Madam, marking only the second time the series has remounted a show. Typically, Encores! has met the musical and choreographic demands of the material. Under the expert musical direction of Rob Berman, a veteran of more than thirty of these productions, the orchestra plays exuberantly and the vocal performances are generally as satisfying as comfort food prepared with a loving hand. That’s equally true of the dance numbers, staged adroitly by Denis Jones, who makes the reduced performing space of the City Center stage (which the cast has to share with the musicians) feel like the expanse space of a large Broadway house. Yet the show, particularly in the first act, is a little lackluster.

Tribute to David: John Corcelli

David Churchill (1959-2013)

Given the sad passing of our friend and colleague David Churchill, we've decided to honour him in a manner totally fitting to our memory of him. Since he was such a strong advocate of Critics at Large from the beginning, he was quick to initiate ideas. One thing he was quite fond of were omnibus projects like the Remembering 9/11 collection (which led to our first e-book) and the Titanic 100th Anniversary commemoration. Therefore, we felt strongly that we could best salute our late columnist by creating an Omnibus of David. From April 16 until April 24, we plan to publish – daily – the best of David Churchill as chosen by our writers.

Today's piece is from John Corcelli.

– The Editors at Critics at Large.

“One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.”
– B. Marley

I met David around 1987 at radio station CJRT-FM (Toronto) through Kevin Courrier who introduced me to his new broadcast partner for movie reviews. We hit it off immediately and I always looked forward to seeing him every week when he came into the studio.

David was (and remains for me) an enthusiastic lover of the arts and in particular music. When I was asked to join Critics At Large, that was co-founded by David, I quickly took the music portfolio with the understanding that I could also write about theatre and the occasional book if it struck my fancy. (Although all of us agreed that we could write about music if we contacted each other to avoid duplication.) Music is my religion and I jumped at the chance to write about it.

In 2011, I had planned to write about Kate Bush's album 50 Words for Snow (EMI), her second release of that year. David contacted me before it came out expressing a keen interest in reviewing it, so once a copy came into my possession, I happily sent it to him, knowing he'd probably write a better review than I.

What follows is David's over-the-top enthusiasm for the album and the artist, Kate Bush. Unlike me, David never failed to get personal with his comments. I would never call any record a "masterpiece" fearing an unauthorized commercial quotation appearing in an ad. My approach is to appreciate the work from afar. Not David. His unbridled support for 50 Words for Snow as a fan is nicely balanced in his review as he maintains his distance just enough to offer his insight into the album and its creator.

– John Corcelli is a music critic, broadcast/producer, musician and member of the Festival Winds Orchestra.

Thriller: Donna Murphy on the Musical Stage

Donna Murphy in LoveMusik in 2007

We seem to be living in a golden age of musical-theatre women. The one whose name is most often on everyone’s lips is Kelli O’Hara, with her simon-pure soprano embroidered by often startlingly impassioned phrasing, whether the character she’s playing is fragile (The Light in the Piazza) or essentially conventional (South Pacific). Victoria Clark has a wide emotional range and suggests a complex response to the world deriving from accumulated experience; as O’Hara’s mother in Piazza, perhaps the best musical-theatre role ever written for a middle-aged actress, she managed to balance romantic skepticism (based on her own disappointing marriage) and optimism (based on an awakening awareness of the romantic possibilities for her damaged daughter). On the other end of the scale of middle-aged performers, Patti LuPone is a diva with grit in place of glamour, a gleaming sense of irony and an unerring instinct for how to make a song dramatic, whether in the old-fashioned Broadway manner (Gypsy) or in the Brechtian style (Sweeney Todd). Marin Mazzie, who’s been around since Ragtime and the marvelous Kathleen Marshall production of Kiss Me, Kate, has a warm soprano and an expansive presence that effortlessly fills a Broadway house. Sutton Foster has a more streamlined personality – she’s colder but more dazzling, and the best lead dancer around, as she demonstrated most recently in Marshall’s Anything Goes. Celia Keenan-Bolger is diminutive but she has a powerful core of feeling; she’s mostly attracted notice in comic roles (recently Peter and the Starcatcher), but she can be amazing in dramatic ones that call for arias of longing – Merrily We Roll Along, the Encores! revival of that Marc Blitzstein rarity Juno. Laura Benanti has a frisky, inventive wit: her show-stopping “Model Behavior” in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is the funniest musical performance I can remember seeing on a stage since Angela Lansbury introduced “The Worst Pies in London” in the original cast of Sweeney Todd nearly three and a half decades ago. Among the clowns, Faith Prince seems to have been largely forgotten – she’s become a cabaret performer – but when she starred in a revival of Bells Are Ringing on Broadway in 2001, she proved to be almost a match for the original star, the late Judy Holliday, plus she made the lilting Jule Styne melodies sound sweeter than they ever had before. Kristin Chenoweth can be hilarious, but vocally there’s almost nothing she can’t pull off (her album, Let Yourself Go, is a virtuoso accomplishment), and she was heartbreaking in the revival of the Bacharach-David Promises, Promises a couple of seasons ago. And any era that produces Audra McDonald, owner of the most versatile and most expressive dramatic singing voice since Barbra Streisand, would need to be considered a golden age by definition.

I’d be hard put to pick a favorite, but no one thrills me more on stage than Donna Murphy. Movie buffs who recognize her name from the tiny parts she’s essayed in blockbusters like Spider-Man 2 and The Bourne Legacy have no idea what she’s like on stage, where she’s always a headliner. I first saw her in a production of Pal Joey at Boston’s Huntington Theatre in 1992, as Vera, the brittle, knowing older woman who keeps the ambitious womanizer Joey, but throws him out on his ass when he proves to be more trouble than she figures he’s worth. Vera is the high-comic element in the low-down, hard-boiled John O’Hara/Rodgers and Hart material, and Murphy’s confidence in the role was almost alarming; you wondered where she could have acquired it before she’d even turned thirty-five. Two years later she had her first Broadway lead, in Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Passion. Since then she’s been seen as Anna in The King and I (my impatience with Rodgers and Hammerstein kept me away from that one); as Ruth in Wonderful Town (first at Encores! and then in a full-scale Broadway expansion, both directed by Kathleen Marshall); as Lotte Lenya in Lovemusik; with Victoria Clark in Follies; in a misbegotten and short-lived original piece called The People in the Picture; and as the Witch in Into the Woods, in Central Park last summer. She was a sensationally effective as Phyllis in Follies – sardonic yet wistful, giving that self-consciously clever poison-pen letter “Could I Leave You” much more a kick than it deserved, and exuberantly leggy, like a sleek version of Charlotte Greenwood, in “The Story of Lucy and Jessie.” But her finest work has been in Passion, Wonderful Town and Lovemusik.

Four Decades of the American Musical

Oklahoma! on Broadway in the 1940s.

Half a century ago The Modern Library published Six Plays by Rodgers & Hammerstein and the complete libretti of Gilbert & Sullivan operettas; when I was in grade school, those two books were the earliest purchases I made for my own library of musical-theatre scripts. I recalled my excitement at having these musicals at my fingertips when I received my copy of The Library of America’s new two-volume collection American Musicals.  It’s expertly edited by Laurence Maslon (who was responsible for Kaufman and Co.: Broadway Comedies, their aggregate of George S. Kaufman collaborations) and handsomely packaged, with gorgeous production photos – most of which I’ve never seen before – and copies of show posters and sheet music. Each of the volumes contains the books and lyrics of eight musicals, arranged chronologically and divided roughly into decades, 1927-1949 and 1950-1969.

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.

Cooperstown Culture (Part One): The Glimmerglass Opera Company production of Kurt Weill's Lost in the Stars

The Cooperstown Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum

We are pleased to welcome a new critic, Nick Coccoma, to our group.

Thomas Wolfe wrote that you can never go home, and there’s a lot of truth in that. Once you’ve grown, you can’t experience home the way you did in youth. But one of the more pleasant surprises in life comes from experiencing your home in new ways, often through the eyes of first-time visitors. This revelation happened to me twice this summer when I returned to my place of origin in Cooperstown, NY – once with friends who had never been and, more recently, on my own. Cooperstown is, of course, famous as the home of baseball, the location of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. If baseball constitutes America’s de facto religion, Cooperstown is its Mecca. Each summer, some 300,000 zealots descend on this sleepy village of two-thousand residents to pay homage to their favorite ballplayers, immortalized on gold-leafed plaques in an atrium that’s got the unsettling feel of a shrine. I’m a baseball fan, but more in spite of growing up in Cooperstown than because of it. To those who live there, the baseball craze makes for an annoying sideshow suffered in what is just an ordinary place to work and raise a family.

And yet Cooperstown is special, but, as many others have come to learn, not just or even mostly because of baseball. Once an important meeting place and residence for the native Iroquois tribes, this region of central New York played an important frontier role in colonial and post-Revolutionary America. The scion of the town’s founder, James Fenimore Cooper, became America’s first novelist and made the Cooperstown area setting to many of his Leatherstocking Tales, of which The Last of the Mohicans is the most famous. In the 19th century, the county grew into the nation’s leader in hop production. It boasts great natural beauty, with the village’s quaint streets sitting at the southern shore of the nine-mile Otsego Lake, the source of the Susquehanna River. The longest river on the east coast, the Susquehanna contributes the largest amount of fresh water to the Chesapeake Bay of any single source.

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.

My Best Friend’s Wedding and Stereophonic: Too Much Music and Not Enough

Matt Doyle and Krystal Joy Brown in My Best Friend's Wedding. (Photo: Nile Scott Studios)

The notion of a jukebox stage musical based on the 1997 romantic comedy My Best Friend’s Wedding, featuring the songs of Burt Bacharach and Hal David and directed and choreographed by Kathleen Marshall (who has helmed ace Broadway revivals of Kiss Me, Kate, Wonderful Town and Anything Goes), sounded promising. (The movie uses Bacharach-David tunes in key moments.) But the show, which is premiering at Ogunquit Playhouse in Maine, is both synthetic and clunky. The movie, written by Ron Bass and directed by P.J. Hogan, is an unconventional romantic comedy in which the heroine, Julianne, a magazine food critic, plays every dirty trick she can think of to stop her best friend and one-time lover Michael from walking down the aisle with Kimmy, the woman he’s fallen head over heels in love with, but her schemes keep backfiring. It’s a tricky proposition, because we fall in love with Kimmy too, yet Julianne is the heroine and the movie won’t work if we end up disliking her. The movie pulls it off because Julia Roberts, in a wonderful comic-neurotic performance, plays Julianne.

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.

Singing Drunks: Days of Wine and Roses

Brian d'Arcy James and Kelli O'Hara in Days of Wine and Roses. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

At first Days of Wine and Roses, written by JP Miller, was a ninety-minute drama on Playhouse 90 in 1958, at the height of the era of live TV drama, starring Cliff Robertson as a corporate drunk and Piper Laurie as the woman he falls in love with and turns into a fellow alcoholic. The tragedy is that while he finally gives up the bottle and gets his life together, she can’t stop – she winds up choosing booze over both him and their little girl. At this point not many viewers remember the original, which is distinguished by Laurie’s complexly delicate performance. (You can watch it on Prime.) But the 1962 movie, directed by Blake Edwards, is justly famous, for the performances of Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick as the couple, Joe and Kirsten Clay, and Charles Bickford, repeating his role as Kirsten’s rough-hewn Swedish papa, is quite fine. The narrative is a conventional addict story but its unadorned quality lends it a certain authenticity, and Lemmon isn’t as showy as he is in other dramatic roles; he may be responding to Remick, an underappreciated actress whose modesty is one of her virtues.

In the new stage musical, adapted by Craig Lucas with music and lyrics by Adam Guettel, which just closed on Broadway (it premiered at the Atlantic Stage Company last spring), Brian d’Arcy James and Kelli O’Hara played the sodden Clays, and it’s hard to imagine two actor-singers who could have been more effective in the parts. James gets Joe’s hail-fellow-well-met affability but with an understated desperation that’s there from the opening party scene, where, as head of public relations at the agency where he and Kirsten both work, he’s expected to supply not just liquor but also women for clients; there’s a subtle suggestion that he imbibes not just to have fun but so he doesn’t have to think too much about the seedier side of his job. Drinking loosens him up but when, in the early days after their daughter Lila (Tabitha Lawing) is born, Kirsten eases off and he feels he’s lost his playmate, it can also make him angry. He explodes in the scene – famous in Lemmon’s version in the film – where, when he’s convinced her to cheat after a domestic near-disaster has kept them sober for a couple of months, he can’t locate a bottle he’s hidden in her father’s greenhouse. Partly because as an actor James has a sweetness and gentleness, his fury in this sequence, which takes in the boss who fired him for drink-fueled irresponsibility, is surprising and upsetting.

Making a Killing in Hollywood: HBO's Barry

Bill Hader as the title character in HBO's Barry. (Photo: HBO)

The star-struck gangster isn’t exactly a new trope – think Cole Porter’s classic Kiss Me Kate or Barry Sonnenfeld’s Get Shorty – but there’s still something different about HBO’s new dark comedy Barry, which follows the title character (played by Bill Hader) as he becomes obsessed with dreams of stardom while trying to shed his former identity as a ruthlessly effective hit man. Perhaps that’s because it’s one of the first attempts (that I can think of, at any rate) to translate this idea to the medium of television.