Shaw Musicals 2013: Guys and Dolls & The Light in the Piazza

Everyone knows that Guys and Dolls is a great American musical, but more often than not productions of it are disappointing – cartoonishly overstated, terminally cute, or generally misguided (which is the word I’d use to describe Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1955 movie version). The 1992 Broadway revival was a popular and critical hit, but I didn’t derive much pleasure from it: the cast, headed by Nathan Lane and Faith Prince, seemed to be working way too hard, the staging was uninventive, and the tempo of Frank Loesser’s songs was slowed down, as if on the assumption that the audience couldn’t otherwise keep up with the witty lyrics. Oddly, amateur mountings of the show often locate its vaudevillian spirit and its robust style – phantasmagorical (the Damon Runyonland milieu) but with a strong underpinning of romantic feeling – better than professional ones, which tend to substitute slickness for charm. But Tadeusz Bradecki’s production at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, is expertly staged and choreographed (by Parker Esse) and vastly entertaining. It gets the balance right: it’s raffish without pandering, open-hearted but not sentimental.

The show takes a little while to kick in. “Runyonland,” the instrumental ensemble number that Loesser supplied in place of an overture, begins intriguingly with silhouettes behind the scrim, but when that scrim flies up to reveal Peter Hartwell’s set, a semi-abstract black-and-white cityscape of midtown Manhattan, your heart sinks – not because it’s monochromatic (Sue LePage’s colorful costumes play vibrantly against it) but because it’s ugly. And, as usual, the company isn’t large enough to fill the huge Festival stage, so the number doesn’t do what it was written to do, set the mood and style of Runyon’s bustling, eccentric world of gamblers and minor-league show-biz pros and street hustlers (as adapted by book writers Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows) – even with Shaw veteran Guy Bannerman exiting as a gesticulating blind man and then reappearing a moment later as a pretzel vendor. In the first dialogue exchange, among the goofball gamblers Nicely-Nicely Johnson (Thom Allison) and Benny Southstreet (Billy Lake) and the vigilant cop Lieutenant Brannigan (Bannerman again), the actors seem to have been directed to act like Loony Tunes figures.

Musicals Round-up Part I: Niagara-on-the-Lake and London

Kristi Frank and Michael Therriault in the Shaw Festival production of Me and My Girl. (Photo: David Cooper)

This article contains reviews of Me and My Girl (Shaw Festival), Dreamgirls (West End), and On the Town (Regent’s Park).

Michael Therriault is so thoroughly winning and energetic in Me and My Girl at the Shaw Festival that you feel he could carry the production on his back if he had to. The musical is built as a vehicle for the performer who plays Bill Snibson, the Lambeth Cockney who discovers he has inherited an earl’s title and is expected to relocate to Mayfair, and the diminutive Therriault, with his pop-eyed charm and apparently elastic body, claims squatter’s rights to every scene he’s in. Therriault is a well-known Canadian musical-theatre actor (he played Gollum in the musical of Lord of the Rings both in Toronto and in the West End), but the only time I’d seen him before this summer was in Studio 180’s production (in Toronto) of Parade, as the Jewish factory owner Leo Frank, framed for the rape and murder of one of his employees in pre-World War One Atlanta. He was superb, but the role was so downbeat that I didn’t immediately make the connection to the song-and-dance man who plays the lovable, insouciant Bill. Therriault’s peculiar gift is for balancing charisma with modesty – like Dick Van Dyke, though his musical-comedy gifts are more extensive than Van Dyke’s and he’s more believable as a Cockney than Van Dyke was in Mary Poppins.

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.

Musicals at Shaw and Stratford: Funny Girl and Guys and Dolls

Sara Farb as Fanny Brice (understudied by Jade Repetta at the performance our critic attended) in Funny Girl. (Photo: David Cooper.)

Since Funny Girl made Barbra Streisand a Broadway star and the 1968 William Wyler movie version enshrined what may be the greatest musical-comedy performance ever recorded, it took more than half a century for the show to generate a major revival. The one-two punch of Streisand’s stage and film triumphs created the impression that the musical was mostly a decorative shell constructed around her, despite the superb score by Jule Styne and Bob Merrill and what the threadbare musical bios of the last couple of decades – Jersey Boys, Beautiful and many others – now reveal by contrast to be a creditable book by Isobel Lennart. Funny Girl was finally revived at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London in 2015 with Sheridan Smith in the role of the Ziegfeld Follies singer-comic Fanny Brice; Smith was marvelous, but when the show transferred to the West End, her health problems delayed her appearance, and for the first half of the run she was replaced by her understudy, Natasha Barnes, who received reviews that can only be called generous. (I saw both actresses; Smith’s performance was filmed in 2018 and can be seen on BroadwayHD.) And Smith was the only reason to see it: Michael Mayer’s production, with a revised book by Harvey Fierstein, was clumsy and looked seedy. Those qualities were very much in evidence when the revival opened on Broadway four years ago, with an apparently disastrous leading performance by Beanie Feldstein, who left the run early and was replaced by Lea Michele. (It was Michele I reviewed.)

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.

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.

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.

Sweet Charity: Manhattan Waif

Julie Martell (centre) with the cast of Sweet Charity, at Niagara-on-the-Lake's Shaw Festival. (Photo by David Cooper)

The 1966 musical Sweet Charity is built around a debased modern version of a fairy-tale heroine, an eternally optimistic New York taxi dancer who falls for men who invariably let her down. The book, which Neil Simon based on the great Fellini movie Nights of Cabiria, employs the Manhattan setting to localize Charity’s story, just as Fellini made use of Rome; one episode, where Charity, in the right place at the right time, finds herself on an improbable date with a dishy Italian superstar who’s just quarreled with his paramour, is straight out of the film. But Simon and the songwriters, Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields, and the director-choreographer, Bob Fosse – who conceived the project as a vehicle for his frequent muse and one-time wife Gwen Verdon, a magnificent show dancer with an endearing cracked voice full of burgundy bubbles – softened the narrative. Cabiria (played, unforgettably, by Fellini’s wife, Giulietta Masina), is a hooker who pictures herself living out the last act of a romance; the first man who treats her like a lady, Oscar (François Périer), turns out to be a thief who swindles her out of her life savings. (One of Fellini’s coups is the way he uses a pair of props, a cigarette and a pair of shades, to suggest a sinister side to Oscar moments before Cabiria intuits his true intentions.) In the musical, Oscar is a timid, earnest fellow Charity connects with when they’re trapped in an elevator together; their courtship takes them all over the city, including a hippie church and Coney Island).

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.