Some Musicals from the Archives

SOUTH PACIFIC

Fichandler Stage, Arena Stage

9 & 12 January 2003

On New Year’s Day evening [2003], my mother and I went to Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage to see South Pacific.  Now, I can’t be very critical about those classic musicals—I love them too much from my childhood.  They’re like theatrical comfort food to me—I hardly see any faults.  (Actually, I don’t think I’d ever seen South Pacific on stage before, believe it or not.  I have the original-cast album—courtesy of my dad—and I’ve seen the 1958 movie, but never the stage show.  There was also a TV version—excerpts, I think, back in the ’50s or ’60s—black-and-white, I recall—with Ezio Pinza (Emile De Becque) and Mary Martin (Nellie Forbush)—but that was a long time ago.)  This production was staged in the Fichandler, which is the arena stage of . . . well, the Arena Stage.  (The Kreeger’s a proscenium.) 

I found some quibbles with Molly Smith’s staging of some scenes in order to accommodate a four-sided audience—movements that were justified only to get the actors to face a new part of the house—but other than that, I loved it.  The Nellie (Kate Baldwin) wasn’t quite cute enough to make me believe that everyone would fall in love with her—she just had thick legs and they wear a lot of shorts and short skirts in South Pacific—but she was a good enough actress and singer to make everything else work.  (Of course, no one can live up to Mary Martin—but that’s not Baldwin’s fault.)  My mother and one of her friends thought that the actor singing Emile (Richard White) had trouble in the high notes, but I didn’t find it too noticeable.  (He even sounded a little like John Raitt.  I wonder if Raitt ever did that role?) 

Altogether, it was a more than enjoyable show.  (Funny side note:  At the beginning of the show, when the staff makes the announcement about photographs and tapes, cell phones and beepers, and so on, the Arena added this:  “No matter how hard you find it to resist, please refrain from singing along with the musical numbers.”  I gather they had trouble with that kind of thing in the past.)

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CAMELOT

Fichandler Stage, Arena Stage

13 January 2004

I saw Arena’s revival of Camelot on New Year’s Eve [2003-04].  As I’ve said before, I have little criticality when it comes to those old musicals, and this production was more than creditable overall.  (There were even some neat casting/costuming things.)  But I had the misfortune of having seen the real, true original—with Julie Andrews and Richard Burton, et al.—and nothing can ever really compare to that no matter who does it.  Especially since I was still a kid—that impression of the big, Broadway show, with all those stars and that story (I had read Once and Future King), is absolutely indelible.  I can’t hear those songs without hearing the original voices. 

(I’m afraid I have the same response to My Fair Lady, which I also saw with the biggies still intact—and I was even younger and more impressionable!  When I was in Oneonta, a bus-and-truck tour of My Fair Lady came through and played at the school theater.  All the theater students went, of course, and I met one of mine in the lobby during intermission.  “It’s really good, isn’t it?” she said.  “Of course, she’s no Audrey Hepburn,” she added.  I chuckled to myself and responded, “Yes, and Hepburn was no Julie Andrews.”  I smiled, both at the student and to myself.  To her, My Fair Lady was an old movie with Audrey Hepburn—using someone else’s voice—and Rex Harrison; to me, it will always be a Broadway experience with Julie Andrews and Harrison.  Perceptions, right?  Harold Hill is always Robert Preston, Maria von Trapp is always Mary Martin—not Andrews, by the way; besides Guinevere and Liza Doolittle, she’s always Cinderella—Fiorello is always Tom Bosley, Quixote is always Richard Kiley, Pseudolus and Hysterium are always Zero Mostel and Jack Gilford, J. Pierrepont Finch is always Robert Morse, Fagin is always Clive Revill, Fanny Brice is always Streisand, Charity is always Gwen Verdon; and, of course, Mrs. Lovett will always be. . .  you know.  Can’t help it.)

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SEÑOR DISCRETION HIMSELF

Fichandler Stage, Arena Stage

11-13 May 2004

I’ll start with the Arena’s world premiere of a Frank Loesser musical: Señor Discretion Himself.  Loesser had written this just before died, but hadn’t finished polishing it and it had never been staged.  It was based on a Budd Schulberg story, but Arena got the Latino writing group Culture Clash (Richard Montoya, Ric Salina, and Herbert Siguenza) to revise the book and dialogue, and some of the songs were shifted around and reassigned.  Even so, it’s not likely to show up here—it’s way too slight a piece to warrant the expense and effort of a New York production, and, despite Peter Mark’s Washington Post’s review, even the songs aren’t all that great.  (I won’t get into the feeling I had that the characters—it’s set in a Mexican village—come close to insulting stereotypes, even though the writers are Latinos.  They’re Chicanos, so I’d have thought they’d have been a little more sensitive.) 

Anyway, the plot’s sort of a Mexican Anyone Can Whistle (which the Post critic also noticed, coincidentally): An impoverished town needs a miracle to draw in tourists and pilgrims, so they engineer one in the person of a the local drunk (Shawn Elliott)—and former town baker—who can parrot things he hears when he’s passed out.  When a loaf of his bread seems to have the image of Mary, he’s hailed as a visionary who has been blessed with divine wisdom (there’s an element of Being There in here, too—which the Post didn’t spot; that’s my observation alone).  The complications are a little more soapy than Anyone: the baker has become a drunk because his business has declined due to the arrival of a big, automated bakery in town.  The owner of the rival bakery (John Bolton) has a thing for young girls, and the old baker has a teenaged daughter (Elena Shaddow) who’s caught the rival’s eye.  He also has an older daughter (Margo Reymundo) who’s less attractive, but who runs the business and looks out for her father.  The young daughter, however, is secretly in love with her tutor (Ivan Hernandez), a young student (whose books provide the “wisdom” her father spouts). 

The whole plot gets underway when the drunken baker comes to the tutor, who is also the town scribe—the baker’s illiterate, don’t you know—to dictate a nasty letter to his rival for his attentions to the older man’s younger daughter.  After he dictates the letter, he passes out, and the tutor rewrites the letter in a gentler tone.  The new bakery owner declares the old drunk a saint because of his forgiveness and generosity, and the drunk parrots a few philosophical phrases he heard while passed out in the tutor’s room.  The loaf with the image is carried in, and the phony miracle is declared.  Of course, the town gets all kinds of attention—tourists, pilgrims, press, clergy—and then the three priests start to fear that their machinations will be revealed when they discover that the tutor still has the drunk’s original letter.  They send him off on a scholarship to study in Mexico City—his dream—and ransack his room to find the letter hidden in one of his books.  When they can’t find it, they burn all his books—but the tutor has taken the letter with him.  He returns because he realizes that he loves the young daughter, who had confessed her love as he was leaving for the train to Mexico City. 

Meanwhile (see, I said it got soapy), the two bakery rivals have become partners and the old man and his daughters have moved into the other man’s mansion.  He thinks he’s waiting for the young daughter to turn 18 (she’s like 15 when the play starts), but the old man has other ideas—he’s planning to marry off his older daughter instead.  The years pass, and just as the young girl turns 18, a cop arrives in town looking for the upstart rival baker.  (This part’s not really funny—though the play glosses over the nastier implications.)  It seems that the younger man’s a fugitive (under a half dozen aliases—he may even be a gringo) as a con-man and an escapee from an asylum where he’d been incarcerated for his penchant for young girls.  (See what I mean.)  The town hoodwinks the cop to keep the man in town (the logic was really twisted, and I don’t remember how they did this anymore), and in the end, he does marry the older daughter (there’s part of the nasty implications no one deals with) and the younger daughter gets the tutor in a double wedding.  The End.  (The whole play is overseen by a sort of conjure-woman/witch, Doreen Montalvo—who looked like she was impersonating Frida Kahlo from one of her self-portraits.  It was a nice idea, but it wasn’t well used theatrically.  She didn’t have enough to do.  The idea of the corrupt priests and the phony miracle juxtaposed with this “old religion” character might have been interesting, but it’s way too dark for this play.)

As you see, the plot isn’t really very good—too contrived and predictable (and there’s way too much of it, too), even without the uglier elements that are swept under the floor covering.  The corrupt priests (Tony Chiroldes, Carlos Lopez, Robert Almodovar)—who are also a little too worldly: they are bored with confession unless someone has a really good sin to confess, like the newcomer’s pedophilia (this was written before the current scandals, remember)—are never caught, much less punished.  The drunk, who doesn’t ever actually reform, marries his daughter to a crook, an escaped mental patient, and a child-molester.  The town protects this guy for their own purposes but no one questions the appropriateness of this action.  It’s a little disturbing—or maybe it’s just me. 

Also, there was something odd about the revised book, too.  I gathered that it was up-dated and modernized—at least ostensibly—but there were some things in it that seemed out of place.  It’s the nature of the slightness of this text that I’ve already forgotten details, but one instance does remain: a reference to the student uprisings in Mexico City.  Those were in ’68, the year before Loesser died, but the play seemed to want to be set today.  There were a couple of other similar things, but I can’t remember what they were now. 

And there’s the fact that the characters all came close to negative stereotypes, as I mentioned before—something that might have happened in ‘69, but wouldn’t pass muster today.  I’d have thought the rewriting team would have up-dated that, too.  Furthermore, though the music and songs are sweet and pleasant, they’re no more than that.  I already don’t remember any of them.  (The Post reviewer mentions one song he thought was wonderful but even though I read the review the day after I saw the show, I couldn’t recall the song.  I remembered when it was sung and what it was about and all—but I couldn’t remember the tune or the lyrics.) 

The production, however, was excellent.  Thomas Lynch’s set—it was in the Fichandler, the arena space—was clever, with the stage ringed with little, tiny buildings of the village (which actually lit up) around a Mexican tile-floored central plaza.  Other set pieces rose up from the floor, including the three grave stones of the cemetery where the old baker’s wife is buried.  (They flipped up, like pop-up book figures; the other pieces came up like elevators.)  Emilio Sosa’s costumes were especially lovely.  I already noted the Frida Kahlo look of the witch, but the other, less prominent costumes were also nice.  (I don’t know if Arena uses the same costumer for all its shows, but this aspect of every production I’ve seen there lately has been excellent.  I remember particularly liking the Camelot costumes last year.)  Also, the singing for this show was the best all around that I’ve heard at Arena in recent years.  (Shaddow, the actress who sang the young daughter—none of the cast had names I knew—had a really wonderful soprano.)  If only the play had been better!

I’ve often said that when a play is neglected, forgotten, or obscure, there’s usually a pretty good reason.  If no one wanted to stage this 1969 script, even though Loesser’s widow had been promoting it apparently, that’s probably a good indication that it wasn’t worth a lot of effort.  It was a pleasant enough evening in the theater, but it really wasn’t worth much in the end.

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DAMN YANKEES

Fichandler Stage, Arena Stage

13 February 2006

I’ve had to be in Washington twice this winter [2005-06], and I caught a show at Arena each time.  Arena used to be a pretty exciting place, presenting new plays that went on to become important additions to American theater (Moonchildren, Indians) or productions that bordered on the experimental (Andrei Serban’s Leonce and Lena—one of his first gigs in the States).  After co-founder and longtime artistic director Zelda Fichandler left to take over the graduate acting program at New York University and after Doug Wager, her successor, was replaced by Molly Smith, the current artistic director, it can still be a pretty good regional company, but its selection of material is often more on the side of audience-pleasers than experience-stretchers.  (My mother has complained about Smith’s choices since she took over and has threatened to drop her subscription altogether.  Mother has cut back and no longer subscribes to Arena’s entire season—there’s a four-play subscription available, instead of the whole six-play bill.) 

So we went to the Arena on New Year’s Eve to see Damn Yankees.  I’d never seen the play on stage, just in the movie version and, in short, I’ll say that it was great fun and very well done.  (Some spectators may have known the name of the actor who played Mr. Applegate, the Devil originally played by Ray Walston: Brad Oscar, who was the original Franz Liebkind, playwright of Springtime for Hitler, the musical-within-the-musical of The Producers.  He later also replaced Nathan Lane as Max Bialystock.)  Oscar was quite good—he got excellent reviews, including one I saw in Variety—but I kept feeling he was projecting a little too hard, as if he forgot he wasn’t in a Broadway house but the more intimate Arena Fichandler (the theater-in-the-round space). 

As I think I’ve said numerous times, when it comes to the old musicals, I have no critical distance.  They’re all nostalgic for me.  If I didn’t see them on stage when I was a kid, I saw the movies (as I did with Damn Yankees) or I listened to the albums, which my dad had from his youth.  (Dad took my mom—both native New Yorkers, though Mom moved to New Jersey as a girl—to the original Oklahoma! on one of their early dates.)  I literally grew up on that music—and when I was little, I knew all the words to all the songs.  That said, Damn Yankees was a more than creditable production.  Oscar made a delightful devil—sort of a used-car-salesman-as-Beelzebub—and Meg Gillentine was very good as Lola.  (She’s no Gwen Verdon—but, then, no one is.  Please.)  She tends to be a better dancer than actor—though she’s an excellent singer, as well—so her witchy seductress is a little by-the-numbers, but given Lola’s routines, that works well enough.  (Lola’s numbers are almost all dance bits anyway.)

As for the Joes, Boyd and Hardy, Lawrence Redmond and Matt Bogart were both fine.  As it happens, I had seen them both at Arena before, Redmond as Luther Billis in South Pacific (another Ray Walston part, by the way) and Bogart as Lancelot in Camelot.  (Say “Bogart as Lancelot in Camelot” five times fast!)  Smith directed, and she did a nice job using the arena space, which I always think is hard to pull off smoothly in a musical.  I’m sure arena staging is tough for any play, but I think it must be harder for a musical—especially the old ones which were conceived for proscenium stages.  The need to get all four sections of the audience some face-time with the actors necessitates some awkward promenading sometimes—moving people around for little logical reason.  In a straight play, you can create a set that gives motivation for such crosses—put a chair on one side, a table in another corner, and the actors have to go to them to sit or pick up a prop. 

The dancing in a musical eliminates a lot of set pieces—the floor’s too small to accommodate both choreography and furniture—so the movements can seem arbitrary.  Smith and her choreographer, Baayork Lee, managed this nicely in Damn Yankees.  There was even one number with props that was marvelous—a dance with TV sets on wheeled stands.  It was a hoot—especially clothed and painted, as the production was, in the Day-Glo pastel colors that evoked the Eisenhower ’50s.  (It kind of made me think of Miami Beach back in the days when I used to visit my grandfather there—the houses were all painted pink, yellow, lime green, and baby blue!  This wasn’t art-deco Miami but kitschy Miami Beach.) 

Damn Yankees isn’t a very deep play, despite its take on Faust.  Yeah, Joe might lose his soul to the Devil, and poor Meg may never see her hubby again and never know why—but you know that’s not going to happen, even if you’ve never seen Damn Yankees before.  It’s not that kind of show.  I mean, we’re not talking Carousel here.  It’s the ‘50s, for goodness’ sake.  So it’s just for fun, a little gratuitous sexiness.  (Not sex—Joe doesn’t succumb, of course.  What do you expect from a show with a song called “The Game” in which every potential sexual encounter ends when the ballplayers “think about the game, the game, the game”?  Like I said: the ’50s.)  But who cares, right?  It’s just a hoot, and the Arena version was more than just a great way to run up to the midnight ball-drop—it was a more-than-enjoyable evening all around.  No one will ever make you forget Gwen Verdon’s Lola—I was barely a teenager when I saw the flick, but, man, that woman was still sexy when she was a grandmother!  But you just have to put that aside, I guess, go with what ya got.  (A little this-a.  A little that-a.  With an emphasis on the latta.  You betcha!)

(Yes, Gwen Verdon is special—and that’s putting it mildly.  I got to see her twice on stage—in Sweet Charity (1966-67) and in Chicago (1976)—with Chita!  Now that’s a pairing for all time!  She was already a grandmother when she did Chicago—and she was still great in every meaning of the word.  She could be a pretty good straight dramatic actress—but, man, when she did song-and-dance, she was in a world of her own.  There are—were; I don’t think they’re making any more like that—very few in that stratosphere.  I count myself very lucky to have gotten to see some of the last of the greats and near-greats before they passed from the scene—Mary Martin, Verdon, Zero, Guilford, Julie Andrews—who hasn’t passed, but her voice has—Stubby Kaye, Howard da Silva, Bea Lillie, and several who are still around but seem to be retired or semi-retired.  There seems to be a self-replenishing supply of good and even great straight actors—even if they go off to Hollywood too fast for my taste—but the great musical ones don’t seem to come along much.  Maybe it’s just me.)

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SHE LOVES ME

Fichandler Stage, Arena Stage

17 January 2007

When I’m with my mom on New Years, it’s our custom to try to find a play on the 31st and then go home and toast in the New Year—sometimes with friends and sometimes just en famille—as we watch the ball drop in Times Square on TV.  This year, the Arena Stage was doing She Loves Me, the 1963 Jerry Bock-Sheldon Harnick-Joe Masteroff musical adaptation of the Hungarian play on which the 1940 Jimmy Stewart-Margaret Sullavan movie Shop Around the Corner is based.  (By some coincidence, the cable channels Turner Classic Movies ran both that movie and then the 1949 film musical adaptation—In the Good Old Summertime with Judy Garland and Van Johnson—the week before we saw the stage musical.  That was kind of fun.  The same material is also the basis for 1998’s You’ve Got Mail, the Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan romantic comedy, but the cable station didn’t run that one. 

All of these are based on Miklós László’s Parfumerie, which, as far as I can tell, has never been performed either on or off Broadway.  I’m not sure the script is even available in English.)  She Loves Me is an old-fashioned musical in the vein of My Fair Lady and Damn Yankees, though a lesser effort.  (Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, of course, had been previously responsible for Fiorello!—my very first Broadway play—and would ultimately create Fiddler on the Roof.  Joe Masteroff would go on to write the book for Cabaret three years later.) 

Still, it is charming and fun, even if the songs are not especially memorable, and it made a perfect entertainment for the New Year’s Eve hours leading up to the propitious moment.  Arena’s production, which included no stars or actors whom I knew, was even, solid, and much more than just competent, though no performance stood out in the ensemble.  Director Kyle Donnelly made good use of the Fichandler’s arena platform—I always feel that staging a musical in the round is particularly hard—and everyone’s voice was strong (they were miked, as usual these days) and vibrant.  I especially liked Arpad’s one solo number, “Try Me,” his self-promotion.  Clifton Guterman, the young actor playing the delivery boy-who-would-be-a-clerk, may look a tad older than a teenager, but his tenor is youthful and his enthusiasm in selling himself (and the song) was delightful. 

But in the end, this was an ensemble production (though its past includes stars: Barbara Cook as Amalia Balash in the original Broadway run along with Jack Cassidy, who won a Tony as the self-serving Steven Kodaly; and near-stars: Boyd Gaines, who won a Tony as Georg Nowack in the 1993 Roundabout Theatre Company/Broadway revival, and Louis Zorich—“Mr." Olympia Dukakis—as Mr. Maraczek); the cast as a whole did a very nice job in what I had actually forgotten (until I watched the movie again the week before) is really a Christmas story. 

'The Most Happy Fella'

I haven’t gone to a lot of Encores! shows over the years, but all of a sudden, they’re offering some that interest me for various reasons.  Last July, I saw Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock because I’d read about it, principally in John Houseman’s 1972 autobiography, Run-Through, but had never seen it.  (I reported on that performance on ROT on 1 August.) This spring, Encores! is presenting two more shows I’ve never seen before.  The second one, coming up in May, is 1960’s Irma La Douce, which I only know from the non-musical movie; but the first one, which Diana, my frequent theater companion, and I saw on Wednesday evening, 2 April, at the New York City Center on West 55th Street, was Frank Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella, which ran for 676 performances at the Imperial and Broadway Theatres in 1956-57.  I’d heard much of the score over the years, but I’d never seen a production of the musical (which premièred just about the time I was starting to see Broadway shows in New York).

Encores! Great American Musicals In Concert began at City Center, established in 1943 as the city’s first performing arts center, in 1994 with the mission of presenting the scores of Broadway musicals that are seldom heard.  (Encores! Off Center, a spin-off series for Off-Broadway musicals, began in 2013; Cradle was from the first season of that series.)  Since then, it has won several theater awards for its concert presentations, including a Tony for Excellence in Theatre in 2000.  A number of the performances have resulted in cast recordings and several productions have transferred to Broadway, such as a 2010 revival of Burton Lane, “Yip” Harburg, and Fred Saidy’s Finian’s Rainbow and the still-running 1996 presentation of John Kander and Fred Ebb’s 1975 musical Chicago.  (Also still playing on Broadway since October 2013 is After Midnight, a jazz revue with text by poet Langston Hughes that was originated by Encores! in 2011.)  The presentations dispense with most of the book, which is edited by playwrights like John Guare and Neil Simon (a former play doctor himself) and often read from scripts carried by the actors, and stage the musical scenes with a minimum of props and costumes and little or no set.  Encores! productions are rehearsed in eight days, with one dress rehearsal and five performances.  The orchestra, however, is generally a complete ensemble of up to 30 musicians or more (Most Happy Fella has 38, with orchestrations by Don Walker) because it’s the rendition of the score, sung by Broadway vets and stars, that is the point of Encores! work.  Many of the shows, three each season (this season’s début show was Neil Simon’s first musical, 1962’s Little Me), are well-remembered and even beloved (Most Happy Fella has been revived in New York as recently as 2007 by the New York City Opera, as well as several times in the ’90s.)

Loesser’s three-act Most Happy Fella, adapted from Sidney Howard’s They Knew What They Wanted (on Broadway in 1924-25), is the story of an older man, Tony, in love with a younger woman, Rosabella, set in the wine country of California’s Napa Valley and in San Francisco in 1927.  (The Encores! program actually makes no note of the setting date, and the costumes look more like mid-’50s, the era in which Most Happy Fella débuted.)  Tony’s a wine-grower, an Italian immigrant, and Rosabella’s an overworked waitress in San Francisco.  He’s too shy to “intrafaduce” himself to her (Tony doesn’t even know her real name so he makes up a romantic one), so he leaves her his “genuine amethyst tie pin” with a love note one day and she answers it without knowing who he is.  When she sends Tony her photo, after months of exchanged letters, he decides he can’t send her one of himself so he sends her a picture of Joe, his handsome, younger foreman.  When Rosabella (whose actual name, Tony and we learn much later, is Amy) arrives, Joe explains he’s not Tony and Rosabella’s angry.  When Tony has a serious truck accident on his way to meet her train, he persuades her to stay and marry him immediately in case he doesn’t survive.  She agrees but also realizes she’s falling for Joe.  Before the wedding, Rosabella discovers she’s pregnant and when she tells Tony about the baby and her intention to go back to San Francisco, Tony learns that Joe’s the father.  When he hears that Joe’s also leaving the farm, he suspects they’re going away together and rushes off to the bus station with a gun to confront Joe.  Joe’s already left for New Mexico, however, and Rosabella’s waiting for her bus.  Tony persuades Rosabella to stay at the farm and tell everyone that the baby’s his.                                          

Loesser (Where's Charley?, 1948-50; Guys and Dolls, 1950-53; How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, 1961-65; A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine, 1980-81) began work on Most Happy Fella in 1952, after a friend recommended Howard’s play.  They Knew What They Wanted contained political, labor, and religious issues and Loesser removed them, but it took him four years to make the musical adaptation.  The result, almost completely sung through, is very operatic (and the musical has been produced by several opera companies aside from NYCO, which has done it twice).  In his original New York Times review of Most Happy Fella, Brooks Atkinson, calling the production “a fine music drama,” wrote that “Loesser has now come about as close to opera as the rules of Broadway permit.”  It opened at the Imperial on 3 May 1956 with opera baritone Robert Weede as Tony, Jo Sullivan as Rosabella, and Art Lund as Joe under the direction of Joseph Anthony.  In 1959, City Center, now home to Encores!, presented a limited run of 16 performances in February, and in 1960, the play had its West End première in London; Lund crossed the pond to reprise his performance as Joe.  The musical was revived on Broadway in 1979 and the production was filmed and broadcast on PBS the following year as part of its Great Performances series; a DVD of the performance is available.  (The Most Happy Fella was never adapted for film.  There are, however, three movie versions of Sydney Howard’s straight play: The Secret Hour, 1928, silent film with Pola Negri as Amy and Jean Hersholt as Tony; A Lady to Love, 1930, with Vilma Bánky and Edward G. Robinson; and They Knew What They Wanted, 1940, directed by Garson Kanin with Carole Lombard and Charles Laughton.)  NYCO presented its first production of Most Happy Fella in 1991, the same year that Goodspeed Opera House in Haddam, Connecticut, produced a revival directed by Gerald Gutierrez, using twin pianos instead of a full orchestra (an arrangement Loesser apparently okayed before his death in 1969).  The Goodspeed production traveled to the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles later that year and that staging was transferred to Broadway in 1992.  NYCO produced a limited engagement of Most Happy Fella with Paul Sorvino as Tony in 2006, and a concert version of the musical, starring George Hearn as Tony, was presented at Chicago’s Ravinia Festival in 2007.  Tulsa Opera staged the musical last year. 

The Encores! concert version, which opened on the night we saw it and ran through 6 April, was directed and choreographed by Casey Nicholaw (Tony as co-director of The Book of Mormon, director of current production of Aladdin) with musical direction by Rob Berman (The Pajama Game, Irving Berlin's White Christmas, Finian's Rainbow), the Encores! musical director, and a cast of 38.  Presented as a two-act performance at City Center (the concert adaptation was by Bill Rosenfeld), the concert ran two hours and 25 minutes.  Shuler Hensley (Tarzan, Young Frankenstein; Olivier for his performance as Jud in Oklahoma! In London) was Tony, Laura Benanti (The Wedding Singer, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown; Tony for performance in the title role in the revival of Gypsy) was Rosabella, and Cheyenne Jackson (All Shook Up, Xanadu, Finian’s Rainbow revival) played Joe.  The large orchestra was arrayed upstage behind the actors, who were relegated to a narrow strip of stage down front.  Our seats weren’t really great, up on the house right side of the balcony so we weren’t only looking down on the performers from a fair distance, but also on a severe angle.  At one point (“How Beautiful the Days,” a four-part number with operatic aspects), Tony and Rosabella were singing from center stage and Marie (Tony’s older sister) entered and stood singing stage right, and I heard Joe’s voice but couldn’t see him.  The amplification at City Center makes it impossible to detect where a voice is coming from—they all come from the same sound system, unlike live voices—so it wasn’t until Cheyenne Jackson made a slight movement that I saw he was obscured by a light pole at the stage left proscenium.)  If this had been anything more than a concert production, we’d have missed a lot of the spectacle, I’m sure.

With so large a cast and so narrow an acting space, I was surprised at how much staging Nicholaw put into the production.  (The cast of Most Happy Fella didn’t carry scripts—possibly because there’s so little spoken dialogue in the play that, having learned the songs, there was little else left to memorize.)  John Lee Beatty’s set (lit by Ken Billington) consisted mostly of a few risers up right (and, I presume, up left, too, though I couldn’t see those) and one across the rear of the acting area (which was about the middle of the stage, just below the orchestra) and some moveable wooden boxes that served as seats, platforms, tables, and whatever anyone needed.  Still, it was a lively show, with Nicholaw’s choreography simple but sprightly—and very reminiscent of the dancing of the old-time musicals from the middle of the last century.  I was particularly delighted with the four farmhands’ dancing-in-place for “Standing on the Corner” (Jay Armstrong Johnson, Ryan Bauer-Walsh, Ward Billeisen, and Arlo Hill), which was dominated by syncopated waist-bending and knee-flexing as the men stood in a line across stage center.  The song may express a sexist sentiment by today’s standards (“Brother, you can’t go to jail for what you’re thinking / Or for that woo look in your eye”), but it was fun and innocent.  Also marvelous, in a more spirited vein, were Zachary James, Bradley Dean, and Brian Calì as what Ben Brantley in the New York Times called “the bouncing, dancing chefs” in “Abbondanza,” a paean to overeating!  (I found it amusing to think that Loesser, a Jew, seemed to have learned so much Italian for the several numbers he wrote in which no English is sung!  They may be in simple Italian, single words or short phrases, but still . . . .)

I already remarked that Gregg Barnes’s costumes looked more like the ’50s than ’20s, with technicolor skirts about knee-length for the women, billowing out whenever they flounced or twirled.  (There was a fair amount of flouncing goin’ on—after all, this was ’50s show biz!)  The guys were mostly in coveralls or dungarees and flannel shirts, which are timeless, of course, and in the end, it’s of little consequence whether the clothes looked right for one decade or another as Most Happy Fella is really set in a fantasy world anyway.  It’s truly musical comedy as it was before the genre got serious a few years later.  (West Side Story, a musical tragedy, was only a year or two away.)  I recently called Newsies a throw-back to the old-time musicals (ROT, 26 February); The Most Happy Fella is a genuine old-time musical, with its simplistic and sentimental treatment of both May-December romance and the immigrant Americans’ effort to make it in the new country.  (Newsday’s Linda Winer called this latter “an atsa-spicy-meatball concept of Italian immigrants.”)  There’s no real intellect in Most Happy Fella, but there’s a lot of heart.  It’s a feel-good play—which is what “musical comedy” used to mean. 

There’s only a modicum of acting in an Encores! concert, little more than projecting the principal character traits and essential personality as they’re expressed in the songs.  Of course, in a nearly-operatic musical like Most Happy Fella, that still leaves a lot.  I knew some of the lead actors’ names, but I wasn’t familiar with anyone’s work except from past reviews (a few are relative newcomers), but the whole cast was fine—and several, even among the featured roles, had excellent voices.  (I was especially impressed with Kevin Vortman’s tenor as the doctor: it was clear, sharp, and strong, even with the muddy amplification.)  Shuler Hensley, who just finished a run in the Beckett-Pinter two-play rep on Broadway and was Tim, the young actor, in two of Richard Nelson’s Apple Family Plays at the Public’s premières (I reported on a revival of Nelson’s That Hopey Changey Thing on ROT on 15 December 2013), made Tony very sympathetic and slightly lost, even through his cartoon Eye-talian accent (‘picture’ comes out a-pitch; ‘I’ is I’ma), and still a strong, passionate man who’s kind and generous by instinct and falls deeply in love easily.  Hensley’s voice isn’t operatic like others who’ve assayed the role before, but it’s strong and expressive, like an old-fashioned musical-theater voice.  As Joe, the foreman afflicted with permanent wanderlust, Cheyenne Jackson displayed less character than Hensley (the Daily News’s Joe Dziemianowicz said Jackson’s “atypically underfueled”), but I’m not sure that the part’s not underwritten a mite, relying on his supposed good looks and laconic loner allure (in old flicks, he’d be played by Gary Cooper).  He’s no bad boy or dark horse, but he didn’t exude the kind of intestinal fortitude that Hensley’s Tony did.  Jackson’s voice is good, but less dynamic than Vortman’s or even Hensley’s; his “Joey, Joey, Joey” was nice but unremarkable as a character revealer. 

Among the women, Laura Benanti as Rosabella showed off classic musical comedy chops starting in the opening scene when she and her best friend (and fellow waitress), Cleo, compare notes on men and customers in “I Know How It Is.”  Benanti didn’t establish a lot of character, either, but again I figure that’s more the fault of Loesser’s book than the actress’s or director’s deficiencies.  It’s hard to believe that any woman would agree to marry a man she doesn’t know on such short notice, even if he could die soon—when does that happen except in romantic fiction?—but Benanti didn’t make it any easier to figure; we just have to accept it for the plot’s sake.  In the hands of Heidi Blickenstaff, Rosabella’s bestie, Cleo, was more of a personality—after all, she’s from “Big D”!  (In musical comedy, especially in the mid-century, if you come from Texas, New York City, Boston, or the Old South, you get instant character.)  Now and then as she cracks wise, her Texan sounded more like New Jerseyan, but her singing was spirited and lively—this Cleo could belt!—and she paired well with Jay Armstrong Johnson as Herman, her fellow Dallasite (Cleo and Herman are the Ado Annie and Will Parker of Most Happy Fella), starting with “Big D” and including “I Like Everybody” and “I Made a Fist.”  (This is another pairing that took some belief-suspension as Herman’s played as too much of a dimwit for this Cleo to fall for—but this may have been more director Nicholaw’s decision than Johnson’s or even Loesser’s.)

While Tony’s and Rosabella’s romantic fortunes go up and down in musical comedy fashion, and Joe remains the proverbial rolling stone, the most forlorn character in Most Happy Fella is Tony’s sister, Marie, who’s so fearful that Rosabella will remove her only purpose in life, the promise she made to their mother to look after Tony, that she tries to torpedo his romance with Rosabella (“Mamma wouldn’t want you to do anything foolish,” Marie warns).  She reminds him frequently that he’s not good-looking, not smart, and not young anymore (plus, he talks funny)—and he keeps buying it (which is why he sent Rosabella Joe’s photo to start with).  As Marie, Jessica Molaskey nearly made me feel bad for this sorry old maid (even though her appearance kept calling to mind Cloris Leachman’s Frau Blücher in the 1974 film of Young Frankenstein—not a sympathetic character).  Possibly the saddest number in Loesser’s score is the duet between Marie and Tony, “Young People”/”Old People Gotta” in which she once again convinces her brother that “young people gotta dance, dance, dance, / Old people gotta get left behind.”  If Most Happy Fella has a point, it’s simply that love and happiness aren’t susceptible to age or age gaps.  As Rob Berman, the show’s and the Encores! musical director, phrased it: “The Most Happy Fella . . . is a story about people who learn to let go of old notions, forgive each other, and embrace the circumstances of the lives they lead.”  Now, that’s old-time musical comedy!

I should remind ROT-readers that I have a thing about these old Broadway musicals.  I have little critical distance because I was so enamored of the form when I was growing up, listening to my dad’s cast albums of Carousel, South Pacific, and Oklahoma! and then seeing some of the greats of the late ’50s and early ’60s, from Fiorello! to My Fair Lady to Camelot to The Sound of Music to Hair, that I can’t separate my feelings of nostalgia from the quality of the performances.  (I confessed to all this in my ROT post, “A Broadway Baby,” on 22 September 2010.)  I don’t have the same connection to Most Happy Fella because I never saw it either back then or since, but I did hear some of the score, I remember the chatter at the time, and it’s part of that era.  (Frank Loesser is, of courseairHairHHHHH, one of the giants of the end of the golden age of the Broadway musical.  Guys and Dolls, How to Succeed are all part of my love affair with the musical theater.)  You might have to read some between the lines of my report to filter out my bias (which I have tried to suppress, but you can judge how successfully). 

This having been a concert performance with a very short run and no previews, the press coverage was a little smaller than it might otherwise have been—most of the weeklies didn’t make it before post time.   In the Daily News (“I’ll tell you what’s in the Daily News . . . .”  Sorry.  That’s Guys and Dolls, Loesser’s great 1950 smash), Joe Dziemianowicz led off with, “Like a great bottle of wine, the vineyard-set musical ‘The Most Happy Fella’ is robust, complex and palate-pleasing.”  He continued, “Most happily, those grace notes shine through in the joyful and exuberant staging,” and recommends, “Go, have a pour.”  In Long Island’s Newsday, Winer opened her notice by exclaiming, “What a weird one this was.”  Loesser, she explained, “appears to have gone berserk on a style-shopping spree with ‘The Most Happy Fella.’”  Noting that the play has “an almost ludicrous combination of inconsistent intentions,” Winer dubbed the Encores! production “a large but largely uninspired concert revival.”  Nicholaw, the Newsday reviewer said, “makes no apparent attempt to integrate the styles or mute the idiotic comic relief” and added, “Nor does this oddly cast production . . . distract us with thrilling performances,” asserting that Hensley is especially “adrift” in his portrayal.  Comparing the Encores! concert rendition to the 1992 two-piano mounting from Goodspeed/Ahmanson, Winer concluded, “This one has a big, glorious orchestra.  That's nice, but not good enough to make the show work.”  Observing that Loesser’s Most Happy Fella possesses “one of the most openhearted, gloriously romantic scores ever written,” Matt Windman of am New York promised that theatergoers were “sure to appreciate Casey Nicholaw’s highly enjoyable staging.”  Windman reported that the principals’ “acting is exquisite throughout” and that the “rest of the cast is superb.”

In the New York Times, Ben Brantley, hailing the arrival of spring in New York City, proclaimed that “for my money, the true vernal equinox occurred on Wednesday night at City Center, when a rapturous production of ‘The Most Happy Fella’ opened,” adding, “Casey Nicholaw’s production of Frank Loesser’s 1956 classic feels like a great thaw” after the “long, hard winter.”  Reporting that Hensley and Benanti did “their richest work to date” in the concert, “matched by an orchestra that turns thought into music” as played “[u]nder the splendid direction of the conductor Rob Berman,” the Timesman wrote that the show is “an unabashed hymn of hope to fresh starts and quickened feelings.”  With regard to the vocalizing of the company, Brantley stated, “There are no complaints . . . regarding Mr. Nicholaw’s production.”  In his final assessment, Brantley admonished that “musical-loving adults with open hearts should do their best to make it to City Center before this glorious ‘Fella’ leaves town” (which, unhappily, it already has).  Calling the concert revival of Most Happy Fella “intoxicating,” Elisabeth Vincentelli recommended, “Fans of glorious singing should hustle to City Center” to catch it (sorry, it’s too late).  Vincentelli found that the production “does Loesser justice” and that in the end, “You just don’t want the show to end.”  New York magazine’s Jesse Green declared, “The Most Happy Fella is one of the greatest musicals ever.”  The Encores! production, he observed, “follows with perfect naturalness the curves of Loesser’s writing” while the principal cast “is especially strong.” 

On Talkin’ Broadway in the on-line reviews, Matthew Murray called Most Happy Fella “one of Broadway’s most curious Golden Age creations” and acknowledged that “even when not everything is exactly right, as is the case with director-choreographer Casey Nicholaw’s mounting, it’s still irresistible.”  Murray complained that “Nicholaw’s direction is . . . on the flat side, and his dances more dependent on glitz than appropriateness for period or character” and though he lauded Benanti and the featured actors in the Encores! cast, he found Hensley “vocally underpowered” and, because the actor “doesn't completely connect to the music, he doesn't completely connect to Tony.”  As Joe, “Jackson’s voice is good for a pop musical but not especially resonant for Loesser's loftier chores; and a general onstage indifference about him makes Joey too blasé as either an object of desire or a threat.”  In the end, however, Murray decided, “Sure, there are a few missteps, but even so it’s difficult to imagine how this Most Happy Fella could be bigger, more captivating, or more charming than it is.”  TheaterMania’s Zachary Stewart wrote, “Opera fans and Broadway enthusiasts alike will find something to enjoy about this concert staging” of Most Happy Fella which “draws out Loesser's lush and beautiful score while maintaining a rigorous approach to acting.”  “Like a Technicolor musical version of Of Mice and Men,” suggested the TM review-writer, “the world of agrarian California springs to vivid life,” even as she bemoaned the loss of some of the edited book. 

In her CurtainUp review, Elyse Sommer felt that “you'll be ‘happy to make its acquaintance[’] (or, if you've seen it before, ‘re-acquaintance’)” if you’d managed to catch Encores! Most Happy Fella, which she called “superb” and “the biggest, most close to perfection Encores! production I've seen in a while.”  Nicholaw’s “choreography is especially impressive,” Sommer reported, and the leads “lend glorious voices to this genre defying but gorgeous musical's challenging” score and “other key players are also standouts.”  “I was glad to hear Loesser’s Most Happy Fella again and sung so well by top-notch players,” wrote David Finkle on Huffington Post, “with one particularly notable exception and one minor exception.”  (Finkle felt Hensley “couldn't muster the volume” for the role—though I read later that he was ailing, as apparently was Benanti as well.  The “minor drawback” was that “Jackson might have mined more of Joe’s expressed restlessness.”)  Overall, HP’s reviewer found, “the company acting was fine across the board” and that Nicholaw’s Most Happy Fella was “in good enough form to reward fans with an acceptable look and listen.”

[There’s been a perpetual controversy in the theater world about whether Loesser had written a musical play or an opera in Most Happy Fella.  Many opera companies have produced it, including, as I noted, New York City Opera twice, and the role of Tony has often been sung by an opera singer (such as Robert Weede in the play’s début).  To my ear, this debate is like the ones over whether an actor is a creative or interpretive artist and whether Shakespeare wrote his plays—it’s irrelevant and ultimately silly.  Like the Bard’s plays, it’s sufficient that Most Happy Fella exists and is available for actors to perform and audiences to enjoy.  It’s entirely unnecessary to put a label on it—or, even worse, argue over that label.  It is what it is.  (Loesser just called Most Happy Fella “a musical with a lot of music.”  That should be good enough for anyone.  It is for me!)]