'The Cradle Will Rock' (Classic Stage Company)

After having seen the 2013 concert rendering of Marc Blitzstein’s agitprop “play in music,” The Cradle Will Rock, I wanted to see a “full production” of it.  So when the Classic Stage Company announced its production for this spring, I signed up.  What CSC is presenting, directed by the company’s artistic director, John Doyle, isn’t a concert version of Cradle, but it’s still pared down—even without Doyle’s hollowed-out staging.  (Doyle also “designed” the set, with the assistance of David L. Arsenault.)  I guess I’ll still have to wait for a production of what Blitzstein originally intended: two acts with a full set, costumes, and orchestrations.

In my 1 August 2013 blog report (https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-cradle-will-rock.html), I provided a background of the play, particularly its abortive and theater history-making début on 16 June 1937.  There’s also a wrap-up of the play’s production history up to the 21st century.  I’m not going to repeat that here, so I suggest interested readers click on the link above and skim the old report.  I’ll focus on the new revival in the East Village.

First, the details of the presentation: Doyle’s revival is the first New York City production of Cradle since the presentation by Encores! Off-Center—a summer concert series for Off-Broadway musicals—at the New York City Center in Mid-town.  The CSC revival started previews at the Lynn F. Angelson Theater on East 13th Street just west of 3rd Avenue on 21 March 2019 and opened on 3 April; it’s scheduled to close on 19 May.  My friend Diana and I caught the Thursday evening performance at 7 p.m. on 4 April. 

My earlier report also includes a plot rundown, so I won’t add a full one here.  The Cradle Will Rock is set in Steeltown, USA.  Mr. Mister’s hand-picked, anti-union Liberty Committee, which includes the town’s leading citizens—Dr. Specialist (Eddie Cooper), Editor Daily (Ken Barnett), President Prexy (Barnett), and Reverend Salvation (Benjamin Eakeley), and, representing the arts, violinist Yasha (Ian Lowe) and artist Dauber (Rema Webb)—have all been arrested by the police by mistake, having been ordered by Mr. Mister (David Garrison), the steel mogul who owns the mill, most of the company town, and pretty much everyone in it, to roust anyone rousing the pro-union rabble. 

Another prisoner, Harry Druggist (Tony Yazbeck), explains to Moll (Lara Pulver), a young streetwalker, what the Liberty Committee is and how it was established.  (Blitzstein wasn’t subtle about alluding to such big wigs of 1930s America as evangelist Billy Sunday, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, and the Du Pont family of tycoons.)  The play then unfolds as a series of back stories, shifting from the courtroom where all the prisoners await night court and scenes from the recent past that reveal how Mr. Mister cowed everyone in town and bought them all off.

Everyone in town takes Mr. Mister’s cash, which he literally throws around in wads to overcome any resistance from, say, the church, academia, or the press.  For instance, to keep Junior Mister (Cooper), the money man’s slacker son (echoes of Eric Trump, d’ya think?) out of trouble, Mr. Mister bribes Editor Daily to hire the boob as a correspondent—in Hawaii!  Dauber and Yasha mock Mrs. Mister (Sally Ann Triplett) and her insipid artistic taste; nonetheless, they take her money and revel in how much they love doing so.  Sister Mister (Kara Mikula), the tycoon’s daughter, is a privileged party girl and loves to spend daddy’s dough on sexy clothes (not seen in the CSC staging, by the way) and eye-candy beaux.

Only incorruptible Larry Foreman (Yazbeck), a stalwart young labor organizer, resists the pull of Mr. Mister’s bribery.  Foreman has also been arrested and exhorts the other prisoners to support labor unions and to rise up and defeat the capitalist robber barons. One day soon, he warns Mr. Mister. “the cradle will rock” and the cushy capitalist cocoon will fall.

(By the way, CSC seems to be trying out a very annoying new practice: no printed programs.  It’s on line, but not in the theater—except on your smart phone.  Boy, I hope that doesn’t catch on!  I keep mine—since I came to New York City in ‘74—and I often find myself using them for reference later.)

                                                                                        

The original Federal Theatre Project cast at the nearly-abortive première was about 17 actors (covering about 36 roles, many of them bits; there are seven principal singing characters) and subsequent Broadway revivals (’37 and ’47) cast as many as 35 actors; Sam Gold, who directed the Encores! concert, pared that down to 14.  Doyle’s gone even further, staging his revival with 10 actors—four of whom play the sole piano as well (they rotate as accompanist).  Gold’s production had no set, but Doyle’s cast also shifts the “scenery.”  (I’ll get to those quotation marks shortly—the ones above concerning the set design as well.) 

Blitzstein wrote Cradle for a full orchestra of a minimum of 25 players, though it was débuted after the historic shut-down with just the composer playing the piano.  Subsequent productions have often tried to emulate this event in various ways (including productions with two or three pianos), and Gold used a 14-piece orchestra on a large platform upstage from the actors.  Doyle, however, not only reverts to the single upright piano accompaniment (the music supervisor is Greg Jarrett), but has four of the actors (Barnett, Eakeley, Lowe, Mikula) alternate at the keyboard even as they shout lines from the script’s dialogue, backs to the audience or over their shoulders, from the bench.  (This tactic sort of operates in concert with the cast-as-stagehands decision.) 

The Angelson’s not built for musicals, and the acoustics are lousy.  The lyrics at CSC were hard to understand a lot of the time, drowned out by the piano or just lost in the flyspace.  (It’s not great for dialogue, either, but not as bad—and there’s less competition from the piano as well.)

(Gold’s Encores! concert presentation, which ran an  hour and 45 minutes, was performed as a series of discrete songs, like the score of any traditional musical.  What I learned at CSC, where Doyle trimmed the script to 90 intermissionless minutes, is that Blitzstein’s score is almost entirely sung through, with what seems like recitative linking dialogue to songs and songs to songs.  The play’s not an opera—although several opera companies have presented it—but Blitzstein did subtitle Cradle “A Play In Music,” not, you’ll notice, “A Play With Music.”)

As set designer, Doyle has split the difference between no set at all (Encores! and the 1937 Virginia Theatre première) and the full set the composer conceived and which was used in the New York City Opera mounting in 1960 (ironically, at the same City Center as the Encores! concert in 2013).  His “design” for CSC’s small, square space in the Angelson consists of small yellow metal drums (containing industrial waste, maybe?) which the actors carry around and reset in different configurations for each scene.  (A bunch are arranged in a cross in the middle of the acting area for a church scene, for example, and rearranged as a soda-fountain counter in Harry Druggist’s shop.  Sort of like cylindrical Legos.) 

This isn’t so much “scenery” in any common sense—hence all those quotation marks—but I guess, in the broadest sense of the term, it’s a visual environment for the actors to play against.  Not that it evokes “steel” or “factory,” but I suppose it suggests “labor,” considering how much the actors heft the drums around.  Except for wads of greenbacks that Mr. Mister tosses around, the barrels are the only props Doyle uses in the show.

Overhead is a spider’s web of telephone or telegraph wires; I only call it that because the wires all seem to emanate from a tall, wooden pole with cross pieces that looks like an old-fashioned telephone pole.  What it’s supposed to signify or symbolize, I have no idea.  One reviewer observed, “In revolution, those who rule the airwaves rule all,” but no mention of this notion or anything similar occurs in the production.  (The closest Blitzstein comes is his implication that Editor Daily and his newspaper is for sale to Mr. Mister when he tells the tycoon, “You’ve only got to hint whatever’s fit to print; If something’s wrong with it, why then we’ll print to fit.  For whichever side will pay the best.”)

The Angelson’s house, which is reconfigured from production to production (it was a compete arena for the Spring 2018 revival of Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke), is arranged as a thrust with spectators on the north, east, and west sides of the playing area; the south side is the “backstage” area where the piano is and where the actors hang out when not on stage.  Some dialogue, as well as singing, includes performers in the off-stage area, and as I’ve said, the piano-players deliver some lines while playing. 

Only David Garrison, as Mr. Mister, plays just a single character; some actors have as many as three roles, plus incidental parts.  Actors sometimes switch roles while on stage and without changes in costume or other visual or vocal clues, it’s sometimes hard to realize which character is talking or singing.  Everyone is dressed in factory-worker garb (designed by Ann Hould-Ward), so there’s also no distinction between the one-percenters and the laborers.  (Ironically, this is the reverse of the Encores! concert version in which everyone, workers and toffs alike, wore evening clothes.  I have no inkling why either director chose these homogenized costume schemes.) 

The performance starts stealthily—no noticeable change in lighting, no sound cue, nothing—as first one then small groups of actors wander into the performing area and cross to the south side neutral area.  Some carry a drum on their shoulder and as the cast assembles, some stop in gaggles in the acting area, which is essentially empty except for the shadows from the tangle of wires above.  (The lighting is designed by Jane Cox and Tess James.)

The first scene, which begins in the off-stage space, shows a cop rousting a bunch of citizens as laborite demonstrators as they protest that they’re actually Mr. Mister’s Liberty Community and that the cops are there to arrest the worker’s demonstrating for the union.  (If I hadn’t already seen a version of Cradle, I might have had a hard time figuring out what was happening, given that everyone was dressed like a steel worker.)

Though some well-known actors have appeared in productions (Howard Da Silva, Will Geer, Jack Albertson, Alfred Drake, Vivian Vance, Jerry Orbach, Lauri Peters, Patti LuPone, Randle Mell, Tammy Grimes), The Cradle Will Rock is the ultimate ensemble play, so I’m going to critique the performance in toto.  That works out rather well, since no single performance stood out at CSC in any case.

Timesman Jesse Green called the production “wan,” but that’s not the word I’d have chosen.  The performances were all right, but I remember the Encores! concert being both funnier and more forcefully agitprop.  I’d say, Doyle’s performance style was too soft-pedaled, as if the director were afraid today’s right wing would point and shout “Socialism!” and shut them down.  From Garrison’s Mr. Mister to Yazbeck’s Larry Foreman, not one of the characters came off as staunchly defending his or her position.  Not even Rema Webb, as Ella Hammer, whose machinist husband was injured in a suspicious accident at the plant, sings “Joe Worker” like the show-stopping number I remember from the 2013 concert. 

With today’s record of union-busting and the growing income gap between workers and bosses, not to forget the disparity between men’s pay and women’s for the same work and the current administration’s drive to strip away safety regulations (not to mention health care), The Cradle Will Rock should speak as loudly to a 2019 audience as it did to one in 1937—and I’d think that actors and directors, who are also members of unions, would feel this as intensely as any citizen.  But Doyle and his cast seem to have put a lid on the expression of strong feelings.  Perhaps they were over-Brechtifying the presentation—eschewing any emotional connection between the actors and their characters.  (Blitzstein dedicated Cradle to Bertolt Brecht, “first because I think him the most admirable theatre-writer of our time; secondly because an extended conversation with him was partly responsible for writing the piece.”) 

The press coverage of The Cradle Will Rock was middling, especially for a historically significant and seldom-produced play—and so was the critical response.  As of 11 April, Show-Score tallied 28 published notices with an average score of only 65.  Fifty percent of the reviews were positive, 32% were mixed, and 18% were negative.  Show-Score’s highest rating was one 90 for the website Musical Theater Review followed by two 85’s for Carole Di Tosti and StageBiz.com; the lowest score was a 35 for Talkin’ Broadway, backed by two 40’s for TheaterMania and New York Stage Review.  My review round-up will cover 20 published notices.

In the Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout declared, “Theatrical politics being what they are, it was both inevitable that ‘The Cradle Will Rock,’ Marc Blitzstein’s 1937 pro-labor musical, would receive a major off-Broadway production in the Age of Trump, and desirable that it is being done by Classic Stage Company.”  Teachout added that director Doyle “is exceptionally good at staging small-scale musical revivals, and he knows exactly what to do with shows like this.”  He assessed the production as “spare, vital, perfectly legible and almost entirely satisfying.”  The Journalist did “have a caveat, and it is, alas, a substantial one:  This production is sung without amplification, and Mr. Doyle has cast actors who can sing rather than singers who can act.” 

Teachout observed that “it’s important that you be able to hear the lyrics in order to follow the action, and you will often find that hard to do.”  He further contended that Blitzstein’s “red-hot Stalinis[m] . . . is what keeps ‘Cradle’ from being the American ‘Threepenny Opera’ that Blitzstein longed to write: He shared Bertolt Brecht’s politics but lacked his rich dramatic imagination.”  In contrast, “The score is another matter.  Not only are Blitzstein’s clear-cut tunes full of off-center harmonies that light up every phrase, but his lyrics are as sharp as a switchblade.”  In conclusion, Teachout asserted, “The songs are what has kept ‘The Cradle Will Rock’ alive, and I expect they’ll keep on doing so for a long time to come.”

In the New York Times, Green expressed the opinion that:

musical theater is last on the list of mediums suited to agitprop.  At its best, it is too complex, too cosmopolitan and too pleasure-seeking to pass loyalty tests. What goes into the machinery as revolutionary rage comes out as “Les Miz.” 

“And yet there’s ‘The Cradle Will Rock,’” continued Green, which its 1930s audience “would have understood . . . as a leftist rallying cry and a satire of unfettered capitalism’s enablers.”  Then he asked, “But what is it now?”  His half-answer: “John Doyle’s revival . . . is too wan to answer the question.”  Of the director’s work, Green felt, “Though his stripped-down approach often enhances richly conceived works . . . it makes others, severe to begin with, seem cold and underfed.”  The Times reviewer explained:

The simplicity that has felt clarifying in Mr. Doyle’s best work feels stingy here.  The piano accompaniment strips “The Cradle Will Rock” of much of its sostenuto beauty; what’s left is further eroded by singing that sometimes grates the ears.  The staging, in one 90-minute act, is largely static and, where musical theater razzmatazz is called for, totally underwhelming.  Too much of the acting seems deliberately wooden.

Green found, however, that after an hour, “the production coalesces” and “you begin to feel the tension between propaganda and entertainment as Blitzstein evidently intended.”  The review-writer warned, though, “It’s only a start, but I’m not sure any production could manage the contradictions much better.” 

Calling the CSC Cradle revival “plodding,” Sara Holdren of New York magazine and Vulture, its website, contended:

There’s a strong sense of déjà vu hanging over the cozy bricks-and-boards thrust at Classic Stage Company right now, and not in a good way.  It’s a wonderful setting—intimate without feeling cramped, textured and a little gritty but still spare and elegant—and it’s just right for the kind of democratic, fourth-wall-breaking, we’re-all-in-this-together vibe that’s often distinguishes stripped-down stagings of the kinds of plays from which the theater takes its name.  But artistic director John Doyle . . . seems to be approaching his current production by rote. 

“There’s a fine line between a distinctive directorial signature and a bag of tricks,” asserted Holdren, “and with The Cradle Will Rock—already a blunt instrument of agitprop that requires lots of sharpening if it’s really going to sing or sting—Doyle seems, more than anything else, to be tired, resorting to his tool belt without honing the tools.”  Holdren seems to have agreed with WSJ’s Teachout when she found,

The problem with too frequent an application of the adjective “Brechtian” is that, while it might accurately call to mind a certain aesthetic, it doesn’t necessarily bring along with it any of that writer’s distinctive brilliance. . . . Blitzstein was no Brecht, and . . . The Cradle Will Rock comes off as wooden and ineffectually hammy.  It’s got a point to make—over and over again—but no sparkle, no true wit, and, here, not even much sense of playfulness. 

Director and designer Doyle “keeps the production characteristically spare . . . use of his purposefully limited aesthetic vocabulary here seems mechanical rather than ingenious.”  Holdren bemoaned that “[t]here’s something deflated under the defiance” of the workers, especially in the rendition of the title number, “The Cradle Will Rock.”  She reminded us, though, that “a play’s worth should [not] be determined by a simplistic debate over whether or not it’s capable of sparking social change—but the cradle aside, plays do need to rock us, and this one leaves its audience right where it found them.”

The cyber press gave the show the most coverage.  On Stage Buddy, Elyse Trevers praised the cast as “talented and versatile” but reported that Blitzstein’s “songs tell the story, but little is memorable and at times the stories are plodding and uninspiring.”  Trevers felt that despite “a few earnestly-moving moments, especially with Yazbeck as the struggling druggist and Lara Pulver as Moll . . . the show is little more than a series of events—interactions between Mister Mister and the people he controls.”  Our Stage Buddy concluded, “Although the economy is better today, the themes still resonate as the wealthy classes and big business continue to hold sway over all facets of the economy.  Foreman’s message, one of hope for the masses, still seems naive and unobtainable.”

Eugene Paul of TheaterScene.com characterized CSC’s Cradle as “[c]ool, attractive, more an homage than a fiery presentation” but observed that “the times have radically changed” (have they?) and the CSC cast “does not project the fire-[i]n-the-belly fervor” of the 1937 original company.  Paul continued, “Without that inner conviction and turmoil, Blitzstein’s stereotypical caricatures lose their power to shock, to convince, to persuade, making them uncomfortable to perform with conviction.”  Furthermore, Paul complained, “the piano [is] too thin in presenting Blitzstein’s powerful music” and found the director’s shifting metal-drum environment “a highly clever series of procedures, worthy of our admiration but fatal to Blitzstein’s  cause.  We admire what is going on,” the reviewer felt, “but remain at a cool Brechtian remove.”  He added, “If that is in Doyle’s design, it is a miscalculation.  We want to, we need to be fired up.”  Paul’s bottom line was: “It’s all very college little theatre.”

On The Wrap, Robert Hofler (who was even more annoyed with CSC for not providing paper programs than I am) complained that

Doyle’s patented minimalist approach worked best for Oscar Hammerstein II’s take on Bizet; the narrative is stronger and more linear in “Carmen Jones.”  Brecht’s “Arturo Ui” and Blitzstein’s “Cradle” aren’t only more episodic; the scenes are piled on top of each other, the connective tissue of a story being much less obvious.  When the actors aren’t switching roles, they’re busy rearranging the stage furniture, which, in the case of “Cradle,” amounts to a few barrels.

“Blitzstein isn’t subtle,” Hofler reminded us, “and neither is Doyle, who has Mr. Mister throw around an increasingly large roll of dollar bills whenever he wants to buy someone off.  At show’s end,” The Wrap’s reviewer reported, “the actors here are knee-deep in paper money.”  The review-writer praised Pulver as Moll and Sadie Pollock (that’s not like Jackson Pollock, by the way, but Polack, as in a slur for a Polish person), Eakeley as Reverend Salvation, Cooper as Junior Mister and Dr. Specialist, and the four piano players.

Ron Cohen, in Show-Score’s highest-rated review (90), gave CSC’s Cradle five stars on the website Musical Theatre Review and labeled the production “triumphantly alive” with an “ensemble bringing passion, immediacy and theatrical acuity to the script’s thesis, its music and sardonic, bitter humour [sic].”  Acknowledging that the current political times make Cradle relevant, Cohen applauds, “What Doyle and company succeed in doing is making it thrillingly relevant.”  The MTR writer interpreted the uniform factory-worker costume scheme as appearing “as if a company of everyday (but sumptuously talented) workers are putting on the show for us.”  With this, however, “the storytelling can get a little muddled now and then,” Cohen reported.  With respect to the music, though, Cohen cautioned that “it may take a while for ears to adjust to the emphatic rhythms and seeming tunelessness of Blitzstein’s” score, but “it’s all handled superbly by the company.” 

Carole Di Tosti on the blog Carole Di Tosti, in one of the two notices that scored 85, the second-highest rating on Show-Score, labeled the show, “which employed no elaborate spectacle,” “sleek.”  She described the play as “sung as a quasi opera, in a Bertolt Brecht style with ferocity and near didacticism,” which Di Tosti  found “certainly speaks for our time.”  She praised “the minimalism of props which the actors use seamlessly,” including “the use of greenbacks which dominate the scenes.”  The “talented actors” of the company produced “a fine production,” Di Tosti felt, and “Doyle’s direction/staging/design is spot-on.”  In the end, however, the reviewer reported that CSC’s Cradle is “a potentially stunning production which fell a bit short” because the singers “[a]t times . . . were imprecise” in their enunciation.  “Nevertheless,” she declared in the end, the revival “is a must-see as a trenchant allegory for our time.”

On CurtainUp, Elyse Sommer declared that Doyle’s cast “will pull you into the power of the gritty score” and “the finely sung songs make up for” the fact that “The Cradle Will Rock tends to come off as a sermon more than an entertainment.”  As her final word, Sommer admitted, “Ultimately, my biggest disappointment was that it wasn't hopelessly dated, but undeniably relevant.”

Steven Suskin acknowledged on New York Stage Review, in one of the site’s two reviews, “The CSC Cradle doesn’t rock quite so well, but it is an admirable presentation of an historically important musical.”  Suskin thought, “Doyle and his denizens blow the accumulated dust off the piece, bringing out the strengths in this most uncompromising work.”  The NYSR writer found that Doyle’s “intimate production places full attention on the cast, revealing some fine performances.”  He allowed that “Doyle and CSC do not reveal The Cradle Will Rock to be an all-time masterwork, no.  But it is a compelling production of a compelling piece of writing.” 

In the second NYSR notice, which received a Show-Score score of 40, one of the two second-lowest for Cradle, Michael Sommers complained at the outset that “Doyle [is] not at all at his considerable best” and “the result is less than impressive.”  Labeling the play a “mostly sung-through musical cartoon,” Sommers lamented, “It’s too bad that this often fevered, entirely fascinating work’s proletarian and musical charms are muffled in Doyle’s misjudged, under-performed production.”  Of Doyle and Arsenault’s set, NYSR number two caviled, “Such visuals do not suggest a Steeltown so much as an Oil City,” but Sommers had a more pointed criticism of the performing: he was displeased with “performers who more or less sing (and more or less act, alas)” and “the not entirely resonant sound of music they make.”  (He was harshest on Yazbeck.)  Summing up, Sommers found, “Generally, there’s too little zest to their group effort, however, and the show merely plods along rather than rouses the audience. Sad to say, this rendition of The Cradle Will Rock scarcely rocks at all.”

On TheaterScene.net, David Kaufman complained, “Without voice or costume changes, it’s difficult to know when Ken Barnett is Editor Daily or when he’s President Prexy.”  Kaufman found that “what’s missing from Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock is the heart and/or soul that every musical requires,” which he blamed partly on “Doyle’s direction.”  Kaufman dubbed Cradle “a wannabe musical or opera that, ironically, lacks substance, given its heavy-hitting intentions.”

Donna Herman of New York Theatre Guide, reminding us of the nearly-abortive début, remarked that “it makes perfect sense that, with the swamp returned to Washington, DC where another conservative congress is making headlines with corruption scandals, The Cradle Will Rock is being revived.”  The NYTG reviewer observed that “Blitzstein’s modern style of music that could almost be described as harsh, at times defying easy melody, fits [Doyle’s] kind of stripped-down presentation.”  Herman felt that the talented cast . . . all manage to nimbly navigate their multiple roles” but also found that “[w]ith almost everyone dressed in some form of overalls or factory worker garb, the early scene in the jail before you understand that everyone will have multiple roles is very confusing.”  Like me, Herman longs to see a fully mounted production of Cradle, but concluded: “I wouldn’t have missed this chance to see a full production of The Cradle Will Rock.”

“Though there’s the occasional lack of tension that makes the 90-minute production tend to lag at times,” reported Broadway World’s Michael Dale, “individual performances are quite good, and the clima[c]tic confrontation . . . is fiercely played.”  On Theater Pizzazz, Joseph Pisano noted that while the history of Cradle is “a great story of art fighting against censorship, that doesn’t necessarily mean the art itself was great.”  At CSC, though, as “[l]ed by director John Doyle . . ., the ten actors, each of whom portray multiple roles, give affecting allegorical life to Blitzstein’s Steeltown, USA.” 

Steven Ross of Front Mezz Junkies dubbed Cradle a “mesmerizingly sing-song sonata of a play” and the CSC production an “interesting and thought provoking revival solidly directed by John Doyle.”  Oddly, Ross suggested that “the passion and emotional depth of what dance might have brought to the thesis on corruption and resistance is what this CSC production is lacking.”  He felt, “The blood of the desperate isn’t pounding in [the characters’] veins.”  (All this seems to come from the fact that Ross longed to see Yazbeck dance because the actor’s a Broadway hoofer.)  In the end, the FMJ reviewer lamented, “The singing registers beautifully, the dance of the staging entertains . . ., the enthusiasm of the cast resonates, but the heart of the piece never pumps with the same power of . . . that first rebellious production.”

Characterizing CSC’s revival as “solid.” Cititour’s Brian Scott Lipton found that “Blitzstein’s bare-bones script . . . doesn’t quite make the stakes feel high enough.”  Nonetheless, countered Lipton, “Still, the entire cast . . . works very hard to flesh out their fictional counterparts.”  Though “sometimes engaging,” CT’s reviewer found that “the songs are also a bit one-note.” Doyle, however, “adds enough choreography to make the numbers more than just ‘park and bark’ solos.”  The director’s “ultra-minimalist” style, though, “has the effect of either forcing audiences to really pay attention . . . or allowing them to get distracted by their own thoughts.”  Lipton sums up by adding that “as a work of stagecraft, it still feels too much a piece of its time to make the same impact it did 82 years ago.”

On TheaterMania, Zachary Stewart, in another review that scored only a 40, proclaimed the history of Cradle’s 1937 opening “a joyous tale of regular people defying fearsome institutions, and singing in the face of power.”  Then he lamented, “It’s a pity none of that comes through in John Doyle’s dispassionate, soporific revival at Classic Stage Company.  The cradle rocks all right.”  The TM reviewer argued, “There’s never been a better time to revive The Cradle Will Rock,” as he recalled the Jussie Smollett embarrassment, the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal, and the Sackler art-funding disgrace.  “With the audience bringing so much pent-up rage into the theater, there’s no reason that a play like this should feel frozen in time.” 

Stewart criticized all of Doyle’s production choices, including the unit costuming, the non-representational set, the pared-down cast and consequent multiple casting, and even the unamplified singing, asserting that Doyle “does his production no favors by falling back on old tricks.”  The TM writer continued: “With this semi-intelligible production, Doyle seems to assume that his audience already knows this rarely revived play, robbing newcomers of the opportunity to discover the work in its full clarity.”  In conclusion, Stewart proclaimed, “Blunt by design and rarely hummable, The Cradle Will Rock still has the power to shake audiences awake . . ., but it takes a firmer hand than this to really push us out of our bassinets.”

Talkin’ Broadway’s David Hurst, whose notice was Show-Score’s lowest-rated at 35, reveled in the prospect of a revival of The Cradle Will Rock at this auspicious (“Trumpian”) moment, particularly one staged by Doyle and produced at CSC.  “Imagine my surprise,” sighed Hurst, “then to encounter a lifeless production which, despite an abundance of talent at his disposal, never explodes with rage under Doyle’s flaccid direction.”  Complaining that “there’s no energy or vitality propelling the storytelling of Doyle’s production.” Hurst declared, “The cast is terrific,” praising all 10 of Doyle’s company, especially “triple-threat Yazbeck,” as the TB reviewer insists, “who tries mightily to bring Doyle’s production to life with the rousing title song.”  In the end, however, not even “mighty” Yazbeck “can save this revival.”  Hurst’s final assessment is that “whether you call it an allegorical play in music or proletariat agitprop, The Cradle Will Rock deserves better than its current mounting at Classic Stage.”

On his blog, Theatre’s Leiter Side, Samuel L. Leiter dubbed the CSC revival of Cradle “problematic.” He warned, “If you don’t know the script, or can’t make out the lyrics as they’re being overpowered by the piano pounding . . ., you’ll have considerable difficulty in making out who’s the plutocrat, the cop, the druggist, the hooker, the foreman, and so on.”  He added, “Nor will it be easy to separate the different characters played by actors wearing the same garments for each.”  Leiter reported, “There’s a lot of talent involved in the ensemble," and “[s]everal moments are imaginatively staged but Doyle overdoes a few things” like the way Mr. Mister throws his cash around to make those he’s paying off crawl for it.  The revival lacked “nuance and character expression . . . in Doyle's fast-paced but monotonous production, so one-note that my plus-one couldn't help saying: ‘It had a certain ring.  Bo-ring.’”  The blogger-reviewer concluded, “The wind is blowing at the CSC but down has come baby, The Cradle Will Rock and all.”

'Irma La Douce'

The third and last presentation in the 2014 Encores! Season of Broadway musicals in concert was Irma La Douce, which premièred in New York at the Plymouth Theatre (now the Gerald Schoenfeld) in 1960 and then moved to the Alvin Theatre.  Unusual for its era, Irma La Douce was a French musical play (music by Marguerite Monnot and lyrics and book by Alexandre Breffort) which débuted in Paris at the Théâtre Gramont in 1956 and then opened in London’s West End in 1958 (with English book and lyrics by Julian More, David Heneker, and Monty Norman) in a production directed by Peter Brook.  The Broadway version, which was produced by David Merrick and starred Elizabeth Seal (in the title role), Keith Michell, and Clive Revill, all from the London cast, played for more than a year, running 524 performances.  (The Paris première ran for four years and the London production stayed on the boards for three, accumulating 1,512 performances.)  Of the Broadway staging, which was nominated for several 1961 Tonys including Best Musical (Irma lost to Bye Bye Birdie, but Seal won for Best Actress in a Musical), Life magazine said Irma was “a French fairy tale for wicked grown-ups who want to believe in love.”  As the title character repeatedly says, “Dis donc!” (an untranslatable French interjection that can mean anything from “wow,” to  “goodness,” to “hey,” to “look here,” to “by the way,” to “that’s enough,” to  “well,” to “listen,” and just about anything else that expresses surprise or draws attention to what you are about to say; it’s also the title of one of Irma’s most striking songs and dance numbers).

I was a tad young to have seen this “adult” show, which Jack Viertel, Encores! Artistic Director, dubbed “by far the hippest musical on Broadway” in its day, when I was first starting to see Broadway musicals, either in Washington or in New York City, but I recall that Irma did play at D.C.’s National Theatre (before its Broadway run), and there was talk among my parents’ friends of this peculiar (and naughty) play (Dis donc!).  (In fact, my mom says she recalls having seen it with my dad, which seems both possible and likely.)  Let’s remember that September 1960 was still the Eisenhower era (John F. Kennedy wasn’t elected president until November and didn’t take office until January 1961), more part of the complacent ’50s than the go-go ’60s, so a comedy about a lady of the evening was a startling phenomenon.  Irma’s biggest competition on Broadway when it opened was Rodgers and Hammerstein’s final collaboration, which Viertel called “undoubtedly the un-hippest” show on Broadway, The Sound of Music: a singing nun versus a singing prostitute!  Hair, the musical that put nudity on a Broadway stage, didn’t début there until April 1968, the end of the decade.  Sweet Charity, a musical about a taxi dancer, the stand-in for a hooker, opened in January 1966, over five years after Irma La Douce came to New York.  (In Federico Fellini’s 1957 film Nights of Cabiria, the young woman was a streetwalker, but Neil Simon, Cy Coleman, and Dorothy Fields sanitized Charity Hope Valentine, who’s still in “the rent-a-body business” in the adaptation, for Broadway consumption.

Soon, I began hearing some of Irma’s score, particularly Clive Revill’s rendition of “The Valse Milieu,” the ballad that introduces the setting and atmosphere of the play (and much of its Parisian argot, which I’ll mention in a bit), and it has always fascinated me.  (“Our Language of Love,” sung in the first act and then reprised twice, was the song from Irma’s score that became what Viertel called a “semi-enduring standard.”)  Long before there were French musicals on U.S. stages (Les Misérables, 1987-2003; Miss Saigon, 1991-2001), even before the British started writing and exporting musical plays, when musical theater of the kind we know from old-time Broadway was a solely American art form, Irma La Douce was a phenomenon and its very existence was intriguing.  (In 1958, a French revue, La Plume de Ma Tante, had opened on Broadway—and also played at the Capital’s National— but that had no book and French musical revues had been the basis for U.S. entertainments for decades, though not at the Broadway level for the most part.)  Beyond some of the songs, however, I only knew Irma from the non-musical 1963 Billy Wilder film starring Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon, which dispensed with three-quarters of the material’s charm along with the songs.  (Without the songs, as you’ll discern, Irma La Douce is just a frantic farce that happens to be about a whore and her pimp.  The only explanation I’ve found for the deletion is that Wilder wasn’t comfortable staging songs and dances.)  There’s been no revival of Irma in New York aside from a truly stripped-down concert (one piano—but without amplification) in 2008 by Musicals Tonight! and the only other restaging I found in the United States was another concert version in San Francisco in 2008. 

The concert version of Irma, the first Encores! musical “that didn’t originate on American soil,” opened at the New York City Center on West 55th Street on 7 May for its customary brief run, closing on 11 May.  Diana, my usual theater partner, and I saw the show on Friday evening, 9 May.  The concert adaptation and direction was by John Doyle (Tony for the 2005 revival of Sweeney Todd; his 2006 revival of Company won the Best Revival of a Musical Tony), with choreography by Chase Brock (assistant choreographer of the 2003 revival of Wonderful Town on Broadway; Lucille Lortel Award Nominee for Outstanding Choreography for 2011’s The Blue Flower).  The orchestra is once again conducted by Encores! Musical Director Rob Berman (who did the same honors for The Most Happy Fella, on which I reported on ROT on 10 April) using arrangements by André Popp and additional orchestrations by Robert Ginzler, the original orchestrators.  (Supplemental dance music was composed for Broadway by John Kander.)  John Lee Beatty designed the sets, more elaborate for Irma than is usual for Encores! 

Irma La Douce, in the dead-on characterization of IBDB, the Internet Broadway Database, “is not only French; it is intensely Parisian French.  Set in an area tourists seek, but so seldom find, its musical idiom, its moral atmosphere, its plot and its argot are part of Paris not even all Parisians know.”  It is, in the words of the opening number (“The Valse Milieu”), a “story of passion, bloodshed, desire and death . . . everything, in fact, that makes life worth living.”  (Dis donc!  Along with the argot terms, that phrase has echoed in my head ever since I first heard Revill sing it on the cast recording.)  The plot is the tale of Irma-La-Douce (her name means “Irma the Sweet” and is typical of the characters’ names in this play, as you’ll see), a successful Paris prostitute, or poule (‘hen’) in the show’s vocabulary.  An impecunious law student, Nestor-Le-Fripe (“Nestor the Shabby”), wanders into Bar-Des-Inquiets (Bar of the Anxious), the bistro in Pigalle, Paris’s red-light district, owned by Bob-Le-Hotu (hotu is a kind of fresh-water fish commonly called a nase, but the slang meaning is hard to translate; the closest I can get here is Bob the Creep), who acts as the narrator.  Nestor, like many of the other men in the milieu (argot for the underworld scene), falls in love with Irma and becomes her mec (‘guy’), the local slang for ‘pimp.’  The young law student becomes jealous of her customers, however, so to keep her for himself, Nestor disguises himself as a rich, older man with a long, red beard named Oscar and becomes her sole client.  (One reviewer characterized Nestor as “poor but noble”: “poor,” yes, but “noble,” not so much.  He’s not trying to save Irma from the streets—he wants to keep her to himself!) 

To pay Irma’s fee (grisbi, argot for ‘money’), Monsieur Oscar takes a job polishing a dance floor at night—by hand—and is admired for his coup by the other mecs, who welcome him as one of them: Jojo-Les-Yeux-Sales (“Jojo-Dirty-Eyes”), Robert-Les-Diams (“Robert the Rocks”), Persil-Le-Noir (“Persil the Shady”), and Frangipane (“The Flower”).  (Apparently Breffort actually knew a crook called “Jo-Les-Yeux-Sales.”  Don’t you just love these French “underworld” names?  They’re a hoot ’na half!)  But having taken Irma out of the clutches of Polyte-Le-Mou (“Polyte the Bull”), AKA Le Boss, and falling afoul of the corrupt Police Inspector, the chief flic (‘cop’), for taking Irma out of circulation, Nestor makes a few enemies, too.  No longer able to keep up this exhausting ruse, however, Irma’s “Wreck of a Mec” does away with his alter ego.  Convicted in a kangaroo trial of murdering Oscar, Nestor’s transported to Devil’s Island, the French penal colony off the coast of French Guiana near the Equator.  Hearing that Irma is expecting their baby at Christmas, he determines to get home and escapes with the gang of mecs convicted with him.  Returning to Paris and proving that Oscar’s not really dead, Nestor and Irma reunite in time for the births of their twin sons, Nestor and Oscar, upon which, in order to conform, however belatedly, to the conventions of morality, they get married.  Dis donc!

(I wonder if that last plot bit, which Bob tosses out at the end as a kind of “oh, by the way” afterthought, was added for the tenderer sensibilities of English and American audiences.  After all, France is the nation where former President François Mitterrand’s funeral in 1996 was attended by both his wife and his long-time mistress and where another French president, François Hollande, had an affair with an actress while living in the official residence with another mistress—after having separated from his first mistress with whom he had had four children.  Dis donc, I don’t think the French would much care if a mec marries his poule or not just because they had a couple of bébés, non.) 

Okay, I’m being a little silly, I admit.  But that’s sort of the effect that Irma La Douce has.  It is silly—without the music and the Gallic frisson it’s practically inane.  (It doesn’t help matters that almost the whole story is in act one, leaving mostly a lot of vamping for act two.)  Let’s acknowledge right off that M. Breffort is no Molière; he’s not even Jean-François Regnard (“Molière lite,” on whose play The Heir Apparent I reported on 25 April).  I don’t know his other plays (he also wrote prose works), none of which seem to have been published or performed in English, but I read that the book for Irma was based on a short piece, Les Harengs terribles (“The terrible herrings,” ca. 1950—and no, I have no idea what it’s about), Breffort wrote for a Paris cabaret performance.  (That could explain why Irma couldn’t sustain a two-hour-ten-minute stretch without petering out after intermission.)  It’s not just the overall plot that creaks, but several scenes seem to have been composed with Breffort’s logic switch in the off position.  (Granted, I don’t really know how much of the book was reinvented by Mssrs. More, Heneker, and Norman.)  Nestor’s trial is beyond absurd—and I don’t mean Beckett, Ionesco, or even Kafka—and his attempts to prove that he didn’t kill Oscar because, first, he was Oscar and, then, Oscar’s still alive, defy recapping altogether.  (Kris Kringle proves he’s real because he gets mail through the U.S. Post Office; Oscar proves he’s alive because he pays sales tax!  Dis donc!)  You just have to buy it or the play doesn’t conclude.  Despite these weaknesses, though, Irma La Douce is fun precisely because it’s (French) fluff and because of the music, which retains its Gallic panache even in translation.  (Marguerite Monnot wrote many of the songs performed by the great French chanteuse Édith Piaf, including “La Vie en rose” and my favorite Piaf recording, “Milord,” and that musical style is audible in several of Irma La Douce’s numbers.)  

The musical ensemble, perhaps better described as a band this time, which numbered a “herculean” 38 for Fella, was pared down to ten instruments for Irma, approximating, Viertel said, “the original instrumentation” of the Broadway production.  The “café-style band” came “complete with an accordion for Parisian color.”  Musically, the decision worked very well indeed, both as a vehicle for the songs and also for the “Parisian color,” which was created and maintained excellently by the musicians (particularly that accordionist, William Schimmel), the singers, the set and costume “consultants,” and the cast.  (After Most Happy Fella, I voiced some complaints about the sound system at City Center, and I have to reiterate them here.  When one or two people sing, I could distinguish the words well enough, but when there were more than two voices, the lyrics mostly got lost.  The sound design for Irma La Douce was from Scott Lehrer.)  But there was an unexpected element to the band’s presence on stage—they were placed on a raised bandstand up and left of center stage—and I don’t know whether it was original with director Doyle or came from the West End/Broadway staging—perhaps even the Paris première.  The frequenters of Bar-Des-Inquiets, occupying the rest of the stage below the bandstand, treated the musicians as the house band, acknowledging them with raised drinks or other gestures.  Dis donc!  (Our seats were high up in the balcony again, this time on the house left side, so I couldn’t see the band members very well—my view was cut off by the proscenium arch—so I don’t know if they gestured back, though I presume there was some quid pro quo.)  This wasn’t a big part of the show—there was no accompanying dialogue, just random silent bits—but it went along with the heightened theatricality of the production (which I’ll describe more later).  

As I mentioned, the look of this show was a little more elaborate than most Encores! concerts, with Beatty (retiring from the Encores! gig following Irma after designing every presentation for the concert series since the start in 1994) having conceived a scaffold-like matrix that framed the Bar-Des-Inquiets as well as the other suggested settings, which include the streets of Pigalle, Irma’s room, the Hotel Rapid, the Bridge of Caulaincourt (the poules’ stroll), a courtroom, a prison ship, Devil’s Island, a police station, and so on.  Talkin’ Broadway’s Matthew Murray called Beatty’s milieu, “real and fantasy Paris all at once.”  Only the seedy bistro, with its exposed brick walls decorated with French liquor ads, had set pieces (the counter, café tables and chairs); the rest of the scenes were suggested by a few select props and action.  The playing area was less narrow than the one for Most Happy Fella (principally, I assume, because the bandstand needed to be so much smaller than the one for the previous show), so there was more staging and bigger dance numbers.  Beatty’s set was moodily lit by Paul Miller who kept the feel of a gritty Paris quartier and one of its seamier bouges (dives).  The denizens of Bar-Des-Inquiets were clothed by costume consultant Ann Hould-Ward who put Irma alone in color, a bright red dress (the color of passion . . . and hookers) with a purple, heart-shaped bodice.  (One reviewer noted that these are the colors of blood and bruises—though neither figures in the plot of Irma La Douce; the mecs, even Le Boss, are decidedly unviolent and Irma’s no Suzie Wong.)  The men’s duds, all shades of gray or brown, are variations on suits (not even one apache scarf or striped shirt in the lot!); they may not be chic, but these mecs are respectably dressed.  

The acting and singing ensemble, all male (Irma’s the only female role), performed well, evoking the slightly sleazy underworld characters that might be the Gallic counterparts to Guys and Doll’s gamblers and lowlifes (that is, not really dangerous or even bad . . . if you overlook how they make their livings) with panache and good spirits.  Even Le Boss, potentially the nastiest mec because he wants to control Irma and goes after Nestor, is less Tony Soprano (whom he resembled vaguely in Chris Sullivan’s performance) than Lippy or Slug, the two gangsters from Kiss Me Kate (in the film; they have no names in the stage version).  There’s little distinction among the mecs (Sam Bolen as Frangipane, Ben Crawford as Persil-Le-Noir, Zachary James as Jojo-Les-Yeux-Sales, and Ken Krugman as Robert-Les-Diams) aside from appearance and vocal range (Bolen is a little guy with a high tenor, for instance), but they perform well together in their several group numbers (when I could overlook that amplification muddle).  In the role of the Police Inspector, Stephen DeRosa looks like an accountant but manages to project a little menace even as he lets us see that he’s not terribly effective at either graft (innocent Nestor bests him, after all) or law enforcement.  (I was reminded, in a comic and non-threatening vein, of Gideon, the vicious killer played by Ned Glass in Charade—a bald little man described by James Coburn’s Tex Panthollow as “even meaner ’n’ I am.”)  All the men save McClure took on incidental roles, and Gets especially became a sort of utility actor, as part of the theatrical style of Irma that also encompassed Beatty’s multi-purpose unit set.

As Nestor, the naïve and straight-laced law student—he drinks milk, dis donc!—who becomes Irma’s lover and mec, Rob McClure was disappointing.  His voice is fine and he did well in the musical numbers from the technical point of view, but he projected so little character aside from wide-eyed innocence that he left Jennifer Bowles essentially alone in their two-character scenes and duets.  There was little romantic chemistry between the two leads, and I couldn’t help wondering what would possibly have attracted Bowles’s Irma to McClure’s Nestor to start with.  McClure has gotten considerable praise for his Broadway début as Charlie Chaplin in Broadway’s Chaplin (2012), for which he received a Tony nomination, and his appearance in the 2011 Encores! presentation of Where’s Charley?—in which he also played a dual role—but I’ve never seen his work before (he worked regionally, particularly in the Philadelphia area, before his New York début), and I’m not impressed with his range.  A lot of shows need a star turn, or at least a really sparkling performance, to sell them, and Irma La Douce appears to be one of those, but McClure didn’t shine here.  He just seemed like a little boy (he’s a small man) trying to play a grown-up and not pulling it off, leaving a hole in the center of the production.

McClure got no help from Malcolm Gets as Bob-Le-Hotu, either.  More than anything else, this Irma needed Clive Revill!  (I’d add “or someone like him,” but there isn’t any such person.  Revill’s the kind of performer who just dominates a scene; he’s so magnetic I can’t focus on anything or anyone else when he’s on the stage or screen.  Who else can do that without being a scene-stealer or scenery-chewer, dis donc?)  Gets, like McClure, received great mentions for past work (Tony nom for 2003’s Amour and an Obie in 1995 for Merrily We Roll Along and The Two Gentlemen of Verona), but like his castmate, I don’t know his work and he was so lacking in personality as Bob, I couldn’t reconcile the centrality of his role, the glue that holds this slim story together, with his performance.  With a weak Nestor and a bland Bob, the whole of this Irma rests on the performance of Jennifer Bowles.  It also places the entire weight of the show’s theatrical success on the silly book and the score since two of the three main performances have been nullified.

Fortunately for John Doyle and Encores!, Bowles hit mostly the right notes (as it were) with the title role.  Even without much of a partner off of whom to play, her singing was evocative of character and story, full of naïve cynicism (is there such as thing as that?—she’s sort of the Gallic musical comedy counterpart of Melina Mercouri’s Ilya in Never on Sunday, a film that opened in the U.S. three days after Irma preemed on Broadway) and total amour for her mec.  Charles Isherwood of the New York Times complained that Bowles’s Irma was “a bit like . . . Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm going slumming”; but that’s how the part’s written, so either you buy it or you have to reject the whole play (which is pretty much what Isherwood did).  Bowles’s dancing, while energetic, expressed less character than her singing, but that may have been more the fault of Chase Brock than the actress herself.  

Fortunately for Encores! and Diana and me, Irma La Douce is basically an ensemble play, with two characters spotlighted and a narrator/Greek chorus to fill in the gaps.  Both Bob and Nestor join the mecs for many of the scenes and numbers, and even Irma takes part, albeit as a focal figure, in several of the group dances.  Brock’s choreography is pleasingly saucy and energetic, with an especially delightful and spirited “dance of the penguins” in act two’s hallucinatory “Arctic Ballet,” with Bowles and four men in long, red beards!  (Dis donc!)  So Doyle could paper over the deficiencies of his individual casting choices and make the show work as a whole—although with a less sparkle than it ought to have (and otherwise would have had).  The original Broadway outing got Tony noms for Best Musical, Best Direction of a Musical (Peter Brook), Best Actress in a Musical (Elizabeth Searle, who won over Julie Andrews in Camelot, Carol Channing in Show Girl, and Nancy Walker in Do Re Mi), Best Featured Actor in a Musical (Clive Revill), among others; the Encores! edition wouldn’t have gotten such recognition, I don’t think.  Nonetheless, for what Irma is and for what Encores! purports to present—essentially a rearview-mirror glimpse of a moment in musical-theater history—this Irma La Douce was nicely handled and presented, resulting in a completely enjoyable, if not scintillating, theater experience for me (and, from the chatter as we left the theater, for many other spectators that Friday night).  I have reservations about some of Doyle’s casting decisions, but not his stage work.  He probably could have gotten more distinctive and emphatic performances out of McClure and Gets (I’m guessing based on their résumés since I haven’t seen their previous work), and for that I judge his work less positively, but I also have to acknowledge that Encores! only rehearses for eight days (plus one dress rehearsal)—and Gets replaced the announced Allan Corduner on 14 April for a rehearsal period that started nine days later.  Given all those circumstances, Doyle did an acceptable and competent job of mounting Irma La Douce for Encores!, though not a truly excellent interpretation that might have shown why the play caught so many people’s attention 54 years ago.  That’s a shame, but not a calamity.  

The press was largely negative, a consensus to which the crowd with whom I left the theater didn’t subscribe, as they vocally affirmed.  (Notices bore headlines or subheads like “Musical story of Parisian prostitute suffers from stodgy direction and a convoluted plot,” “‘Irma La Duce’ production lacks zest,” “Lovely songs—and penguins—save dated musical’s plot,” “Irma La Douce Isn’t So Sweet,” and “How Was Irma la Douce Ever a Hit?!”)  In the Times, Isherwood dismissed the play as “a rusty relic” which needed “a small Pernod . . . [o]r maybe a large draft of absinthe . . . to restore the zest” of the original.  Although the Timesman praised the “small but hard-working cast,” particularly Bowles and McClure, who, he said, “fling themselves into” their roles “with energy to spare,” in the end, “it all feels about as fresh and tasty as a day-old croissant.”   Isherwood gave a lot of credit to Berman’s instrumental ensemble, who “make a comparatively mighty and merry sound that does more than anything to bring alive the musical’s now-faded charms.”  “Still,” the reviewer concluded, “‘Irma La Douce’ may be a show destined to live on in its admirers’ memories, and on recording, as opposed to a viable work for the contemporary stage.”  He ended his notice with a bitterly humorous quip: “By intermission, I was ready to give myself my own cute nickname: Charles-Le-Bored-Senseless.”

The Daily News’s Joe Dziemianowicz labeled the play “so leaden that it’s ‘Irma La Dull,’” declaring that “the story is unwieldy” and adding that “flaky casting and direction . . . don’t help matters.”  Dziemianowicz did concede, though, that “bouncy songs . . . and the 10-piece orchestra add jolts of ooh-la-la.”  He concluded, “It takes buckets of charm and magnetism to pull off this walk on the weird and wild side,” but observed that the cast, singling out McClure and Bowles in particular, can be seen to be “working hard” to accomplish this.  In her New York Post review, Elisabeth Vincentelli called the plot of Irma La Douce a “bizarre comic romance,” and objected that director Doyle “lacks the soufflé-light touch required for a show big on whimsy,” engaging in “heavy-handed staging.”  Making matters worse, Vincentelli asserted, “the leads don’t click,” expressing complaints about both McClure’s and Bowles’s performances.  In the end, the Post reviewer decided that “this one’s for hardcore showtune buffs.”

In am New York, Matt Windman pointed out that the play, touted 54 years ago as “hip and sexy,” just “looks sanitized by today’s standards.”  The musical’s “premise . . . is relatively thin and the farcical shenanigans produce few laughs,” Windman affirmed, but added that “it has some attractive songs” despite Doyle’s “grim-looking production” which “lacks any sense of zest.”  After disparaging each and every ridiculous plot element—which he made even sillier by his presentation, of course—Jesse Green wondered, “Well, perhaps the joke came off better in 1960,” in New York magazine.  “I have to say this is entirely mystifying,” he continued, and declared that the musical’s book, “is possibly the most repulsive I have ever encountered and, for what it’s worth, the most bizarre.”  (Just to drive home his point, Green noted that “just when you think the thing can’t get any weirder, there’s the penguin-hallucination ballet.  Oh, you read that right.”)  Of the play’s vaunted “frankness,” Green decided that it “now reads as a smokescreen for smarm” and that the “fablelike tone is also a dodge to keep the reeking thing at arm’s length.”  The man from New York described the result, “a rare botch” by Encores! directed with “dour sensibility” by Doyle, as “part Fantasticks, part letters to Penthouse” and even asserted that “to modern sensibilities, wholly misogynistic—with a soupçon of homophobia and racism thrown in for good measure.”  (I get the misogyny—it’s endemic in the mid-century plot—but I don’t see the racism and homophobia.  Race and sexual preference aren’t mentioned in Irma La Douce as I remember it.)  Even when it comes to the songs, which Green agreed are “lovely,” the New York review-writer added that Monnot “proceeds to drill them into your ears until you want to shoot the accordionist.”  Green’s conclusion was by far the most unrelievedly negative of all the notices I read:

Maybe it would take a full-bore zany like Jerry Lewis, so beloved of the French, to make material like this silly enough to be palatable.  Or a sexual culture so far advanced from our own that laughing at the wacky life of streetwalkers would be like laughing at cavemen now.  In the meantime, let’s put this one back in its box and bury it.  No one will weep . . . .

Dis donc!

On Broadway World, Michael Dale described Irma as an “intimate, semi-seedy musical comedy” that’s “an interesting obscurity with a lively collection of songs, a sufficient amount of cleverness and some wonderfully atmospheric orchestrations.”  Despite “holes in the plot,” said Dale, the show, “as second-tier musical comedies go, . . . is quite enjoyable through to its first act curtain twist.”  Act two, the BWW writer felt, suffers “from a lack of sufficient plot,” as I noted.  Additionally, Dale wrote, “there is little in director John Doyle’s production that pops out at the audience” because the director “takes a whimsical farce and tones it down toward realism.”  He derided the main performances with the exception of McClure’s Nestor, although the reviewer found “little chemistry displayed—romantic, comedic or otherwise—between” McClure and Bowles.  The score, Dale affirmed, is the “main attraction” in Irma and in Berman’s rendition, “audiences at Irma la Douce are treated to a rare and succulent taste of 1950s Parisian authenticity.”  Wondering if Irma La Douce isn’t “simply a case of some charming songs but a book that’s too hopelessly dated and contrived, not to mention too skimpy to work as more [than] a drawn-out sketch,” CurtainUp review-writer Elyse Sommer asserted that “John Doyle wasn’t the right . . . man to save this from being the invaluable staged concert series’ first stumble that I can recall.”  Sommer blamed all the contributors, including a director less “adept at dishing up a light souffle than a heavy bouillabaisse,” a leading lady who’s “more gamely energetic than gamine,” and the male ensemble “who also sing and dance well, also lack Gallic panache.”  The concert presentation “does have its pleasures,” noted Sommer, naming a number of the songs and dances, but essentially asserted that they’d be more enjoyable without Doyle’s “fully staged and rehearsed set-up.”  

Huffington Post’s David Finkle called the musical “the feeble enterprise that apparently is all there is of Irma La Douce” and felt, “There absolutely had to be a great deal more [than Seal’s original performance], for nothing else would explain why Irma La Douce . . . could have captivated audiences, critics and Tony voters” back in 1960.  During the sequence when Nestor and his alternate identity, Oscar, shift busily between roles and activities, Finkle asserted that “audience members are beginning to lose patience and/or nod off” (although I’m not sure how the reviewer gets to speak for all spectators).  “What Irma La Douce really is,” Finkle believed, “is rampant idiocy, for which there may be no excuse” and “the perfectly adequate, though ultimately lackluster . . . troupe assembled [at Encores!] are unable to make anything of it.”  He praised the songs, but added, “There aren’t enough of them, however, to serve as show redeemers.”  Opening his Irma notice with, “It’s tragic when comedy falls flat,” David Gordon on TheaterMania lamented that “humorless direction gets in the way of earning the production the thing it most yearns for: laughs.”  Gordon characterized the play as “a silly trifle of French farce” and warned, “Everything involved with this storyline should be funny, and it’s clear that we’re supposed to be laughing, but we’re not.”  Blaming director Doyle, the TM reviewer observed, “Tonally, this production is confusing, taking itself way too earnestly to be funny, and yet not seriously enough for you to care about the romance.”  He also criticized the romantic leads who “fail to ignite the requisite sparks” and pointed out that the rest of the acting ensemble “have turned in more memorable performances elsewhere.”  Praising the physical (and instrumental) production, especially Beatty’s farewell design, Gordon concluded, “If only this staging of Irma La Douce were more worthy of the great send-off that Beatty has provided for it.”  

Noting that Irma’s “story is as light as a French pastry, and has aged just about as well over the years,” Jena Tesse Fox of NY Theater Guide wrote, “As plotlines go, there’s not much there . . . and the score—while quite enjoyable—just isn’t enough to sustain the whole show on such flimsy bones.”  Despite these reservations, however, Fox concluded that “the Encores! cast, under Doyle’s somewhat muddled and vague direction, gives it their all, and elevates the show beyond the sum of its parts.”  Repeating her admonition that Irma hasn’t aged well, and acknowledging that it isn’t “likely to go down in history as one of the must-see Encores! revivals,” Fox felt the musical “is certainly worth catching if only for the chance to see a rarely produced Golden Age musical.”  Dubbing Irma La Douce a “raucously Gallic curiosity”  and “a silly, vaguely adult entertainment that’s as free of pretensions as it is inspiration,” Talkin’ Broadway’s Matthew Murray pronounced it as Encores! “most laid-back” and “certainly the weirdest” concert in the series and the most “flamboyantly flagrant way” for the project to abandon its original mission of staging “Great American Musicals in Concert.”  The production, Murray noted, “revels in its chapeau-to-chaussure French-ness while doing everything possible to avoid the sauce, spice, and whimsy that usually implies” even as “it works as far as it goes, provided you’re expecting it to not go very far.”  Murray insisted, though, that “there’s so little here” that in the end, “you may wonder whether you’re actually supposed to care about any of this at all.”  (The Talkin’ Broadway writer continued that “all I can say is that I didn’t.”)  He blamed Doyle’s “cool, broad staging” and lamented that the stars couldn’t “transcend such obstacles.”  Even the songs “are pleasing in the moment,” the reviewer wrote, “but fade into the mist not long after.”  In the end, Murray found, “You either buy into what the show is selling or you don’t . . .”—and he apparently didn’t.