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.)
* *
*
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.)
* *
* *
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.
* *
* *
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.)
* *
* *
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.
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