"Unopened": 'A Pray by Blecht'

 

[The third installment in the New York Times “Unopened” series is the paper’s co-chief theater reviewer Jesse Green’s report on the demise of the Broadway plans for a musical with the unlikely title of A Pray by Blecht (and no, that’s not a typo).  It ran in the “Arts” section of the Times of 5 November 2020; the online version of the story was posted on 2 November under the headline “A Golden Team, a Terrible Title and a Show That Vanished.”

[As I observed in the introduction to the second installment of “Unopened,” the individual articles in this series aren’t connected (except by the common theme), but reading them all gives a (dismaying) picture of the traps and hurdles that have scuttled more than a few Broadway-bound endeavors.  I recommend, for those who are just joining the series, going back to parts one and two, posted on 26 February and 1 March, to read about the founderings of Lone Star Love in 2007 and Face Value in 1993.]

“A TOP TEAM, BUT THE SHOW VANISHED”
by Jesse Green

Would you like to see a new musical from the people who brought you “West Side Story”? For better or worse, you probably never will.

How do you top “West Side Story”?

If you’re Leonard Bernstein [1918-90], Stephen Sondheim [b. 1930] and Jerome Robbins [1918-98], the answer is: You don’t.

Well, you try. Ten years after the composer, the lyricist and the director-choreographer of that show (along with its book writer, Arthur Laurents [1917-2011]) changed the musical theater with their contemporary take on “Romeo and Juliet,” they rejoined forces to develop another project.

The idea was Robbins’s. He thought that one of Bertolt Brecht’s Lehrstücke, or teaching plays, could make a good musical, being short and pointed and fable-like. In 1967, he asked Sondheim to read “The Measures Taken,” the first in a collection of four translations, for possible adaptation. When Sondheim balked, finding the material too inert, Robbins told him to read the next play in the book.

That one, “The Exception and the Rule,” is about a rapacious oil merchant (read: capitalism) who races another merchant across a desert to win a lucrative deal. Accompanying him are a guide and a porter; when the three get lost, and the porter (read: exploited labor) tries to help the merchant, the merchant misunderstands the gesture and shoots him. Naturally, being of the ruling class, he is acquitted: Self-defense, the judge decides, applies even if the threat is imaginary.

Sondheim, eager to work with Robbins, whom he called “the only genius I had ever associated with,” thought this story might work, even though he found most of Brecht [1898-1956], and especially the teaching plays, “insufferably simplistic.” In his book “Look, I Made a Hat,” he wrote that there was “too much Lehr in each stück” — too much teaching in each play — “to hold my attention.”

Indeed, his attention waned after “taking a stab” at two songs. Giving up, he suggested that Robbins get Bernstein to write both music and lyrics. But Robbins instead asked Jerry Leiber [1933-2011], the word half of the pop songwriting team of Leiber and [Michael] Stoller [b. 1933], to work with the maestro. Though the odd couple did complete some numbers, the show stalled out. Most do, usually for their own good.

But “The Exception and the Rule,” as it was then called, had a gleam of possibility that kept it from dying completely. Perhaps it would be an exception itself, as “West Side Story,” which almost fell through several times, was in its day.

What looked like the key arrived when the playwright John Guare [b. 1938], then known for surreal way-off-Broadway comedies, joined up with a great idea for the adaptation.

The story would now take place in a television studio where the Brecht play is being readied for broadcast. The tension between the star actor playing the merchant (who was to be white) and the supporting actors playing the guide and porter (who were to be Black) would parallel the class paranoia of the inner scenes, while adding an element of racial paranoia to the mix. Sondheim, noting that the Brecht would be chopped up by scenes set in the present, “and thus not be so relentlessly Brechtian,” rejoined the team.

By April 1968, a New York Times theater column trumpeted a January 1969 opening for the new musical. Later that year, the producers announced that the Broadway star Zero Mostel [1915-77] would play the lead. It seemed a mere glitch in its inevitable success when, in October, the show, budgeted at $600,000 [$4.6 million today] and now bearing Bernstein’s awful Spooneristic title “A Pray by Blecht,” was postponed until the following fall.

[Spooneristic is a word I haven’t heard much lately, so if you’re unfamiliar with the expression, it means ‘having the form of a spoonerism.’  A spoonerism, according to Wikipedia, “is an error in speech in which corresponding consonants, vowels, or morphemes are switched . . . between two words in a phrase.”  

[An example, from one of my middle school teachers, is “duddy stubble hall” for “double study hall” (which is where I first heard the word spoonerism—my teacher called herself out on it).  An intentional spoonerism, from comedian George Carlin (1937-2008): “Don’t sweat the petty things and don’t pet the sweaty things.”  

[The speech error is named after William Archibald Spooner (1844-1930), an Oxford don and ordained minister who was renowned for mixing up the syllables in spoken phrases.]

And then: nothing.

It was so dead that Bernstein, nine years later, describing it as “a big wonderful show that could have been,” got its title wrong. He called it “The Measures Taken.”

What happened? According to “Look, I Made a Hat,” in which Sondheim relates “almost all” of the tale, the golden collaboration was “no fun at all”; he stepped away again after he and Bernstein, who treated him as if he were “still an apprentice” from “West Side Story” days, wrote eight songs. Robbins quit soon thereafter: In the middle of auditions, he excused himself to Guare and Bernstein, left the theater and took off in a cab to Kennedy Airport.

Perhaps it is better that some shows should die so that others might live. After “A Pray by Blecht” collapsed, Sondheim went on almost immediately to write “Company,” “Follies” and “A Little Night Music.” Guare’s 1971 play “The House of Blue Leaves” jump-started his career. Bernstein and Robbins would each return to Broadway, albeit with mixed success, while continuing to excel in classical music and ballet.

Yet it was Robbins, the runaway, who couldn’t let the idea die. In the spring of 1987, at Lincoln Center Theater, he directed a multiweek workshop of a new version of the show called “The Race to Urga.” Sondheim attended only two rehearsals, which (he recalled in an email) were inchoate and disorganized.

“I couldn’t tell anything about it,” he wrote, “except that it seemed (as I’d always thought it was) self-consciously Important instead of spontaneous and exuberant, which is the chief saving grace of any Brecht play (and was Brecht’s intention).”

Guare, who provided the necessary new lyrics, recently declined to comment on the experience, having “closed the door” on it ages ago.

One person was happy to comment, though: Zero Mostel’s son Josh [b. 1946]. In the 1987 workshop, he was cast (after Kevin Kline [b. 1947] apparently withdrew) in the role originally intended for his father.

By the time the show was performed for invited audiences in May of that year, he recalled, Robbins had given up on the white vs. Black theme; Joe Grifasi [b. 1944] played the guide and Thomas Ikeda the porter, still unfortunately referred to as the “coolie.” But Brecht’s warning about the dangers of unlimited power remained — and not just in the coda, during which planted actors rose from the audience to sing about revolution. Robbins himself was a warning about unlimited power.

“Working with Jerry was torture,” Mostel said. “Thomas Ikeda literally passed out in my arms in rehearsal, from exhaustion. At our last show, Bernstein fell down the stairs trying to get out of there. Jerry was nasty even to Guare, a very sweet guy. He was so controlling and paranoid he wouldn’t tell us what time the performances were until right before they started.

“But I have to say the songs were brilliant. And the book was one of the best of any musical I’d been in. Some friends brought a 6-year-old to the show, and he said, ‘Is that all?’ — which is a pretty good review. It should have moved forward, and the reason it didn’t is that no one could stand Jerry.”

That’s a shame; a musical exploring the prerogatives of class (and the power imbalances inherent in the theater) would be exceedingly timely now. At one point, Sondheim has a police officer sing proudly of his beat, “Thirty natives and all so quiet,” to which his partner replies, “Thirty-seven before the riot.”

That’s a lyric that needs no alteration to work as satire, or tragedy — or at any rate a stageworthy bit of Lehr — in 2020.

[Readers of Rick On Theater may note that I’ve mentioned the Brecht play The Measures Taken in a number of posts.  It was produced in New York City by the experimental theater troupe Shaliko in 1974 and I used it as an illustration in my discussion “Acting: Testimony & Role vs. Character,” posted on 25 September 2013. 

[After try-outs in Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia, the groundbreaking Broadway production of West Side Story opened at the Winter Garden Theatre (at 50th Street and Broadway) on 26 September 1957 and ran 732 performances before closing on 27 June 1959, a year and nine months later. 

[The production was nominated for five Tony Awards in 1958, including Best Musical (WSS lost to The Music Man), and won two (Best Scenic Design for Oliver Smith and Best Choreography for Robbins; the production also won Carol Lawrence, who played Maria, a Theatre World Award.

[Unlike the other Broadway attempts that didn’t make it to opening covered by this series, A Pray by Blecht was never even seen by a public audience.  The Lincoln Center workshop, performed as The Race to Urga before an invited audience, occurred in April and May 1987.

[Next in “Unopened” (7 March): “The Bob Dylan musical that tried to find a way—way before ‘Girl From the North Country.’”]

Thoughts On Rehearsals

by Kirk Woodward

[Having started out this month with a contribution to Rick On Theater by my friend Kirk Woodward (“Bob And Ringo,” about rockers Bob Dylan and Ringo Starr  in performance, posted on 1 December), I’m all but closing out the month with a revisit from Kirk.  As the title of this article, “Thoughts On Rehearsals,” indicates, Kirk’s contemplating the theatrical exercise of rehearsing.  But he’s not writing about the techniques and practices of rehearsing, a subject on which he’s more than capable of expounding (see Kirk’s four-part series “Reflections On Directing,” 11, 14, 17, and 20 April 2013, along with several other posts about productions which he directed).  He’s ruminating on why he enjoys the work of rehearsals so much.

[That’s a sentiment with which I suspect most stage actors would agree.  I certainly did, as I told Kirk.  One major aspect of rehearsing—at least for me—that Kirk touches on here, one of the principal reasons I loved rehearsing, is that that’s where the creativity happens.  That’s where the art of acting is exercised—not just the skill or the craft.  By performance, the art work is done and technique largely takes over; but in rehearsal, the actor is called upon to create.  It’s why Aaron Frankel taught a class at HB Studio called How to Do Homework—which I took twice and went on myself to teach because I found it so useful and inspiring.  (See my post “An Actor’s Homework,” 19, 22, 25, and 28 April 2010.)  It’s also the impetus for both Uta Hagen’s book Respect for Acting and Konstantin Stanislavsky’s whole system.  For me,  performance was the reward for the creative work of rehearsing.

[Along the same lines,  Kirk also discusses the teamwork and the collegiality—the group of artists all coming together to make something, the collaboration.  With only rare exceptions, a theater production can’t happen without all the participants working together, and I found that exhilarating.  (It was also something I stressed when I taught or directed middle and high school students.)]  

Recently I participated in a concert presentation of the musical Candide (Wikipedia calls it an operetta), with music by Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) and lyrics by as many as eight contributors, particularly by the poet Richard Wilbur (1921-2017). The presentation I took part in was a joint endeavor by the Society of Musical Arts (SOMA) of Maplewood, New Jersey; the State Opera Company (SOC) of New Jersey; and Columbia High School, also in Maplewood.

Dita Delman is the Artistic Director of the SOC; Steve Culbertson is Musical Director and Conductor for SOMA and he conducted the orchestra and singers.  Jamie Bunce, the Director of Choral Activities for Columbia High School, trained the 150 member student chorus. The three shared directorial activities among themselves.

For the Candide I’m describing, there was only one performance, on October 28, 2017, in the Columbia High School auditorium. The lead singers were Jeremy Blossy, Samantha Dango, Halley Gilbert, David Murray, Charles Schneider, and Katy Sumrow.

Candide is perhaps the best known today of the many works of Voltaire (the pen name for François-Marie Arouet, 1694-1778), the brilliant novelist, dramatist, and satirist. Voltaire wrote in Candide, a picaresque novel, a series of episodes connected mostly by the fact that they all involve or affect the central character, and by not much else – certainly not by a rigorous plot. The episodic structure of the novel makes it difficult to adapt it to dramatic form.

The musical Candide tried, though. It was first performed in New York in 1956, with a book by the playwright Lillian Hellman (1905-1984). Its score was widely admired, but its book – probably because of the loose structure of the original novel – was not, and the show had only a short run. In 1974 a version directed by Harold Prince (b. 1928), with a new book by Hugh Wheeler (1912-1987), opened on Broadway to considerable success.

The musical has been revived frequently since them, sometimes in full productions, sometimes as a concert piece, for which several different revisions of the libretto have been used. Among the best known revivals of the piece is a partially staged concert version in 2004 with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, featuring, among others, Kristin Chenoweth and Patti LuPone, released as a DVD and broadcast on public television.

There are no rules for how concert presentations of operas, operettas, and musicals (as well as other musical forms like cantatas and oratorios) are staged. Typically they use little or no set, and fewer movements by the leading singers (the soloists) than you’d find in a full production – sometimes no movement at all.

In concert productions the orchestra, chorus, and any soloists are both ordinarily on stage, as they would be in a concert of classical music. Since a concert performance may not include all the music written for a theatrical piece, a narration may be used to provide continuity.

At the request of the conductor, Steve Culbertson, I wrote a narration – continuity between songs – tailored to the specific song selections of the concert version I participated in, and what’s more, my efforts were approved by the Bernstein estate. In writing a new narrative I joined a group of writers that would fill a small room – I count at least seven authorized narrations for Candide, and there may be others.

Why do I mention this experience? Because I was able to attend several rehearsals for the project, and – here’s my point ­– I love rehearsals! In the case of Candide, I was actually able to participate in the rehearsals a little, occasionally reading the narration (a fine performer, Dan Landon, did the reading at the concert) and offering the odd suggestion on staging – nothing significant; I just tried to be helpful.

But rehearsals themselves – there’s nothing like them. They are, for me, wonderful experiences. I can think of few places I’d rather be. They don’t have to be my rehearsals – they can be for projects I have nothing to do with. It doesn’t matter. They are always interesting and fun.

Why do I like the rehearsal atmosphere so much? One reason, I believe, is that work itself is always fascinating – any kind of work. Whenever I’ve asked anyone what their everyday job entails, I’ve always found their answers to be illuminating. So much detail, so many things that need to be accomplished in even the simplest task! Steve Martin captures this hilariously in a routine from his standup comedy days:

Ok, I don’t like to gear my material to the audience but I’d like to make an exception because I was told that there is a convention of plumbers in San Francisco this week – I understand about 30 of them came down to the show tonight – so before I came out I worked up a joke especially for the plumbers. Those of you who aren’t plumbers probably won’t get this and won’t think it’s funny, but I think those of you who are plumbers will really enjoy this…

This lawn supervisor was out on a sprinkler maintenance job and he started working on a Findlay sprinkler head with a Langstrom 7″ gangly wrench. Just then, this little apprentice leaned over and said, ‘You can’t work on a Findlay sprinkler head with a Langstrom 7″ wrench.’ Well, this infuriated the supervisor, so he went and got Volume 14 of the Kinsley manual, and he reads to him and says, ‘The Langstrom 7″ wrench can be used with the Findlay sprocket.’ Just then, the little apprentice leaned over and said, ‘It says sprocket, not socket!’

The joke within the joke – Martin is very skilled – is that a plumber’s work is interesting, once you get down to the details, and so is any other kind of work. If further proof is needed, try describing a simple action as if to someone who knows absolutely nothing about it. Describe everything. Even for something as simple as, say, putting on a pair of glasses, the steps involved will turn out to becomplex.

How complex, then, are the processes that go into putting on a performance! That’s one reason I find rehearsals so thrilling. So many things are in play.

For examples,rehearsals focus on a task – getting the performance together. That’s the goal. This main task will have multiple subtasks. The stronger the focus on the main task and its offshoots, the more likely a rehearsal will be to accomplish its goals.

This principle of focus has wide application. In my opinion it’s definitely the secret of effective acting. A performer who focuses strongly on the appropriate thing in a play – almost always, on what the performer’s character wants – is going to give a successful performance.

Even if the actor focuses on the wrong thing – if she or he has an idea about a character at odds with the intention of the script – that actor will still hold the audience’s attention, as long as the performer’s focus stays strong.

This principle can be easily verified by attending an elementary school or middle school play or musical. Often you’ll see one child, in the middle of all that confusion, who seems to have been born for the stage. You can’t take your eyes off that one. When that happens, it’s almost certainly a matter of focus – that young performer has been given the gift of concentration on what’s happening in the play. Sometimes that performer’s gift lasts her or him for a lifetime.

Rehearsals, of course, are also an area for creativity – or they should be, unless the director happens to be a tyrant, in which case creativity is likely to happen surreptitiously at best. Usually, though, once one starts to look for creativity in a rehearsal, one usually sees it everywhere.

Even in a relatively structured rehearsal environment like that of our Candide, I could spot the inventive ways that Jamie Bunce, the chorus director, found of getting the sounds she needed from the 150 singers. Steve Culbertson, the conductor, is adept at finding solutions for the largest or most minute musical questions at a moment’s notice. And the soloists helped each other out with suggestions about staging that began with phrases like “What about . . .” or “Maybe we could . . . .”

It strikes me that a rehearsal of an established work is in many ways a re-creation – not an imitation of something that’s already been done, but a new creative process applied to an already existing piece of material. No doubt the same thing happens throughout life – as the old proverb goes, you can’t step in the same river twice; but in rehearsal we see the process in compressed form.

On a less exalted level, another factor that makes rehearsals an interesting and pleasurable experience for me is that performers as a group are wonderful people to be around. Obviously there are glaring exceptions, but I stand behind this statement as a general principle, despite the famous bit of dialogue in the producers:

LEO BLOOM: Actors are not animals! They’re human beings!

MAX BIALYSTOCK: They are? Have you ever eaten with one?

Performers have many qualities as performers that in themselves make them enjoyable as a group. They are as up to date as anybody with what’s going on in the world of art, and sometimes – not always, but frequently – in the world itself.

Eric Bentley, I believe, says someplace (I can’t find it) that at a panel discussion of theater people he attended, the actors were the only ones who talked about theater as an art – everyone else was dealing with issues of success. I’m certain Bentley’s observation (if it’s his) doesn’t apply everywhere, but it does point to the fact that actors really do care, not just about making money in the theater (sometimes they don’t), but about the theater as a place where worthwhile things can happen.

What’s more, performers don’t expect the world or themselves to be perfect, either. That’s why they rehearse – because it takes work to get a project into shape. Performers know that, and it doesn’t throw them . . . .

Well, not always. I remember going through a period where I took every comment a director made as a personal insult – I would seethe at the most innocuous suggestion, to the point where friends noticed it and warned me that I had to cut it out. I did, and as far as I can remember this period of hostility wasn’t long lasting, but it helped me understand that all people don’t behave in one way all the time, and that sometimes it’s not easy to uncover why people behave the way they do.

Still, on the whole, I’ll take a group of actors, to name one kind of performer, over just about any group of people from other professions. If exceptions to this statement come to mind, please let me know. It would be fun to meet a group of equally entertaining people. Even in my Hostile Period, I’m sure my barely suppressed fury (which limited its expression to stares and the occasional snarl) provided entertainment for a few colleagues, at the least. (I hope so.)

One more factor I’ll mention about the charm of rehearsal is actually not so charming – it’s the fact that something is on the line for performers, and that something is the good opinion of a substantial group of people. Where that performance is live (rather than taped or filmed), the audience’s verdict can be immediate – it may or may not laugh in a comedy, it may or may not demand an encore in a concert. Performers run quite an ego risk.

The writer George Plimpton (1927-2003), who as a journalist was famous for writing about his efforts to participate in various sports teams and other organizations, wrote that nothing beat the level of tension he felt among classical musicians, because in performance they could not fail – they had to play perfectly. (Plimpton played the triangle with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and muffed his one note.)

So there is a determination among performers to succeed. Presumably we all want to succeed – but they need to succeed within a certain period of time, in a definite way. This situation adds an edge to rehearsals, and it also adds interest.

On the other hand, a rehearsal, unless it’s by oneself alone in a room, is always a group activity of some sort, so there’s support available. I noticed small but important bits of praise the soloists offered each other, sometimes just a touch, or a muttered “Nice job.” Those things are recognitions that “we’re all in it together, and we’ll all get through it somehow.” Add them all up, and they’re invigorating.

So for me rehearsals are always interesting. I attended three rehearsals of Candide – one in Ms. Delman’s living room, one in a choir room at a church, and one at the high school auditorium where the performance would be held. (Because of a conflict, I wasn’t able to see the performance itself.)

The Candide rehearsals had the extra attraction for me of belonging to a kind of performance – opera – I haven’t had any experience with. The lead performers were singers. I’m not just saying they sing – I’m saying they sing the roof off. Their voices have confidence, range, and power, all vital for opera. To sit within feet of six big, trained voices and have the sound they produce flow over you, is a memorable experience.

They must have warmed up their voices too, but if I heard that happening, it didn’t register. Surely they needed to? Might they have warmed up at home, or in the car on the way?

In a concert production one of the most important decisions is always how much movement to incorporate into the performance. Do the singers just stand there and sing? Do they add more than minimal gestures? Do they move around in relation to each other?

In this concert Candide the performers moved around a fair amount, a situation made more interesting because they weren’t sure how much space would be available on the Columbia High stage once the full orchestra was seated.  The actors were patient and willing to be flexible. I wonder just how opera singers feel about directors. Their major training is in music, yet opera is character-based and these days an opera singer is also expected to act.

Perhaps my curiosity is misplaced. Opera direction is, with a few exceptions, a Twentieth-Century invention. (Stage direction as a whole was in its infancy until the 1900s as well.) Today it is difficult to imagine a major opera production that has no director. So the performers must be used to it. At the same time, learning an opera’s music is a daunting task; how much energy is left for acting?

I didn’t have a chance to pose that question to the soloists I observed, but they seemed eager to receive direction, so I suppose that’s one stereotype about opera shot down. Another stereotype is that opera singers have the reputation for being temperamental, in part because if they don’t take good physical care of themselves, the result will be apparent to an audience of hundreds or thousands of people.

There was some maneuvering among the singers to keep their throats warm (scarves and sweaters), sit away from air flows, and so on, but these six could not have been more cooperative.

Did I learn anything from these rehearsals? Only how much I enjoy them. But that in itself is worth something. We live in a world of confrontation today. By contrast, rehearsals – almost always – involve people working together, allowing themselves and each other to be individuals yet also being a part of something greater.

The jazz composer and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis makes the same point in his book Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life (2009), using jazz improvisation as a model. Actors in the kind of production I’m describing aren’t ordinarily improvising the material they’re performing, but they are improvising, in a sense, their relationships with other performers, from show to show.

Such mutual cooperation, Marsalis says, is a good model for families, for governments, for societies, and I heartily second that.

[I saw the 1974 Hal Prince revival of Candide on Broadway; it was one of the first things I saw after coming to New York City (along with Equus and Raisin, all running when I got here).  I also saw a later revival, using the Hugh Wheeler book again, at Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre Company in 2010 and posted a report on ROT on 13 January 2011.  I enjoyed the ’74 production (I saw it in ’75 apparently) very much, largely for the performances. and Prince’s all-over staging—but I never wrote anything on it.  (I mention some of the same remarks Kirk makes about the book and the play’s structure in my 2011 report.)  I also watched the PBS broadcast of the NYPO concert version with Chenoweth and LuPone in 2005.]

'On the Town'

Wanna see a T. rex fossil dance?  How ’bout a clan of cavemen?  Then head down to the Museum of Natural History.  No, not the one in Central Park at 79th Street—the one at the Lyric Theatre on 42nd Street west of 7th Avenue.  That’s where On the Town is on stage.  The current revival of Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green’s World War II musical is, if nothing else, a romp, mostly a throw-back to the heyday of old-fashioned musical comedy—before it had to be rechristened “musical theater” or even “musical drama”—with a little tweaking for the 21st century.  It doesn’t deal with anything serious or substantial; it’s all about having fun—the audience in the theater; the sailors and their girls in a Lifesaver-colored New York, New York (that dancing T. rex is lemon yellow, for example); and, we trust, the dancers, singers, and actors on stage and the musicians in the pit.  My companion, Diana, said she hadn’t realized how “corny” the book of On the Town is, but I enjoyed myself despite the execrable weather outside (a drenching rain).

1944’s On the Town is a legendary American musical, with book and lyrics by Comden and Green—their first collaboration for the Broadway stage—and music by Bernstein (his first Broadway score).  To complete the foursome, Jerome Robbins, whose ballet for the American Ballet Theatre, Fancy Free, that premièred on 18 April that same year, had been the foundation of the musical, was brought in to choreograph, also his first musical theater gig.  (The original Broadway outing that opened on 28 December at the Adelphi Theatre, now demolished, was directed by the veteran—and immensely successful—George Abbott.)  It ran over a year, accumulating 462 performances; Comden and Green were among the interracial cast, appearing as Claire de Loone, a not-so-repressed anthropologist, and Ozzie, the lead sailor who meets her at the museum, respectively.  In 1949, MGM, which had helped finance the stage show in return for the movie rights, turned On the Town into a film starring Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly (as Chip and Gabey, the two other principal swabbies), but the studio replaced all the songs except “New York, New York” with Hollywood fare.

Later productions of On the Town didn’t meet with a great deal of success.  The London première in 1963 closed after 63 performances, the 1971 and ’98 Broadway revivals ran for only 73 and 69 performances each (despite the presence in the cast of Phyllis Newman, Bernadette Peters, and Donna McKechnie in the ’71 restaging).  The 1998 version had been a transfer by the Public Theater from its summer season at the outdoor Delacorte Theater which had been a popular hit, but apparently suffered from the move indoors.

Concert presentations have been popular, starting with a 1992 semi-staging by Michael Tilson Thomas leading the London Symphony Orchestra which then was remounted with the San Francisco Symphony in 1996.  New York City’s Encores! presented a concert version of On the Town in 2008, directed by John Rando, who staged the 2014 Broadway revival, and featuring Tony Yazbeck as Gabey, a role he repeated in the staging I saw. 

The English National Opera placed the musical in its repertory in 2007.  New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse mounted a revival in 2009 and in 2013, Rando directed a production of On the Town for the Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, with essentially the same cast as the one that opened at the Lyric (formerly the Foxwoods, after a slew of previous renamings) on 16 October 2014.  The current staging started previews on Broadway on 20 September 2014, accumulating 288 performances as of this writing (28 June).  The Hollywood Reporter has reported that the revival’s producers are planning a National Tour in the 2015-16 season to coincide with the centennial of Bernstein’s birth.  (Some listings indicate that On the Town plans to close by 1 September to go out on the tour, but the Internet Broadway Database, maintained by the Broadway League, doesn’t list a closing date.)  My friend Diana and I saw the performance at the Lyric on Saturday evening, 27 June; we picked up tickets for the two-hour-and-thirty-five minute show (with one intermission) at TDF’s discount TKTS booth in Duffy Square.

I won’t do a detailed synopsis of the plot; it’s so well known and far too easy to look up.  I’ll just say that it’s set in wartime New York City and tells the story of three sailors, Chip, Gabey, and Ozzie, on liberty from their ship for a mere 24 hours.  (At pre-set, there’s a giant American flag filling the proscenium, and then the orchestra plays “The Star-Spangled Banner”—substituting for a formal overture—bringing the audience to its feet, the first time I’ve seen that in an American theater, though the Brits still do it.)  During their day in the Big City, they plan to see all the famous sights and “pick up a date . . . .  Maybe seven . . . .  Or eight” on their way.  They do less well with the first goal than the second, as Gabey, the romantic, falls in love with the photo on the subway of the new Miss Turnstiles, Ivy Smith (there was an actual Miss Subways contest from 1941 to 1976); Ozzie, the stud, meets Claire de Loone, an anthropologist working at the Museum of Natural History, and they get “Carried Away” (the raucous number, written by Comden and Green for themselves, that includes the dancing T. rex—an honest-to-God hoot); and the schedule-making, sight-seeking Chip (whose family name is Offenblock—get it?) finds trouser-chasing Hildy (for Brunhilde, no less) Esterhazy in wait in her cab for a likely passenger.  The story’s mostly improbable—especially if you actually know New York City!—but no one cares, because it’s all a helluva fantasy and part of the fun is seeing the shipmates get into difficulties (they start right out when Gabey removes the poster of Ivy from its frame and an old lady rats his theft of city property to a cop) and then get out pretty much by dumb luck.  You know they will, but it’s how it happens that’s the heart of the play.  So, hang on, for just as Hildy gives Chip a whirlwind, high-speed tour of the entire city (she can’t wait to get him to “Come Up to My Place”), Comden, Green, Bernstein, Rando, Joshua Bergasse (the choreographer who drew from Robbins’s spirit), and Beowulf Boritt (the set and projection designer) give us one helluva view of this “vistor’s place”!  (The New York City PR organization has recently—just about when On the Town opened—launched an ad campaign to urge New Yorkers to “See Your City.”  If city-dwellers don’t want to be actual tourists in their hometown, a visit to On the Town comes close to being a virtual substitute.  But with singing and dancing.)

(A joke in Comden and Green’s book is that Chip has a guidebook his father gave him from the older man’s visit to the City in 1934.  Most of the places in it the sailor’s supposed to see—“I promised Daddy I wouldn't miss on any”—were gone by 1944, like the Hippodrome, which closed in 1939; the famous Woolworth Building, which Chip reads was the tallest building in the world, no longer holds that title, Hildy tells him, now that they have the Empire State.  Since the play’s first run, however, many of the places named in the libretto are also gone now, too; the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where the men’s ship is docked, closed in 1966, for instance, and though the Woolworth Building is still around, Woolworth’s five-and-dimes aren’t.  Nonetheless, the Bronx is still up and the Battery’s still down—and the people still ride in a hole in the ground!)

Diana’s right, of course: On the Town is silly.  I don’t know if Rando and the Barrington Stage Company hoked the play up to sell it in Pittsfield (I’d never seen the musical on stage before, oddly enough, just the bowdlerized movie), but there are some obvious insertions.  (This production has a racially mixed cast, but that turns out not to be a 21st-century innovation: the 1944 Broadway staging included African-American performers and Ivy was played by Japanese-American dancer Sono Osato.)  Director Rando indulged the urge to tweak the script and score with “additional material” supplied by playwrights Robert Cary and Jonathan Tolins which sometimes calls attention to itself.  A running gag throughout the show, for example, is the same two women (Flossie and her Friend)—in the subway, on the street, in an elevator—whom we overhear in mid-conversation.  Flossie’s obviously having an affair with her boss, Mr. Godolphin.  At Carnegie Hall, we see two men entering one of the rehearsal rooms—and they’re having the same conversation about Mr. Godolphin, clearly a bit of re-casting for the present day that’s not likely to have occurred in 1944.  But, as I’ve admitted many times on ROT, I have nearly no critical distance when it comes to these old-time musicals, so little of this detracted from my enjoyment. 

So there’s little point in discussing the book—it’s no more than a vehicle for the songs and performances.  It’s probably worth noting that Bernstein’s music, though substantial and lovely, produced only one iconic song, “New York, New York.”  As befits a play derived from a ballet, however, almost all the songs are dance numbers, and the execution of both the singing and the dancing, including the choreography of Joshua Bergasse, was almost universally superb.  Bergasse, best known as the choreographer for the TV series Smash (2012–2013), is also certified by the Jerome Robbins Foundation for whom he teaches the dances in another Bernstein-Robbins collaboration, West Side Story.  He seems to have set about to spiff up Robbins’s original choreography for On the Town (which only survives as fragments), drawing on the character of Robbins’s work rather than reinventing it entirely.  (I may not have seen On the Town on stage before, but I have seen Robbins’s theater work, including 1989’s Jerome Robbins’ Broadway.)  His work and that of his dancers is sprightly and acrobatics-packed (for the most part—the exception is “Imaginary Coney Island,” Chip’s dream about meeting Ivy after having lost her earlier, which is romantic and heartfelt).  Bergasse was nominated for the Best Choreography Tony and the Outstanding Choreography Drama Desk Award for 2015.

Some reviewers back in October complained that Rando’s pacing was haphazard and uneven.  I didn’t find that, and maybe over the ensuing eight months, the performance has evened out in the huge Broadway theater it now occupies (the Lyric, at 1,930 seats, is the second largest house on Broadway), acquiring its rhythm.  The director has managed to take what Ben Brantley called in the New York Times “a seemingly limp 1944 artifact,” and breathe vibrant, delightful, silly life back into it.  (Rando was a 2015 nominee for the Tony for Best Direction of a Musical.)

The six principal performers, Clyde Alves (Ozzie), Jay Armstrong Johnson (Chip), Tony Yazbeck (Gabey), Megan Fairchild (Ivy), Alysha Umphress (Hildy), and Elizabeth Stanley (Claire), each do outstanding work in the voice and footwork departments, establishing their own styles and personalities even when dancing and singing in pairs and groups.  (Johnson has a flair for physical comedy, especially visible in his wild ride in Hildy’s cab.)  They all sing wonderfully, and each actor has his or her unique delivery style, with particular emphasis on Stanley’s Claire.  (The singing is marred to an extent by the miking, which flattens everything out and makes it hard to determine where a voice on stage is coming from.  I’m sure it’s easier on the singers, but, as I’ve said before, I still wish the theater’d go back to the way they did it before amplification became the norm.)  Fairchild is a principal ballerina with the New York City Ballet, but the others are all theater and Broadway vets who here simply validate their chops as musical theater up-and-comers.  Fairchild makes an impressive début—she’s the only one of the main six who wasn’t in the BSC production and this is her first performance outside the ballet world—and she won the 2015 Theatre World Award for her role in On the Town.  Overall, and I don’t intend this as faint praise, the whole ensemble is charming and delightful, particularly in fulfilling their main purpose: delivering fun.  (Yazbeck was nominated for the 2015 Tony for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical and Stanley was a nominee for the 2015 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical.) 

Beyond these, some wonderful characterizations are salted through the production, including Jackie Hoffman’s portrayal of Maude P. Dilly, Ivy’s dipso voice teacher at Carnegie Hall (Hoffman plays a number of other old biddies, each a gem of a comic turn); Michael Rupert’s Pitkin W. Bridgework, the over-indulgent fiancé of Claire de Loone; Lucy Schmeeler, Hildy’s rheumy roommate as played by Allison Guinn; and Jess LaProtto, who plays S. Uperman (that’s right!), Hildy’s dyspeptic taxi-company boss.  These are essentially vaudeville blackout performances (lest we forget that Comden and Green started with short comedy sketches), but they’re wonderfully eccentric and perfectly presented.  (The timing by this cast is universally flawless.  If there’s laugh to be had, even a cheap one, they find it.)  I must make one special acknowledgement, to Nicholas Ward as the dock worker who sings the real opening number (before “New York, New York”), “I Feel Like I’m Not Out of Bed Yet”: his deep, rich baritone is awfully reminiscent of Paul Robson, with the same soul and heart I hear on recordings of Robson’s “Old Man River.”  A gorgeous rendition of the longing to stay home with his woman and baby in his warm bed, rather than face the pre-dawn cold and hard labor of dock work. 

The sets (Boritt), costumes (Jess Goldstein), and lighting (Jason Lyons) all add immensely to the bright fantasy that is On the Town’s New York City.  Boritt’s skeletal scenery, like the drawings in an expressionistic comic book (sorry, graphic novel), are augmented by his whimsical, flashing projections of the skyline (especially as seen from Brooklyn), looming streetscape (whizzing past as Hildy careens around the city “from Yonkers on down to the Bay” with Chip), Coney Island (the setting for that dream ballet) and Times Square (another ballet milieu), and much more.  Lit by Lyons, the stage of the Lyric can’t be mistaken for any real New York City, but the one in the fantasies of all who don’t actually live here (and some who do, I’m sure)—the one evoked by the iconic song nearly everyone thinks of in connection with the city where “no one lives on account of the pace.”  Goldstein’s costumes just as strongly suggest the different kinds of “Manhattan women” (and a few men, too) the boys meet during their one-day liberty.  And then there are those Navy whites!  I’ve always found it funny when dancers are dressed as swabbies—maybe it’s the bellbottoms that wiggle and flap or the middy blouses that ride up and the neckerchiefs that flop around—and On the Town makes terrific use of this phenomenon. 

There was lots of press on this production—including out-of-town papers like the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune—which I suppose isn’t surprising given its iconic status in the world of musical theater.  The reviews were generally on the same wavelength for the most part, although there was some disagreement about the effectiveness of Boritt’s sets as well as Rando’s directing—and about half the notices panned Jackie Hoffman’s comedy and half lauded it to the skies.  (One thing upon which everybody but one journalist agreed was the marvelous performance given by Megan Fairchild in her first speaking role and Broadway début.)  

In the New York Post, Elisabeth Vincentelli called On the Town “Leonard Bernstein’s joyous musical” and observed that “Betty Comden and Adolph Green’s book and lyrics still crackle and pop after all these decades.”  She complained, however, that since On the Town is “already written funny, . . . director John Rando’s frantic oversell can feel a little desperate.”  Further, “It’s also hard to get past Beowulf Boritt’s pedestrian, pastel-colored set and his eyesore projections, which do little to bring the ’40s to life,” said the NYP reviewer.  “But that can’t dim the glittering gem that is ‘On the Town,’ with its delirious, high-energy score, which seamlessly incorporates Tin Pan Alley, boogie woogie and even a Brecht-Weill pastiche.”  Vincentelli, however, reserved special praise for “[t]he show’s golden asset,” Megan Fairchild, who’s “graceful and strikes breathtakingly beautiful lines.”  Pronounced Vincentelli ,“The show explodes with unfettered joy every time she’s onstage.”

Declaring On the Town “a show about sex that you can take the whole family to,” the New York Times’ Ben Brantley called the production at the Lyric a “jubilant revival” and a “merry mating dance” that “feels as fresh as first sunlight.”  The Timesman went on to say, “If there’s a leer hovering over ‘On the Town,’ . . . it’s the leer of an angel.”  In his rave review of the revival, Brantley had high praise for all the actor-singer-dancers, including the supporting cast, as well as the designers, choreographer, orchestra, and director.  (Music director James Moore, conducting a 28-piece orchestra, used the original 1944 arrangements for the score.)  Characterizing On the Town as “fizzy and frisky” in the Daily News, Joe Dziemianowicz said that not only do the play’s sailors “get lucky,” but “[t]he audience does, too.”  The show “feels like a big, juicy kiss,” Dziemianowicz wrote.  The director, said the Newsman, “mines the script for all its boisterous humor and smartly makes space for hushed interludes” and he also praised the entire company collectively and individually, noting, “The look of the show is chipper and bright.”  Dziemianowicz did cavil about Boritt’s set designs, describing them as “head-scratchers”: “Set pieces add modern flourishes but overdo the cartoonishness. That includes clear plastic skyscrapers and a lemon-yellow T. rex.”  “Even so,” the News review-writer concluded, “it’s a helluva entertainment.”

“When did you last see a big-budget musical that made you want to shout with joy?” asked Terry Teachout in the Wall Street Journal.  Then he announced that On the Town “is everything a great show should be,” adding that “anyone who isn’t thrilled by this tinglingly well-staged production needs a heart transplant.”  Nonetheless, Teachout admonished readers that On the Town “is far more than a piece of fancy fluff, and while John Rando, the director, is a recognized master of comic timing who could make a funeral funny, he never skimps on warmth.  Neither does his cast . . . .”  Heaping plaudits on the designers, music director, and ensemble, the WSJ reviewer instructed readers, “I urge you to see it as soon as you possibly can.”  USA Today’s Elysa Gardner warned us that the director, choreographer, and music director “have mined the show . . . for all its raw poignance, without sacrificing any of its jazzy wit or exuberant romanticism,” resulting in a show “that will leave you both exhilarated and haunted.”  “The superb cast has great fun,” reported Gardner, but admonished us, “Great musical theater doesn’t require total escapism, after all, any more than unconditional happy endings,” referring to the touchingly sad finale, “Some Other Time,” when the squids and their new-found girlfriends say goodbye shipside, knowing they may never see each other again—as the boys go off to war.

In the Financial Times, Brendan Lemon called the production a “joyous, amusing revival” in which “sailors on shore leave have never seemed so deliriously horny.”  Linda Winer of Long Island’s Newsday described this On the Town as an “altogether loving, good-humored, skimpy-looking but imaginative frolic”  that “just is a breezy, peppy, pleasantly libidinous valentine to New York-New York.”  Winer, like several other reviewers, lamented the lack of reference to the fighting of World War II (they all seem to forget that, my comment above aside, this was intended in 1944 to be escapist theater from that very concern), scolded Jackie Hoffman for “overdoing four comic cameos” (including Maude P. Dilly), complained that “the two big ballet scenes don't build into more than serviceable pastiche,” and took director Rando to task because he “doesn't delineate Gabey's two pals . . . enough.”  Winer concluded that On the Town “needs a throat-catching sense of the world outside to make it more than diverting.”

Rex Reed stated in the New York Observer, in one of the only truly negative notices, “The latest (and best) in a long line of mostly second-rate Broadway revivals . . . brings back all the songs from the original 1944 stage production . . . .  But the star wattage [of the 1949 film] stayed home . . . .”  The gifted actors, Reed added, “erase no golden memories of MGM magic.”  Complaining that Yazbeck, for all his obvious talent, is “no Gene Kelly,” Reed persisted in comparing the 2014 Broadway revival to the Bernstein-less MGM flick; even the shipmates’ three dates “couldn’t fill Vera-Ellen’s  toe shoes . . .  can’t carry Ann Miller’s tap shoes . . . [or] lacks the endearing charm and comic timing of Betty Garrett.”  (Those would be the movie’s Ivy, Claire, and Hildy.)  The Observinator went on to dub the revival “a very good summer stock production,” adding that “what it does best . . . is serve as a reminder of what a monumental job . . . the MGM geniuses . . . did . . .,” explaining, “They knew how to edit, condense and shape, achieving the kind of sizzling momentum the current (uneven) On the Town often misses.”  Reed summed up with: “You won’t be bored by all the gridlock in On the Town, but there’s so much of it!  And it’s entirely too long for its own good.”  (Oh, and Reed was the sole writer to pan Fairchild’s Miss Turnstiles, declaring that “she can’t act, and on the rare occasions when she does speak, her articulation is full of rocks.”)

In New York, Jesse Green described On the Town as “a heartbreakingly youthful work: both about youth and by youth” (Comden, Green, Bernstein, and Robbins’s average age when they created the musical was 27!); the “crowd-pleaser” revival is “as big and breakneck and beautiful as ever.”  Green complained of some “insufferable missteps” that carried over from the original to the revival, such as a “plot [that] is somewhat random” and “the effortfully silly character names” (Chip Offenblock, Claire de Loone, Pitkin W. Bridgework), but the play “triumphs over” them.  Green also affirmed that “the musical aspects of the revival . . . are first-rate,” praising both the singers and the orchestra.  He does quibble with some aspects of Boritt’s scenic design and projections, and even some of the principal acting and Rando’s insertion of “shtick” in both the songs and dances, which “begins to suggest that director John Rando does not trust the material.”  In the end, though, the man from New York urged: “If for no other reason than ‘Some Other Time’—and there really are plenty—get yourself, by warship or taxi, to On the Town.”

In the New Yorker, Robert Gottlieb used most of his review to compare the new On the Town, not to the movie (for doing which he took Rex Reed to task) but to the original 1944 première, which he says he saw when he was 14.  He spent about half his column describing his youthful experience of that surprising event, then, disparaging the reviews of Reed and Ben Brantley, who’s report made him “prepared to loathe” the revival, until “the wonderful songs started turning up, and the very capable dancing”—of which he caviled “there may be a little too much.”  The 2014 production, “a big, brassy spectacle worthy of Vegas,” Gottlieb reported, “is a lot of fun on its own terms.”  The New Yorker review-writer asserted, despite some “longueurs,” that “there are high spots” as well.  Compared to the “touch of amateurism” in the original, in the revival “there isn’t a moment of anything but slick professionalism, but there are worse crimes.”  Gottlieb concluded, “This is the ‘On the Town’ that can make it in today’s showbiz, and I’m glad that today’s audience is eating it up and restoring it to its proper place in the pantheon.”

Acknowledging that out of On the Town’s “paper-thin premise, the original collaborators spun loopy magic,” the Village Voice’s Jacob Gallagher-Ross declared, “And director John Rando’s new production delivers the goods: . . . the gushing effervescence of just-uncorked Champagne.”  “It’s a confection, but a delightful one,” Gallagher-Ross affirmed, and he advised, “Somewhere inside every jaded New Yorker, there’s an awestruck, aw-shucks sailor, still besotted by the city and crying for some shore leave.  So indulge your inner rube and take in the new revival of On the Town, an evergreen entertainment whose brash charms have not faded with time. . . .  They don’t make musicals like this anymore, and you’ll leave wishing that they did.”   

In the entertainment press, Adam Feldman of Time Out New York, delivered his “Bottom Line”: the On the Town revival is a “major production of a fairly minor work,” which he said “seems a bit like a well-mounted exhibit at some Natural History Museum of Broadway: a stuffed lark.”  The man from TONY found that, “though frisky and enjoyable” and the company does “their best to deliver a night of re-creationist recreation,” the play “does not have the strongest legs.”  In Entertainment Weekly, Thom Geier called the revival “spirited and surprisingly frank,” but sadly quipped, “The Bronx may be up, as the song goes, but the battery sometimes runs down on this production—which only occasionally hits the ebullient heights of the Empire State Building.”  Calling the On the Town revival “still a helluva show,” Marilyn Stasio said in Variety that director Rando “has given the kid-glove treatment” to the production, while Bergasse’s choreography is “classic in design and elegant in form” and “although the young and vital cast is light on acting chops, the dancing is sensational.”  Stasio, however, thought that “the show’s comic elements are much giddier than they need to be,” but “that must have seemed like the safest way to go with the show, given the limited acting range of some key players.”  “But who’s going to go to the mat on that,” the Variety reviewer added, when the “lyrics alone are enough to make any old grouch break out in a grin,” and “the sheer exuberance of the music (God bless that orchestra) gives wing to the ecstatic joy of the dance.”  David Rooney of the Hollywood Reporter dubbed the “vibrant Broadway revival” of On the Town “transporting entertainment” in which director Rando “embraces both the strengths and weaknesses.”  Rando, wrote Rooney, “is unapologetic in presenting the old-fashioned material at face value,” directing “with a mostly light touch.”  The HR review-writer ended by declaring that in this “beguiling” revival, “there’s ample pleasure on offer.” 

The cyber press came to mostly the same conclusions about this production of On the Town.  David Gordon observed on TheaterMania, “Bigger isn’t always better,” complaining that the small, human staging at BSC had grown outsized, “pushing the humor to the furthest reaches of the third balcony of this massive house.”  On the other hand, however, the TM reviewer added, “there are six central performances so exceptional that they make up for said deficiencies.”  Gordon warned, “As funny as On the Town is, it is also sneakily poignant, resting on an emotional transparency that here is only apparent in fits and starts” and “the cast members fall too often into easy laughs that are more distracting than they are funny.”  The on-line review-writer ended with, “But we should be thankful no matter what,” even though “[w]ith a little more faith in the material and a little less desire to push for laughs, Rando would have a perfectly calibrated production on his hands.”  On CurtainUp, Elyse Sommer found the Broadway revival of On the Town, like its Pittsfield predecessor, “a wonderfully performed and staged musical,” only the new incarnation is “bigger and more Broadway-ish.”  With praise for all the artists, performing, design, and directorial, of the new mounting, Sommer concluded, “For a night on the town, with unforgettable numbers like the moving ‘Lonely Town’ with its dreamy dancing you can’t beat this On the Town for old fashioned fun, glorious music and breathtaking dancing.”

New York Theatre Guide’s Casey Curtis quipped, “There is a candy store in the lobby of the Lyric Theatre.  It serves beautifully displayed and wrapped sweets.  This is exactly what you should expect inside the Lyric Theatre as well when you see ‘On The Town.’”  Curtis explained that the “show is a feast for the eyes and ears, a beautifully wrapped sweet,” but warned that “the sugar rush leads to a bit of a crash as the plot is thin as cellophane”; “nonetheless,” the NYTG reviewer concluded, “this is a high quality confection.”  Director Rando, Curtis affirmed, “impressively finds comedy at every turn”; Boritt’s designs “are delightful,” and choreographer Bergasse “stages one superb dance number after another.”  “Candy is not nutritious,” the cyber reviewer summed up, “but there is a reason we love it—it makes us feel good.  ‘On the Town’ will make you laugh and bring delight . . . .”  On Talkin’ Broadway, Matthew Murray called On the Town, “a swanked-up” revival that’s been “choreographed to a frothy fare-thee-well.”  Even though “this is hardly the best imaginable mounting of this show,” Murray felt that “it comes close enough to be worth a trip.”  Most important, the characters “have and reveal fun, which is all that On the Town really has on its mind,” which makes the play “simply put, what musical theatre should be.”  Murray found, however, that “flaws begin to creep in—not big ones, mind you, but lesser problems that, after a while, add up.”  He named the erratic direction, the production’s inconsistent energy, and the uneven cast as well as Rando’s “urge to implement minor tweaks to the script and score.”  Murray’s final assessment, though, is that “when it’s allowed to be itself, in all its glittering ’40s glory, there’s no greater show—or time machine—in town.”  Steven Suskin of the Huffington Post reported of On the Town that “this romp of a spree is cookin’ with gas” and the spirit of the four creators remains “in sparkling shape.”  Rando and Bergasse, Suskin asserted, “have precisely the right touch” and the revival “hits the jackpot” with the six principal actors.  The BSC-derived revival of On the Town, summed up Suskin, “is a dandy singing & dancing spree.” 

'Candide'

On New Year’s Eve, 2010, my mother and I went to the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Sidney Harman Hall in downtown Washington, D.C., to see the musical production Candide, the latest incarnation of the 1956 Leonard Bernstein “comic operetta” whose original lyrics and book were by Richard Wilbur and Lillian Hellman respectively. (Hellman apparently brought the idea of adapting the novel to Bernstein. She saw a reflection of her experiences in 1950 with the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the Hollywood blacklist, but Bernstein took the play out of the realm of political commentary. He continued to revise the work until just before his death in 1990.) This notoriously problem-riddled play, based on the 1759 novel by Voltaire, has never really worked in production and nearly every outing has begotten a revision of the book (John Caird, British director and playwright, and, for Harold Prince’s 1973 revival, Hugh Wheeler) and sometimes the lyrics (which have been tweaked, augmented, or rewritten by such theatrical stalwarts as Stephen Sondheim, John Latouche, Dorothy Parker, Hellman, and Bernstein himself). It kept looking as though no one could make this script work if the music had to be accompanied by the libretto, which was often pared down to a minimum. (Following the ’56 début, which had been staged by none other than Tyrone Guthrie and closed after only 73 performances, countless concert performances of the play have been mounted, including one broadcast on PBS’s Great Performances from a live staging at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall on 12 January 2005, with Kristin Chenoweth as Cunegonde and Patti LuPone as the Old Lady. The original cast recording became a best-seller in 1957 and introduced listeners to Bernstein’s score, which became the undisputed star of the play.)

Prince’s production, which started in Brooklyn at the Chelsea Theatre Center before moving to the Broadway Theatre in 1974, played all over the theater, the interior of which Prince had had reconstructed to include ramps and platforms through the house and a shallow stage in the rear of the auditorium. It ran 740 performances (one of which I saw in February of 1975, shortly after I moved to New York City); my recollection is that the production’s success was more for Prince’s environmental staging than Wheeler’s new book—though I remember enjoying the great theatricality of the experience (and the performance of Charles Kimbrough, who’d replaced Lewis J. Stadlen as Pangloss by then). Of course, you all know by now what a sucker I am for theatricality . . . . I’m sorry to report, then, that Mary Zimmerman, director of the STC production I just saw, didn’t improve on this—and my 35-year-old impression still holds because Zimmerman, like Prince, had used Wheeler’s script, enhanced with material from Voltaire’s novel. It didn’t sparkle—and the actors all stayed behind the proscenium.

Now, don’t let me get carried away here. This was in no way a bad experience. The company all had good to excellent voices (I even appreciated that Lauren Molina’s Cunegonde didn’t have Chenoweth’s high, piercing soprano which, to quote Archie Bunker, goes through my head like a nail) and the staging was often clever—the plot covers pretty much the whole world, from Westphalia in Germany (where the ham comes from, ironically), to Buenos Aires and a fantasy El Dorado in South America, to Constantinople, as well as the seas in between—doing with dolls and miniatures what film would resort to CGI to accomplish these days. On New Year’s Eve, I’m looking for a nice way to spend the evening before watching the ball drop in Times Square on TV, not so much a fabulous theater experience (though I wouldn’t eschew one—it’s just not a main priority on this particular occasion). In the Washington Post, Peter Marks described the production as a “thoughtfully conjured, eye-pleasing entertainment” and that’s what I got. Candide was nicely done, considering the inherent weaknesses, and the musical portion of the evening was far better than that. Bernstein still rules—and I suspect always will when it comes to Candide. We’ll just have to get over it.

STC’s Candide was a co-production with Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, where it ran from 17 September to 31 October last fall. (The Washington performances closed on 9 January.) The director, Mary Zimmerman, is a presence in Chicago (and now national) theater because of her innovative and inventive work (often with the Lookingglass Theatre) on such classics- or myth-based works as The Arabian Nights (Off-Broadway, 1994), The Odyssey (1999, Goodman, and then elsewhere around the country), Ovid’s Metamorphoses (which garnered her a Tony in 2002), and The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (Off-Broadway, 2003). (For the STC, Zimmerman has also staged Shakespeare’s Pericles in 2004 and Argonautika, her adaptation of the Jason myth, in 2008; Arabian Nights opens at Washington’s Arena Stage this month. She has also lately directed opera at the Met.) In all of these highly-praised works, Zimmerman, the recipient of a 1998 MacArthur Fellowship (the “genius grant”), was the adapter or writer and was acclaimed for her use of the space, the physicality of the production, and such imaginative techniques as puppetry and other playful imagery. Until Candide, however, she had never tackled a musical. (It’s also STC’s first-ever musical.) Peter Marks also said the production was what “one had come to expect from an imagineer like Zimmerman,” but given her theatrical pedigree, she was very conventional in her treatment of the play—which surprised me as the production unfolded and I realized she wasn’t going to rival even ol’ Hal Prince from 35 years ago. (The Chicago Tribune said “the show seems afraid of truth.” To be honest, I didn’t know what to expect from this staging. But I did figure Zimmerman would do something akin to the way she treated Ovid or Homer—and I expected she’d reinvent the libretto more than the contemporary references—intelligent design, the priestly sex scandal—she seems to have added.)

I’ll assume that I don’t need to summarize the plot of the picaresque Candide; if the play’s not well enough known, then the source material surely is. (Once again, I’m sure there are websites with summaries of the plot of either the operetta or the novel.) All I’ll say here is that it’s the tale of the journey of the sheltered, naïve, and eternally optimistic Candide (Voltaire’s full title was Candide, or Optimism), wandering from Germany through Bulgaria, Portugal, Holland, Argentina, Paraguay, Suriname, France, and Italy, to Turkey as the classic “blank page” tests Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s philosophy of Optimism as taught him by his tutor, Dr. Pangloss, against the vicissitudes of life, including war, the Lisbon earthquake (which inspired Voltaire to write the novel), and the Inquisition. (All the environmental and human evils Candide encounters are historical ones; Voltaire didn’t make up or even exaggerate them to make his point.) Leibniz’s main tenet, which Voltaire was ridiculing, was that we live in “the best of all possible worlds” and that everything that happens is for the best.

I can’t explain why Zimmerman’s direction seemed so tame in Candide, but her visual concept was certainly creative. The costumes by her long-time designer Mara Blumenthal were delightful and often slyly irreverent. (The perukes Cunegonde’s parents, the Baron and Baroness von Thunder, wear are outrageously ridiculous, like something from an 18th-century satirical cartoon. The Baron’s in particular stuck up atop his head like twin peaks of snow-white fluff. Having studied some costume, I know that these were modeled on actual wigs of the period, but just stylized enough to look foolish.) I can only imagine that Voltaire would have approved: he ridiculed nearly everything in the novel anyway, so making figures of fun look as asinine as he described them seems right. The writer wasn’t always subtle, either. The name of the sex interest in the story, Cunegonde, was selected for its sound as much as for the fact that it’s an old Germanic name: to the French ear, Cunegonde contains funny sounds which also happen to resemble very vulgar French words. (Cu is pronounced just like cul, the word for ‘ass’ and gonde sounds a lot like con, the vulgar term for female genitalia—which, just like the English equivalent, can be used as a nasty name for a woman.) Voltaire, who shared his countrymen’s distaste for everything German, surely chose Westphalia for the home of Cunegonde, her insufferable brother Maximilian, and the adopted Candide, because, among the French, it was thought of as a “barren region.” (It’s not, actually. It is—and was—a very mineral- and agriculture-rich area, much fought-over in its history.)

Dan Ostling’s set was both functional, serving often as a frame for Zimmerman’s stage pictures and Daniel Pelzig’s choreography, and a clever reference point for Voltaire’s satire. In the opening scene in the Baron’s Westphalian castle, the classroom where the three youngsters are instructed in Dr. Pangloss’s philosophy is depicted by a drop painted in mock 18th-century style. When Candide is evicted from the castle and starts on his voyage, the drop fell to the floor to reveal the paneled room that was the background for all the rest of the play’s locations, altered by a changing backdrop and projections across the wooden panels of the side walls. The set was used nicely by Zimmerman and her cast, with bits of suggestive scenery carried on and off to establish the place without overwhelming the stage or requiring hordes of stage hands. Most of the set pieces were moved by the actors themselves, usually including one who served as a narrator to connect each of the disparate scenes. The director used small props cleverly, including birds on long poles carried around the stage by actors, tiny boats sailing in the arms of actors to indicate a sea voyage, and a globe pulled across the stage on a string to indicate the hero traversing the world.

Zimmerman has used multiple narrators before, but here it constitutes one of the problems with the Hellman-Wheeler libretto. The story is just impossibly diffuse, and no amount of reworking even by the most talented writers like Hellman or Wheeler can change that since it’s in the nature of Voltaire’s novel. Narration is the only way to cover the gaps in the story, but after a while, it becomes a repetitively untheatrical and undramatic device. Other difficulties with the material, many of which derive from the source, are the huge number of incidental characters—19 roles in all—many of whom are important to one episode but then disappear entirely from the narrative. (In production, only the actors playing Candide, Cunegonde, and the Old Lady do not play multiple roles.) There is also the matter of Candide, the title character and basically the protagonist, though the character has no distinctive personality. Because he’s the quintessential blank slate, he’s a sponge for all the experiences of the story—but he has to remain essentially plain white bread in order to accomplish this mission. That leaves a huge void in the center of the operetta—the main character is little more than a hole in the air. It’s not by accident, I don’t think, that while stars or at least name actors have played Cunegonde, Pangloss, or the Old Lady, the actor playing Candide is often virtually unknown—though the character’s on stage for nearly the entire three-hour performance. Geoff Packard, the 29-year old actor who played Candide for Zimmerman, had all the technical attributes for the part, for instance: a sturdy physique; a pleasant face (not truly handsome, but boyishly reminiscent of Owen Wilson, with a blond mop of hair and a “nose with deviation,” as Fanny Brice had it in Funny Girl—Wilson’s looks broken; Packard’s is just too broad); a pleasing, but not spectacular, voice. But I have no idea how good an actor he really is (he has some major musical credits in his bio) because the role doesn’t demand he do much acting. He has—or displays—very little reaction to the horrors he witnesses and, even, experiences—which may be more a directorial fault than a textual one. (Actors will tell you that the hardest thing to do on stage is nothing—but being nothing is another matter.) Even Candide’s songs don’t compare to Cunegonde’s “Glitter and Be Gay” or the Old Lady’s “I Am Easily Assimilated” (the show-stopper of the first production and inevitably an audience-pleaser).

The cast was generally good, though no one stood out especially. Even Hollis Resnik as the Old Lady, possibly the best role in the play even without “Assimilated,” a lively tango-infused romp, didn’t burn particularly bright (though she was singled out in reviews both in Washington and Chicago). Lauren Molina (no relation to Alfred, by all accounts) and Larry Yando as Cunegonde and Pangloss were both fine, and Lauren has a nice, warm soprano that carried off Cunegonde’s songs well enough, though she seemed to be stretching a little at times. The best voice in the cast—a clear, strong tenor—belonged to Jonathan Weir, who played, among others, the Governor of Buenos Aires who sends innocent Candide off to war against the Jesuits in Paraguay so the Governor can make a move on Cunegonde. My impression, however, was that everyone, including Zimmerman and her actors, were so busy trying to keep the story moving along that no one had much time or focus for actual acting or character-creation. The roles, like the Old Lady or Pangloss, whose characters were limned by Voltaire, could fall back on those characterizations, but anyone with less-defined roles or who might otherwise have individualized her or his part was at a loss—and apparently didn’t receive any help from the director. Choreographer Pelzig managed a couple of nice dance numbers, particularly on “Assimilated,” but most of the movement was . . . well, movement rather than dance. It was all serviceable, but not rousing. In the Chicago Tribune, Chris Jones summed up Zimmerman’s work, which he called “aggravating,” as showing “a vexing inability to translate [her] understanding [of the text] into a personal journey that's undertaken with truth and touches the heart.” (Several of the published reviews, both in Washington and in Chicago, complained that the small, 12-piece orchestra was not adequate to reproduce Bernstein’s lush sounds, but I’m not musically astute enough to have noticed.)

In other words, what Prince got from his environmental staging, which he obviously substituted for textual drama, was lacking in Zimmerman’s interpretation. Prince famously went to a lot of trouble (and I imagine expense as well) to have the Broadway Theatre retrofitted for his all-over performance (I don’t know what he did in Brooklyn), and I suppose Zimmerman didn’t have that option even had she wanted it—Candide’s not Spider-Man and Zimmerman’s not Julie Taymor—but she found no alternative to enhancing the theatricality in lieu of dramatic and narrative impact. As a result, I guess what we had at the Harman was another concert version of Candide, but with a lot of extra motion.