'High Button Shoes' (Encores!)

In my recent report on some art shows I’d seen earlier this month (“Two Art Fairs & Joan Miró at MoMA,” 16 May), I recounted a discussion I had with the my graduate schoolmates back in the mid-1970s when I was an MFA student at  Rutgers University’s School of Creative and Performing Arts (now the Mason Gross School of the Arts).  “I argued with my MFA classmates at Rutgers that theater for the sake of entertainment isn’t second rate,” I reported.  “Entertainment is a commendable goal for art.”

A case in point is the largely forgotten Broadway hit of 1947-49, High Button Shoes, a concert presentation of which I saw at New York City Center on Thursday evening, 9 May.  I’d always heard the title of the musical comedy (music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Sammy Cahn, and book by Stephen Longstreet from his 1946 novel The Sisters Liked Them Handsome), but I’d never seen it or, I thought, heard any of the score—at least nothing that I identified with the play.  When my friend Diana called me and asked if I’d be interested in seeing the Encores! Production, I immediately said yes—and was rewarded with a thoroughly delightful, charming, and entertaining experience in old-time musical theater. 

High Button Shoes was considered a throw-back even in its own time—which was already three years after Rogers and Hammerstein’s far deeper musical drama Oklahoma! (1943) and two years after their darker Carousel (1945).  The Rogers-and-Hart musical play Pal Joey was considered so risqué in 1940 that a Broadway ticket broker wouldn’t sell my grandfather tickets to the show if he intended to take my then-17-year-old future mother!  But High Button Shoes was old-fashioned musical comedy, all innocent fun, fancy, and farce.  New York Times theater reviewer Brooks Atkinson remarked in his critique of the première, “Eschewing progress to the arts for the moment, the producers of ‘High Button Shoes’ have put together a very happy musical show in a very cheerful tradition. . . .  Put it down as excellent family entertainment with no pretensions to show-shop aesthesia.”

Written in 1947 after Cahn (1913-93) and Styne (1905-94), who’d been writing pop songs together in Hollywood for several years, wrote their first attempt at a Broadway show.  Glad to See You, about a USO show touring the South Pacific during World War II, flopped out of town in 1944 and never made it to New York City.  The pair returned to Hollywood and, in 1947, Styne turned to the semi-autobiographical novel by Longstreet (1907-2002) as the basis for his and Cahn’s next try for the Great White Way.

The team struck gold.  George Abbott (1887-1995), already a Broadway legend at 60, was hired to direct and Jerome Robbins (1918-98), relatively new to musical theater but a major star in the dance world (including several stints on Broadway with ballet productions), would create the dance numbers.  Comedian Phil Silvers (1911-85), well-known for his portrayals of scheming con men on screen and a longtime friend of Cahn’s, was cast as Harrison Floy; Nanette Fabray (1920-2018) would play Mama Longstreet and Joey Faye (1909/1910-97) portrayed Mr. Pontdue, Floy’s shill in his flim-flam routines. 

Longstreet’s book was shaky, according to the rumors around Times Square, so Abbott, a play doctor among his other theatrical talents, took over the book-writing—and Silvers dipped his pen in as well.  (I quipped to a friend that the character of Floy not only sounded as if it were written for Silvers, but by Silvers—and apparently it was!) 

High Button Shoes opened at the New Century Theatre (Seventh Avenue and West 58th Street; demolished in 1962) on 9 October 1947 and ran 727 performances through 2 July 1949.  (The production moved twice, first to the Shubert Theatre on 22 December 1947 and then to the Broadway on 18 October 1948.)  Robbins won the 1948 Tony Award for Choreographer and actor Mark Dawson took the 1948 Theatre World Award for his performance as Hubert “Oggle” Ogglethorpe.  

A national tour opened in Boston on 20 April 1948, playing 13 cities, with Eddie Foy, Jr. (1905-83), as Harrison Floy, Audrey Meadows (1922-96) as Sara Longstreet, and Jack Whiting (1894-1975) as Papa Longstreet.  The tour played at least 16 cities in the Midwest and Great Plains, including Chicago, Denver, San Fransisco, and Minneapolis; it closed 31 December 1949, in Kansas City.

A London production opened at the Hippodrome 22 December 1948 and closed on 6 November 1949, completing 291 performance; Audrey Hepburn (1929-93) was a chorus girl.  A television adaptation was broadcast live on 24 November 1956 on NBC with Nanette Fabray and Joey Faye repeating their original roles, Hal March (1920-70) as Harrison Floy, and Don Ameche (1908-93) as Papa Longstreet.  High Button Shoes has never been revived on Broadway, but the play’s had some minor fame with community and regional groups around the U.S., including two in nearby Connecticut. 

The Broadway revue Jerome Robbins’ Broadway (26 Feb. 1989-1 Sep. 1990: 1989 TONY, Best Musical; 1989 Drama Desk, Outstanding Musical) recreated Robbins’s choreography for three of his dances in High Button Shoes: “I Still Get Jealous,” “On a Sunday by the Sea,” and “Papa, Won’t You Dance With Me?”  Goodspeed Musicals revived the musical at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Connecticut, from 16 June to 11 September 1982 and again from 13 July to 22 September 2007. 

The Encores! two-hour-and-twenty-minute concert presentation (with one intermission) at City Center (West 55th Street, east of Broadway) ran from 8 to 12 May 2019; Diana and I caught the 7:30 p.m. performance on the 9th.  High Button Shoes was the last in Encores! 2019 series (Encores! Off-Center, the 2019 summer season of Off-Broadway musical concerts, will run in June and July, with Studs Terkel’s Working, Promenade by María Irene Fornés and Al Carmines, and Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s Road Show); the season was a commemoration of City Center’s 75th anniversary and a tribute to Jerome Robbins, marking (belatedly) the 100th anniversary of his birth.  (The two previous Robbins-choreographed shows in the season were Call Me Madam, 1950, with music and lyrics by Irving Berlin and book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, and Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s I Married an Angel, 1938.)

High Button Shoes was staged at City Center by John Rando and choreographed by Sarah O’Gleby, with musical direction by Rob Berman; the Encores! orchestrations were from Philip Lang.  The scenic designer for the concert was Allen Moyer, the costumes were designed by Ann Hould-Ward, the light design was by Ken Billington, and Scott Lehrer designed the sound.   

For ROTters who aren’t familiar with the Encores! productions, they are stripped-down versions of “rarely produced” musicals, considered neglected or forgotten, with the focus on the score, performed in full, rather than the dialogue, which is pared down to a minimum.  (Encores! artistic director Jack Viertel does the book adaptations.)  The actors carry scripts and the scenery. lighting, sound, and costumes are simplified, as is the staging.  

The orchestra, usually a full ensemble (High Button Shoes had 27 instruments), is given prominence on stage, not in a pit, often above the actors’ playing area.  This leaves a relatively narrow strip for action and especially, dancing—though the choreography is always conceived to reflect the standards of Broadway, just in a confined area.  The current Encores! season is February through May every year and each show runs five performances from Wednesday through Sunday; Encores! presents three concerts a season.  In 2000, Encores! won a Tony Honor for Excellence in the Theatre.

First-tier actors and singers, as well as directors and designers, are hired for the productions—some of which have been transferred to commercial runs on Broadway (the current production of Chicago, which was presented in concert in May 1996 and then opened at the Richard Rodgers Theatre in November and is still running after 9347 performances as of 12 May, is the most prominent example).  

The concerts have proved an excellent way to see—and hear—some of Broadway’s less-well known musicals, some going back to the earliest decades of the American musical (No, No, Nanette, 1925, the oldest produced, and Strike up the Band, 1927, for example).  Encores! has been a feature of City Center since 1994, and Jack Viertel, the Encores! artistic director, has led the program since 2000, and Rob Berman (who also conducted the Encores! Orchestra for High Button Shoes) has been musical director since 2008.

It’s 1913 and con man Harrison Floy (Michael Urie) and his shill Pierre Pontdue (Kevin Chamberlin) have made a living hustling “genuine Pantagonian diamonds,” knock-off watches, and other frauds in cities like Washington, D.C., and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—real snake-oil salesmen.  They hang around just long enough to be chased out of town by the cops (“He Tried Make a Dollar”). 

They skip to the next town until they literally run out of safe places to go—until Floy remembers time spent in New Brunswick, New Jersey, years ago . . . and off they go to the town on the banks of the Raritan (where yours truly went to grad school!).  Floy sets up a real-estate scam, selling lots for future McMansions on New Brunswick’s undeveloped outskirts in  a development called Longstreetville.  (He also sells a couple of Model T’s at a promotional discount as the personal representative of Henry—that’s Ford, of course.  The cast all sing the delightful “There’s Nothing Like a Model T” while driving about the stage in a model . . . ummm Model T!  It’s a hoot.)  

The upstanding Longstreet family (yes, they’re named for the novel’s author; 11-year-old Stevie Longstreet, played here by peppy young Aidan Alberto, is Stephen Longstreet as a child), consisting of Mama (Betsy Wolfe), Papa (Chester Gregory), Mama’s younger sister, Fran (Carla Duren), and her college boyfriend Oggle (Marc Koeck), are the central targets of Floy’s land con.  

After the scam is revealed, Floy and Pontdue try to escape to Atlantic City with their ill-gotten booty (or, as Hawkeye Pierce says in a 1972 episode of M*A*S*H, “his ill-booten gotty”) and also take Fran—who’s become romantically attracted to Floy—with them.  As the con men flee to the Atlantic City beach while carrying a satchel full of stolen money, the beach-goers dance around them in “The Bathing Beauty Ballet,” staged before a row of cabañas.  Among the crowd are bathing beauties, lifeguards, other criminals, identical twins—and a gorilla.  

When the folks from New Brunswick arrive in AC (little Stevie overheard Floy and Pontdue’s plans and ratted them out), they get the police to go after the flam-flam team and there’s a wonderful chase à la the Keystone Cops right out of a Mack Sennett silent comedy!  (This is “Bathing Beauty Ballet,” one of two dances for which choreographer O’Gleby has recreated Robbins’s original choreography.  The other is “I Still Get Jealous,” a soft-shoe with Mama and Papa Longstreet.)

Meanwhile, Floy has entrusted the bag of loot to Pontdue and instructed him to put it all on Princeton in the big football game against Rutgers—which hasn’t won the annual rivalry in years.  Oggle is, of course, the star player on the Rutgers team and Floy tries to distract him and his Scarlet Knights teammates by advising them that “Nobody Ever Died for Dear Old Rutgers.”  Nonetheless, Big Red wins and Floy has lost everything.  

Until, that is, after he’s captured by the police and learns that Pontdue had bet not on the Princeton football team . . . but a filly named Princeton.  Floy gives the swindled citizens their money back, but before he leaves, he tries to sell the audience one more item of “great worth.”

In Rando’s staging for Encores!, the whole thing was a terrific time in the theater.  I can’t for the life of me see why the play’s never been remounted in New York City in the 70 years since it closed.  It’s not like the only plays revived successfully in New York have been meaningful, significant dramas—a lot of nonsense has been brought back and done well.  High Button Shoes is such fun, I can’t but believe it could be made into a hit—especially with some  really good choreography (there are lots of dance numbers).  The Times’ Ben Brantley said the songs aren’t memorable—and maybe they’re not, but they’re delightful and up-beat and can easily be performed and staged to great entertainment effect!

(There’s one possible dramaturgical fault, but it shouldn’t be a problem with a bit of fluff like this.  There’s no real romance involving the central character, Harrison Floy, and any of the women.  Mama Longstreet obviously has a little thing for the con artist, but it doesn’t lead to anything—the play’s too innocent for an extramarital affair.  Fran is attracted to Floy—and he strings her along for the sake of his land scheme, making her treasurer because the townspeople he’s fleecing trust her—but it’s hardly a real musical comedy romance.  The love match in High Button Shoes is between Fran and Oggle—and they do pair up in the end—but he’s a secondary character in the plot.  The best love song in the score, incidentally, is “I Still Get Jealous,” a duet between Mama and Papa Longstreet.

(The reason for this apparent oversight, by the way, is that in the original book for the musical, Floy isn’t the central figure.  When Phil Silvers got the role, his part was enlarged and the play’s perspective was shifted so that Floy became the main character.  That’s what Abbott was rewriting for—and Silvers had a hand in the revision as well.  But in the end, this deficiency doesn’t really have an effect on the farcical fun High Button Shoes provides.)

The acting in the City Center production of High Button Shoes was perfect for what the play is.  I swear Michael Urie (whom I saw do a wonderful physical comedy turn in the Red Bull Theater’s 2017 mounting of Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector—see my report for Rick On Theater on 12 June 2017) was channeling Silvers (whom Urie’s really too young to know); he even found Silvers’s black-framed eyeglasses somewhere.  

Urie sings more than passably and can hoof enough to get by, but when it comes to verbal and physical humor, he’s no second banana.  He had less physical comedy here than in the Gogol, but when he and Chamberlin got going in their flam-flam routines and other two-hand scenes, you’d think they were old hands at playing off one another.  (The Encores! concerts have very little rehearsal time, so this kind of work must have come naturally to both actors.  Kudos to them both!) 

The rest of the company was fine, but the real stars of Encores! High Button Shoes were Sarah O’Gleby’s charming and spritely dances and the cast’s rendering of Hugh Martin’s vocal arrangements.  I also have to compliment Allen Moyer on his designs for the Atlantic City beach scenes in act two; the surf and the cabañas were wonderfully depicted—and the cut-out Model T, which came early in act one so that it set a marvelous tone for the rest of the show, was a terrific sight gag.

The press coverage of the concert was small.  Show-Score tallied just 15 published reviews as of 17 May, and the average score was only 56.  The highest score was 75 for Theater Reviews From My Seat, followed by two 70’s (Broadway World and New York Stage Review); the lowest-rated reviews were five 45’s, including amNew York, TheaterMania, Talkin’ Broadway, and New York Theatre Guide.  Twenty percent of the notices were positive, 47% were mixed, and 33% were negative.  My survey will include 10 reviews.

In a review entitled “Skip this clunky musical revival” in amNew York, Matt Windman characterized the Encores! production as “lumbering and tiring,” proving why, he asserted, High Button Shoes “is hardly ever performed nowadays.”  Windman does add that High Button Shoes does have “a madcap vaudeville spirit running through it” (and “may be the only musical ever set in New Brunswick, New Jersey”), but he argued, “Much of the plotting is clunky and outright baffling, and the so-so score lacks any songs that are well-remembered today.” 

The amNY reviewer, whose notice received one of Show-Score’s low-score 45’s, determined that the Encores! revival “suggests that without an ace comedian like Silvers, ‘High Button Shoes’ lacks the substance to justify a professional revival . . . .  Then again, with more inspiration and better comic ingenuity, ‘High Button Shoes’ might have at least been more fun.”  He reported that Urie “appears to be impersonating Silvers’ antic disposition the entire time” and the “actors playing the local community’s straight-laced characters . . . seem ill at ease and unsure whether to approach the material from a standpoint of sincerity or satire.” 

Obviously, from what I’ve already said, I don’t agree with Windman’s conclusions, but Ben Brantley was cool on the show as well, his New York Times review scoring only 55 on the survey website.  He suggested that theatergoers looking for “a revival that lets a cheerful old American musical remain its cheerful old self, with any inner darkness undisclosed” might be happy with High Button Shoes, which he labeled “a nearly forgotten frolic” with “the approximate fizz and flavor of a vanilla egg cream.”  Brantley condensed the theatrical experience as summoning “the high jinks of vaudeville, burlesque and peppy college-themed fare of yore.”  “That’s not an assessment to make the heart beat faster,” wrote the Timesman, and “the charms of this ‘Shoes’ are of a hazy strain.” 

Brantley summed the “entire production” up as seeming “to take place under a double glaze of nostalgia—of remembering a more innocent time’s remembrance of a more innocent time.”  The review-writer added that “the production creates a bright, daytime world in which sunshine comes in shades of ice-cream parlor pastels,” praising the work of set designer Moyer, costumer Hould-Ward, and lighting designer Billington.  

Though saying that Urie “offers a bright, tooth-flashing facsimile of the Silvers grin here” and “has the rim-shot-inspiring vaudeville delivery down cold [while] he remains as Gumby-like as ever,” Brantley continued, “It must be said that he has only a touch-and-go relationship with a melody line” and “he lacks the streak of shiny malice that gave an edge to Silvers’s clowning.”  The reviewer’s final assessment was, “Mr. Urie gives a characteristically skillful performance, but it feels pasted on.” 

Aside from “Bathing Beauty Ballet,” Bratley asserted, “none of the musical numbers land with the impact that makes audiences clap their hands raw.”  He went on to adjudge that the “music is genially, forgettably melodic” and that “score for ‘Shoes’ is rendered here with a swoony lushness by the wonderful Encores! orchestra.”  Brantley concluded, however, that “it seems to evaporate even as you listen.  Like the production as a whole, it somehow reminds you of a generic host of golden-age musicals without ever staking a claim to its own unassailable identity.”

In the New York Observer, Robert Gottlieb dubbed Encores! High Button Shoes “pretty terrible” and a “mess” except for a few highlights.  Gottlieb said the first act was “endless” and had “no coherence, no charm, and lots of puerile jokes.”  The Observer reviewer continued: “The Jule Styne-Sammy Cahn score is derivative and second-rate.  The Encores! performances were efficiently shticky,” with the exception of Kevin Chamberlin, who alone was “three dimensional.”  “As for the Bathing Beauty Ballet itself,” the one dance number Gottlieb liked, “it lived up to its huge reputation, even though the stage of the City Center was too small for it: it looked reduced.”

TheaterMania’s David Gordon, in another notice that scored only 45, pronounced, “The only reason to see” the Encores! High Button Shoes was the “Bathing Beauty Ballet,” which the review-writer labeled “10 or so fleeting minutes of heaven.”  “Until that moment,” observed Gordon, “John Rando's production of this 1947 tuner lurches from tepid to tiresome: an assortment of enthusiastic actors lost in a sea of passé jokes and just-OK songs.”  The TM reviewer declared, “I'd . . . encourage Encores! to just present this sequence and cut the rest of the show.” 

Despite praise for Moyer’s sets, Hould-Ward’s costumes, Billington’s lighting, Berman’s musical direction, and Lang’s orchestrations as “traditionally superb,” Gordon reported that “Rando’s staging is, in a word, rudderless.”  The reviewer asserted, “The production just isn’t ready for prime time, and that extends to the actors.”  He explained, “The jokes land with a thud, the pacing is lugubrious, and the whole thing has a very strange aura of melancholy about it.” 

On Theater Reviews From My Seat, the lone 75 in Show-Score’s round-up, Joe Lombardi described High Button Shoes as “Broadway musical comedy filtered through a vaudeville lens.  Slapstick humor given a burlesque styling.”  He continued, “Some of the comedy is silly and dated but I still chuckled” and added, “The humor verges on titillatingly naughty.”  Lombardi reminded us, “The big reason to revisit High Button Shoes, however, is for the choreography of the ‘Bathing Beauty Ballet.’” 

The Theater Reviews writer pointed out, “There are some very good songs including the forgotten hit, ‘Papa, Won’t You Dance With Me?’” (a pop hit for the late Doris Day), but demurred that “I find it hard to make an argument for High Button Shoes as a great musical.”  The review-writer concluded, “If you care to take a swim in musical theater history where football and vaudeville could amusingly coexist on stage, High Button Shoes is worth the plunge.”

Michael Dale of Broadway World (a 70 on Show-Score) acknowledged that High Button Shoes “is not exactly a forgotten gem,” but it’s still “a worthy selection for Encores! to explore” as “a great example of the type of star vehicle shows that remained popular on post-OKLAHOMA! Broadway.”  Then Dale asserted that “the main reason for Encores! to bring back the smash hit 1947 musical comedy” was the “Bathing Beauty Ballet,” that “madcap mayhem of the Mack Sennett-inspired” display of “crazy cacophony of choreographic chaos.”  The reviewer reported that “the talented company of dancing comedians brings down the house.” 

Except for “I Still Get Jealous” and “Papa, Won’t You Dance with Me,” Dale noted, the “rest is a pleasant, though not especially distinguished collection of generic ballads and novelty numbers.”  Dale also found that Urie’s channeling of Silvers “didn't seem a comfortable fit,” but acknowledged that with Encores! short rehearsal schedule, the opening-night performance might not have been quite fully baked.

On Theater Pizzazz, Brian Scott Lipton (in another 55-rated review) pointed out that “our tastes in musicals have evolved so much over the past 70 years, it can be a little hard to understand why this 1947 romp ran for nearly two years.  Still,” he continued, “that’s not to say there aren’t enough enjoyable moments in John Rando’s production to merit a visit if you keep your expectations in check.”  The songs, with the exceptions of the two numbers mentioned already, is “less-than stellar . . . made to sound a bit better than they are by Rob Berman and the Encores! orchestra.”  Lipton concluded, “In the long run, ‘High Button Shoes’ won’t go down as a high mark in the history of musical theater—or even Encores! presentations–-but I was happy to have a chance to see it.”

Talkin’ Broadway’s Howard Miller proclaimed, “High Button Shoes . . . has not withstood the test of time in the seven decades since its initial run, at least not by the evidence of the deflated Encores! production.”   Like other reviewers, Miller found that “Urie does his best here to sell us in the same manner, but despite all the charm he can muster, Silvers’ checkered suit simply does not fit his shoulders.”  The plot, said the TB reviewer, “makes little sense” and “[u]nder John Rando’s direction, almost every flaw is emphasized, while the show’s strengths (and there definitely are some) are downplayed.” 

Except for “Bathing Beauty Ballet,” asserted Miller, whose notice also scored the low 45, “the dancing . . . is a mishmash of styles.”  The reviewer felt, “There are some very good songs scattered here and there, including ‘Can’t You Just See Yourself in Love with Me?’ and ‘You’re My Girl’ . . . .  But neither the toe-tapping ‘Papa, Won't You Dance With Me?’ nor the appealing soft shoe tune ‘I Still Get Jealous’ . . . manage to soar.”  With the exception of Marc Koeck (Oggle) and Carla Duren (Fran) and Betsy Wolfe (Mama) and Chester Gregory (Papa), the “rest of the cast try to rev things up with lots of frenzied mugging, but snake oil is still snake oil, no matter how you package it.”

Austin Yang of New York Theatre Guide, who rated yet another low of 45, explained the Encores! “formula”: “ A gossamer-thin plot, a charming but forgettable score, and dialogue that may fail to land even with New York City Center’s chief demographic of the affluent, elderly, and Caucasian.”  (Yang must not have seen some of the concerts I have.  Several have been quite substantial.)  “High Button Shoes is this formula at its most underwhelming,” he affirmed.  The NYTG reviewer found that “with no timeless standards, the score falls flat, and even at its best with the upbeat ‘Papa, Won’t You Dance With Me[,]’ . . . it comes off as silly and dated.”  Yang asserted, “The lifeline of the show, in classic Encores! tradition, is its dance.” 

On New York Stage Review, one of the 70’s on Show-Score, Steven Suskin declared that “until the start of act two,” High Button Shoes “is revealed to be what we’ve always been told: not much of a musical.”  The moment of the turn-around is, of course, the “Bathing Beauty Ballet” when “the audience is whipped into a frenzy of musical-comedy delight.”  It was Suskin’s opinion that “[m]any in the audience at City Center, in fact, would probably have preferred that they run the ‘Bathing Beauty Ballet’ three times . . . .”  His description of the play was a “ragtag, pasted-together, decidedly non-ambitious, old-fashioned affair.” 

On top of deficiencies in the book, the dances, the songs, and the supporting cast, Suskin found that “the current staging . . . falls flattest . . . in the star performance. . . .  Michael Urie . . .  is an impressive comic actor, and does adequately in the role; but he is not a low-comedy clown, and the Silvers gibes . . . don’t land.”  The NYSR writer went on:  “Without a strong star performance, all that’s left in this High Button Shoes is the ‘Bathing Beauty Ballet.’  And that’s not enough to support the evening.”  The reviewer did have one superior compliment to express as a final comment: “The music, at least, is impeccably handled.  Rob Berman leads the Encores orchestra with such flair that during the rambunctious overture the show sounds like a hit. But not for long.”

[Steven Suskin’s remark about the overture reminds me of a comment I made to Diana as we were leaving the theater after the show: I miss the traditional overture before the performance—and even after the intermission.  I’m sure there’s a reason it’s mostly disappeared from musical theater, that composition of snippets from the show’s score, but I’d forgotten how it sets us up for the musical play we’re about to see.  It puts me in the mood for what’s coming, it draws me into the world of the play before the actors, singers, and dancers make their entrances.  At the start of the second half, the second overture reacclimates us to the musical environment from which we’ve taken a real-world break. 

[The overture sets the tone (if you’ll pardon the pun) for the performance by giving us a preview of the style of music we’ll be hearing—and, after all, that’s the foundation of the classic musical.  The dialogue from the book carries the plot line, the story, but the music carries the emotional line, the feelings the play’s meant to generate.  The overture gives us a little taste of that and puts our psyches in the right mode for receptivity.  It primes the pump, if you will.  I miss that, and I’d forgotten how much until Rob Berman and his Encores! Orchestra struck up those first notes at the top of High Button Shoes.  What a little joy that was!]

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.]

'Irma La Douce'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dis donc!

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

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

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