Theater & Art

CHAMPAGNE LADY

(13 February 1989)

 

[In early July, I watched a cable broadcast of Mae West’s I’m No Angel (1933).  I thought of a play based on West’s career that I’d reviewed years ago—25, it turns out—but didn’t go beyond that brief thought.  Then West, who wrote the script for the film (which co-starred a very young Cary Grant, 29, who also starred in West’s previous movie of the same year, She Done Him Wrong), delivered one of her iconic lines: “When I'm good, I'm very good.  But, when I'm bad . . . I’m better.”  That’s a perfect paraprosdokian, a figure of speech on which I blogged on 12 July 2013, so I posted a short “Comment” on that ROT page with the quotation.  (There was already a line—apparently actually a paraphrase—from another Mae West movie in the posted list of examples: “Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before,” from 1936’s Klondike Annie.) Then I remembered my old review of the Mae West musical, Champagne Lady, and I thought it would be fun to look back at an oldie that predates not only ROT, but even the play reports I started sending some out-of-town friends in 2003.   

 

[This review appeared as half of “Drinking and Driving” in the New York Native on 13 February 1989.  (The second half of the column covered the French Canadian play The Cezanne Syndrome by Normand Canac-Marquis at Soho Rep.)  I’ve revised the review and inserted some information in the version below that didn’t appear in 1989.

 

[Champagne Lady doesn’t seem to have left much of a footprint: there’s nary a mention of it (or the cabaret space where it ran, for that matter) on the ’Net and even the “Paper of Record,” the New York Times didn’t run a review.  (To be fair, though the Times now covers Off-Broadway pretty extensively, Champagne Lady was more Off-Off than Off.)  The venue was the cabaret room, dubbed the Trocadero Theatre Club, of a Greenwich Village restaurant.  The play’s slugged as “A Bawdy, Intoxicating Musical Comedy Of The Prohibition Era” below the title in the program, and the setting is described as “New York City In The 20’s With Prohibition In Full Swing.”  Directed by Jon-Michael Delon, Champagne Lady was written by Nelson Jewell and Richard Atkins and produced by Jonel, Ltd. (presumably for Jon-Michael + Nelson), at The Trocadero Restaurant, at 368 Bleecker Street, on the corner of Charles.  (There were no set, costume, or lighting credits in the program.) The one-act non-Equity showcase, comprised of eight scenes and 10 musical numbers, opened on 5 January 1989 and ran Thursdays, Fridays, and Sundays until 26 February.]

 

In a low-ceilinged room below the Trocadero Restaurant, on a tiny, nearly bare stage, Champagne Lady relates the story of Ruby Lil, who’s “never fully dressed without a man,” and the men who come up and see her sometimes.  Taking its plot from the films of Mae West, it’s the tale of a bad girl who dupes the authorities while outfoxing the men who think they’ll take advantage of her.  This little musical, set in the Prohibition ’20s, is performed in the restaurant’s cabaret, creating the small irony of drinking while watching a play which notes the illegality of that practice. 

 

Irony’s in short supply in Champagne Lady.  Ruby Lil (Tracey Morse) is a straight impression of West, her name taken from Diamond Lil, the title character in West’s own eponymous 1928 Broadway play, the basis for her 1933 film She Done Him Wrong.  The plot elements that librettist Nelson Jewell’s borrowed from West’s films include the jilting of an unwelcome lover (John Combs), who then vindictively hales Ruby Lil into court for bootlegging.  She appears before the judge (Paul Campana), a lecherous drunk who places Ruby Lil under his own protection rather than jail her.  Despite Campana’s weak impersonation and intrusive New York intonations, Judge “Willy” Drakenfeld is supposed to be W. C. Fields (born, famously, near Philadelphia—not anywhere near New York City).  Their relationship is right out of My Little Chickadee (1940), and I waited in vain to hear him ask Ruby Lil if she were trying to show contempt for the court so she could reply, “Ooh, I’m tryin’ very hard not to, Judge.” 

 

The addition of a gigolo (John Patti) tangles the plot, but Ruby Lil unravels it assisted by her black maid, Beulah (Mari Briggs), a character and relationship taken directly from I’m No Angel.  (In that movie, West has the line, “Beulah, peel me a grape.”  In Champagne Lady, Ruby Lil orders some grapes, and Beulah responds, “Shall I peels ’em for ya?”)

 

All this is mildly amusing, even occasionally quite funny.  Morse does a creditable Mae West, and Briggs, despite the stereotyped role, is very comical as squeaky-voiced Beulah (calling to mind Butterfly McQueen’s Prissy in 1939’s Gone with the Wind, whom Briggs may have been channeling).  Morse has a good belt, and, although Patti’s baritone has little personality, he’s the best singer in the cast.  Richard Atkins’s music, though not particularly apt for either the Roaring ’20s or Mae West, is pleasant and Atkins and Jewell’s lyrics are often clever. 

 

The play, however, is neither a spoof in the vein of, say, A Night in the Ukraine (1980-81) nor a clever recreation like Little Mary Sunshine (Off-Broadway, 1959-62), but a vehicle seemingly written for the real West and Fields.  There are no comments on the absurdity of the characters or the blatant racism and sexism.  The producers, whose press release compares Champagne Lady to the Off-Broadway hits A Chorus Line (1975 at the Public Theater), Hair (1967 OB) and The Fantasticks (1960-2002), have hopes for a full two-act version that don’t seem justified.  It’s not campy enough to be a send-up, nor reverent enough to be an homage; however, the availability of drinks and the cabaret atmosphere of Downstairs at Trocadero render Champagne Lady an enjoyable way to pass an hour and ten minutes.   

 

[There were no other published reviews than my own in the Native that I could find 25 years after the fact: as I noted above, the Times didn’t cover Champagne Lady (though the paper did include it in its theater listings), and the other New York dailies didn’t, either.  I didn’t find a notice in the Village Voice or the theater trade paper Show Business, but I did happen upon a column in the other trade weekly, “Bistro Bits” in Back Stage (3 February 1989), in which Bob Harrington wrote about the show because it was part of a trend of putting on theater productions in nightclubs like Downstairs at Trocadero.  It may have been the only thing that passed for a review aside from my own notice.  Characterizing the performance as “as much a backers audition . . . as it is a cabaret revue,” Harrington wrote that “at times, it actually approaches those vintage ’30s films, though the similarities are mostly in derivative imitations.”  In addition, the cabaret columnist felt, “The whole production seems to teeter between a high camp spoof and a legitimate comedy, and it never seems to  fall one way or the other.”  Of Jewell and Atkins’s songs, as well as Morse’s “singing persona,” Harrington observed that they were “more Sophie Tucker than Mae West . . . .  But what do the Tuckerish tunes have to do with the West plot and impersonation . . . ?”  (Morse was a solo singer at clubs like the Duplex and Don’t Tell Mama before treading the boards in Champagne Lady.)  “‘Champagne Lady,’” the Back Stage columnist concluded, “has some fun moments and possibilities as a high camp frolic, but it needs a lot of work.” 

 

[As for Mae West (1893-1980), the ostensible subject of what Harrington dubbed a “mini-musical,” beginning with Sex in 1926, she wrote and starred in her own Broadway plays.  Writing under the pen name Jane Mast (her birth name was Mary Jane West), the star was already famous for her double entendres and distinctive walk (which she attributed to a popular female impersonator on the vaudeville circuit where she got her start).  “Discovered” by the New York Times at 18 in a Broadway revue (which closed after eight shows), West was already 33 when she began her playwriting career—and in 1927, after Sex was raided by city police, West was sentenced to 10 days on Welfare (now Roosevelt) Island for “corrupting the morals of youth.”  (Her morals trial was held at the Jefferson Market Courthouse at 10th Street and 6th Avenue in Greenwich Village—a beautiful red-brick building that’s now my neighborhood library!)  She went on to write The Drag (1927), The Wicked Age (1927), Diamond Lil (1928), Pleasure Man (1928), and The Constant Sinner (1931).  Hollywood called in 1932, when West was already 39.  Despite her age, usually a disadvantage for women in Hollywood, especially a newcomer, West was the definition of “star”—and she controlled her own career, a rarity not just for women but for any actor in the days of the powerful studios and their bosses.  In 1970, West came out of retirement to appear in Myra Breckinridge, and she made her last movie, Sextette, in 1978.  Mae West died in L.A. at the age of 87.

 

[W. C. Fields (1880-1946), whose real name was William Claude Dukenfield and who made scores of comic films from 1915 to 1944, starred opposite West in My Little Chickadee in 1940.  I used to howl with laughter watching his antics in the old flicks on TV when I was in college—Fields was a master of physical comedy of all kinds, but especially juggling, and an expert stick man in pool, doing his own trick shots, a routine he’d perfected in vaudeville, for many of his films.  I’ve always felt a special connection to Fields because he died (at 66) on the very day I was born (a distinction I share with singer Jimmy Buffett).]

 

THE AZTEC EMPIRE

(13 December 2004)

 

[In a recent ROT report on an art exhibit, I made passing mention of an art show I’d seen previously at the same museum.  When I was setting up my report on Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe (20 July), I noted that the last exhibit I’d seen at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum was probably The Aztec Empire in 2004.  I wrote about that show five years before I ever launched ROT, but because it was part of an omnibus report covering several exhibits and performances, it’s very short.  Now, since I’m posting another archival report, I decided it would be interesting to combine the two brief pieces as a look back a decade or two (-and-a-half) at the theater and art scenes in New York City. 

 

[The Aztec Empire, organized in collaboration with the National Council for Culture and Arts and the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico City, ran at the Guggenheim, on 5th Avenue at 89th Street, from 15 October 2004 to 13 February 2005.  The guest curator for Aztec Empire was Felipe Solís Olguín, director of the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, co-curator of the large-scale survey Aztecs at the Royal Academy in London in 2003, and one of the world's foremost authorities on Aztec art and culture.  I’ve reedited this report slightly for posting on the blog.]

 

Both The Aztec Empire show at the Guggenheim, which my mother and I saw on 30 November 2004, and China: Dawn of a Golden Age, 200-750 A.D.at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (12 October 2004-23 January 2005), which we saw later in the holiday weekend, were good shows, but Aztec Empire, an exhibit of more than 440 works, many never before seen outside Mexico, drawn from both public and private collections—the first large-scale survey of Aztec art and culture to be seen in the United States in more than 20 years—was more interesting since we haven’t seen as much of that culture as we have China.  (We did have a Maya exhibit in D.C. this year, Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya at the National Gallery of Art’s East Building from 4 April to 25 July 2004, which was magnificent-—another really huge show, by the way [see my report below]—but China gets a lot of attention all the time here.) 

 

Slugged as “the most comprehensive survey of the art and culture of the Aztecs ever assembled outside Mexico,” the Guggenheim display, covering the 13th to 16th centuries but focusing on the 15th century, roughly the period of the Renaissance in Europe which it resembled in ancient Mexican culture, was more appealing as well as easier to access and traverse.  Riding an elevator to the top of the ramp—though there is also a floor higher we had to walk up to and then return—then taking a leisurely stroll down the spiral is much easier than going from exhibit case to exhibit case and room to room while dodging the other viewers following some other self-defined route.  (Actually, we did have to break the Aztec show part way through to grab a little lunch and then return to the spot where we interrupted our progress.  Couldn’t be helped!) 

 

A highlight of the exhibition are treasures only recently uncovered at the Templo Mayor archaeological site in Mexico City, including two monumental (both are about six feet tall) figures of fired clay, one of an eagle warrior (c. 1440–69), an elite Aztec soldier, and the other of Mictlantecuhtli (c. 1480), god of the dead.  (I’m constantly astounded at shows like Aztec Empire—as well as at, say, American Indian exhibits—how some of the relatively delicate items made of wood or clay or porcelain managed to survive intact or nearly for hundreds, even thousands of years buried underfoot.  Yes, many of the items were in tombs, but some were just buried.  It’s astonishing to imagine.)  The imposing Eagle Warrior depicts a standing man wearing a helmet in the form of an eagle, through whose beak the warrior’s face can be seen.  The warrior’s costume also includes stylized wings with feathers made of stucco and a raptor’s talons.  Portraying one of the two most prestigious Aztec warrior classes (the other wore jaguar costumes), this was one of two statues found flanking the door to a chamber where the eagle warriors met, and is believed to represent the morning sun.  (In Aztec mythology, the eagle was the symbol of the sun, to whom all sacrifices were made.)

 

Mictlantecuhtli (Lord of Mictlan, the Aztec underworld), who craves human blood, is quite a grotesque image.  The statue stands in a darkened corridor of the museum, the ghastly figure of a decomposing corpse, stripped of most of its flesh, its grinning skull cavernous, its hands in the form of huge claws, and its liver dangling from his exposed ribs.

 

Throughout the exhibit is a bestiary of naturalistically observed figures of the biosphere of Mesoamerica featuring wild beasts such as eagles, coyotes, jaguars, monkeys, rabbits, frogs, and snakes; insects like locusts, fleas, and a larger-than-life-size (over 7½ inches long), realistically detailed grasshopper (c. 1500), carved of orange, semi-precious carnelian stone, that looks like it’s ready to jump, as well as domesticated animals such as dogs and turkeys.  As stylized as Eagle Warrior and Mictlantecuhtli are, the Mexican bestiary, even the tiny insects magnified dozens of times actual size, is as lifelike as a zoological study.  (In Aztec mythology, animals play important roles in not only the human sphere, but the spiritual and celestial ones as well.  That’s why so many of the Aztec gods are shown as hybrids of several animals, such as Quetzalcoatl, the famous “feathered serpent”: to emphasize the presence of characteristics of a combination of symbolic powers.)  In addition to animal figures, Aztec Empire also includes images of plants and agricultural products.

 

In the end, the Aztec artifacts were the more interesting to me than the Chinese mostly because I have a thing for that art.  When I visited the Yucatan a dozen years ago, which is the northernmost extremity of the Mayan territory, I couldn’t get enough of their carvings and statuary.  I desperately wanted to find a really nice reproduction of something as my souvenir—but the ones I could afford weren’t nice enough and the ones I liked were just too expensive.  (The Maya simply disappeared—no one really knows why for sure—in about 900 C.E. and the Aztecs, who were centered on what is now Mexico City—Tenochtitlan in Aztec times—far to the north of the Maya, were just rising at that time; nonetheless, there is an iconographic similarity between Mayan art and Aztec, though I don’t know how much actual influence the older culture had on the newer one.)  Chinese art, especially the porcelain works, is beautiful—I brought home a fake Tang horse from China, as it happens (and my folks brought home a real one!)—but the imagery and style of the South and Central American Indians has always knocked me out. 

 

[I have a similar response to the art of the Indians of the Pacific Northwest—Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Alaska—as my reaction to the Aztec and Maya exhibits.  In my estimation, the northwest Indian art may be the most aesthetically magnificent of all so-called primitive arts.  I didn’t even know about it until I went to Seattle back in 1989, and I just went nuts for it.  I brought back a mask—a piece of signed art by an Indian artist, not a real religious artifact—and half a dozen or so prints that were made up as fancy cards for stationery.  I had intended to give the cards away as gifts, but I only gave away one—plus one I bought specifically as a thank-you gift for someone who had been my host in San Francisco, where I had stopped before going on to Seattle—and have kept all the others because I can’t part with them!  If you read my journal of my trip to Alaska (“The Last Frontier”; 26 March, 5 April, 30 April, and 10 May 2014) you’ll see that I still love that art and that this was part of the reason I went there.]

 

THE COURTLY ART OF THE ANCIENT MAYA

(11-13 May 2004)

 

[Since I made so much in my report on The Aztec Empire of the Maya show at NGA that same year, I think it’s worth adding the earlier short report I wrote on that exhibit as well.  The coincidence of seeing the art of these two cultures within about seven months is enough to make the experience remarkable, but the fact that both shows so impressed me made the phenomenon all the more notable. 

 

[As I recorded above, The Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya ran at the East Building of the National Gallery from 4 April to 25 July 2004.  My mother and I caught it while I was visiting her in Washington that April for her 81st birthday; I’ve revised this report, written about a month later, some for ROT.  Kathleen Berrin, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, curator of the art of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, and Mary Miller, Vincent J. Scully Professor of the History of Art at Yale University, were the curators for Courtly Art.]

 

The Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya is a huge show, 156 works of art from about 30 public and private collections in Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, Chile, the U.S., Switzerland, the U.K., and Australia.  The exhibit, organized with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, focuses on the art of the various Mayan kings and queens and their courts from 600-800 C.E., a 200-year stretch during which they transformed Mayan art, “achieving a peak of dramatic expression and naturalism unmatched in the ancient New World,” according to the museum’s publicity.  (The Mayan civilization, which extended from what is now southern  Mexico into northern Central American—present-day Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador—existed from about 2000 B.C.E. until after the arrival of the Spanish, but its classical period extended from about 250 to 900 C.E., after which, for reasons historians don’t understand, it went into a steep decline.  By about 1000 C.E., the grandeur of the Mayan civilization had ended.)  Like The Aztec Empire at the Guggenheim and exhibits of Native American art at the National Museum of the American Indian (as well as exhibits at the National Museum of African Art), the Maya exhibit’s focus is the artistic appeal of the items, not their anthropological value.  The works in The Courtly Art aren’t folk art, but highly refined works by well-trained professionals in a Mayan court which made stars of its artists. 

                                                            

A second aspect of this show is also interesting, in addition to the aesthetic focus: much of the Mayan culture is under reinterpretation because their hieroglyphics have only recently begun to be deciphered.  (It has been observed that the Mayan hieroglyphics took decades to decipher because there was no Rosetta Stone for them, which is true, of course.  I recall, however, that the code was first broken at just about the time my folks and I went to Yucatan back in ’92.  It had defied interpretation for centuries, leading to a massive misunderstanding of the Mayan culture.)  I think the repercussions of the first approach is self-evident, but the second, the reinterpretation of what we know about this people, meant that even artifacts that have been on view for decades have come to reveal or exemplify truths only recently understood. 

 

The most prominent of these reassessments is that the Maya, whom we used to believe were basically a peaceful people interested in the arts and astronomy, were warlike and bloody in the extreme.  The Maya of The Courtly Art not only loved blood, but pain.  This is borne out in the art on display at NGA, most clearly in the magnificent full-size modern reproduction of wall murals from Bonampak showing a king and court presiding over mutilated captives in “The Court at War” section of the exhibit.  Among the many “courtly” activities depicted in the mural are prisoners being scourged and killed—some having their fingernails pulled out or their fingers sliced off, some pleading for mercy, and others awaiting further mutilation and death—as well as other gruesome scenes.  (The mural is reminiscent of the work of a Mesoamerican Hieronymus Bosch, except that Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, for instance, portrays a grotesque fantasy world while the Bonampak fresco putatively represents a real one.)  In an earlier part of The Courtly Art, a pair of relief carvings show individual captives with their arms tied behind their backs—one seemingly stunned, another crying, a third staring up in wild-eyed panic.  In yet another carving, a limestone relief depicts the wife of a powerful ruler called Shield Jaguar pulling a thorn-studded rope through her tongue, the blood spattering on paper in a basket at Lady Xok’s feet.  (In terms of the Maya, ‘courtly’ doesn’t equate with the common usage in the world of European chivalry.  It refers to “the sanguinary horrors of Mayan imperial rites,” as the Washington Post said in an editorial review by Mark Jenkins.) 

 

But the one thing that hasn’t changed—except in our own appreciation of it—is that the Maya made incredibly beautiful art.  In that same relief of Lady Xok, the details of Mayan textile work is carved into the limestone in exquisite detail, showing the intricate weaving and delicate embroidery of the lady’s robes and Shield Jaguar’s form-fitting armor, replete with ornamental tassels, fringes, and elaborate edgings.  In “Life at the Maya Court,” the first gallery of the show, the Portrait Head of Pakal, a 7th-century ruler from Palenque, is stunning in its beauty.  (Beauty in Mayan culture was associated with the divine, in particular, with the Maize God.)  A stucco carving with an elaborate feathered headdress, the sculpture depicts a handsome young man (Pakal ruled from 615 C.E., when he was12, until he died at 80 in 683—a Methuselean span in his day) with classic Mayan looks: an elongated head and prominent nose, full lips, and piercing eyes. 

 

The Yucatan is the northernmost reach of the Maya territory, which is centered in southern Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize.  The sites we saw near Cancun (Tulum, Coba, and Chichen-Itza) were smaller and poorer—outposts really of the major city-states to the south—and even the carvings and sculptures we saw there were magnificent.  [As I explained in the Aztec Empire report above, I tried in vain to find something I could afford—a replica, obviously, or a modern work that drew on the Mayan imagery—to bring home as my souvenir.]  Along with the Northwest Indian art, the Mayan stuff is the most striking of any indigenous culture I have seen.  The Courtly Art show, which has pieces small and large, even monumental—organized into six sections: “Life at the Maya Court,” “The Divine Model of Courtly Life,” “Women at Court,” “Word and Image in the Maya Court,” “The Court at War,” and “Palenque: An Exemplary Maya Court”—was breathtaking.  And exhausting. 

 

I was left with the question [which I reiterated recently in my report on Italian Futurism, 15 July 2014] of how to appreciate the aesthetic beauty of this art, which is undeniable, and not overlook the innate cruelty and brutality of the violence-loving, bloodthirsty culture that created it.  Paul Richard, the Washington Post  art reviewer, described Mayan art as “curiously unsettling, fabulous yet fearsome, opulent yet painful.”  (The New York Times tellingly titled art writer Holland Carter’s review “A Mystique of Blood and Beauty.”)  I haven’t reconciled this dichotomy for myself, so I can’t provide any guidance for anyone else.  The remoteness in time is certainly part of the calculus; after all, the Dark Ages in Europe were hardly a benign era in human history, particularly in terms of humankind’s treatment of its fellow creatures, yet we can admire the art of that time (or there’d be no point in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s magnificent Cloisters).  On the other hand, the Mayan art we see in The Courtly Art is not only the product of a brutal culture, but it openly celebrates that brutality and bloodlust.  Whatever the answer is—if, indeed, there is one—The Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya is an astonishing experience, the impressions from which will doubtlessly remain with me for a long time.  Of course, as I’ve already admitted: I’m a sucker for this art anyway, so maybe I’m no gauge.

 

[It was only in the middle of the last century that museums, galleries, and the viewing public began to consider objects from the diverse cultures of Africa and the Americas as aesthetic items rather than sociological and anthropological ones.  Some Western artists appreciated the beauty of African art and were even influenced by it in their own work as early as the 1890s and the 1920s, but most art from Africa and ancient North, Central, and South America was shown not in art museums in the West but in museums of ethnography.  Big museums like NMAI and NMAA, opened in 2004 and 1986, respectively, were both originally small, private museums trying to break new ground in the world-art museum scene.  The eventual acceptance of this perspective allowed the establishment of institutions like NMAI and NMAA and exhibits like The Aztec Empire and The Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya.] 

“Broadway’s Musical Chairs”

by Gabriel Cohen


[I’ve published articles on various backstage aspects of theater in the past, most recently “Two (Back) Stage Pros” on 30 June.  I’ve also written about the pit orchestra and theater music.  Here’s a report from the New York Times that describes a truly esoteric, inside-baseball part of that world—the replacement musician in a pit orchestra on Broadway, or what happens when a player goes on vacation or gets ill.  Like substitute teachers, there’s often not a lot of time to plan (or rehearse), but unlike the classroom sub, the replacement instrumentalist has to approximate the work of the regular player or risk throwing not only the ensemble off its rhythm, but the actors off theirs on stage as well.  Also unlike teacher substitutes, the replacement musician gets a great deal of respect from her or his fellow players—many, as you’ll read, are in great demand and can work multiple gigs just about simultaneously.]


Beneath the stage of Broadway’s Al Hirschfeld Theater lies a dark space with a low ceiling — a cross between a suburban rec room and a submarine. Shortly before each performance of “Kinky Boots,” 13 black-clad musicians file to their battle stations, each illuminated by a small light attached to a music stand. The expectant buzz of the audience filters down from a narrow opening at the edge of the stage.


As at any Broadway show, the musicians in the “Kinky Boots” pit are expected to play flawlessly for two-plus hours — even those who are sitting in for what may be the first time. During a recent Sunday matinee of the hit show, for instance, four of the musicians were substitutes, called in and asked to unobtrusively join a band grooving at the top of its game. After all, even Broadway musicians may want to take vacations, or spend the summer touring with Sting or the Rolling Stones.


“Subbing is a bit nerve-racking,” said Ann Klein, 52, who replaced Michael Aarons, the regular “Kinky Boots” guitarist, twice in July. Ms. Klein has worked as a replacement on Broadway for five years, in five different shows. She has a career as a singer-songwriter and will pick up work on tour with other artists. But substituting on Broadway pays pretty well — like regulars, subs earn union scale, $227.42 per performance — if you can deal with the high stakes. “You don’t have the luxury of rehearsing with the band,” Ms. Klein said. “So it’s scary.”


“Once,” Jeff Schiller, another “Kinky Boots” sub, recalled, “I got a call half an hour into a show, when a regular was experiencing incredible kidney stone pain.” Luckily, Mr. Schiller, who goes by the nickname Houndog, lives near the theater district. He swapped in between numbers in the middle of Act One.


Thankfully, this kind of quick-change routine is rare. Most subs get some notice before they have to step in.


Mr. Schiller, 55, has filled in on more than 40 Broadway shows, including “Phantom of the Opera” and “The Book of Mormon,” and he says that most productions follow a similar system. Each regular musician is required to name five possible substitutes, who learn their parts through a process called “watching the book.”


“If there’s room,” Mr. Schiller said, “you go in and sit in the pit and make a recording of the regular.” Then the subs go home and play along.


A regular works eight performances a week, but subs can do more if they’re playing in more than one show at a time. Indeed, Mr. Schiller has had 10-performance weeks. Part of what puts him in such demand is that he’s proficient on saxophone, flute, clarinet and a raft of other instruments. This flexibility, known as doubling, opens him to a wider range of work — not to mention extra pay.


Unfortunately, there’s a major downside to the sub lifestyle: There’s no guarantee of when you’ll play next. Mr. Schiller averages two or three jobs a week, but there are weeks when he gets none. That’s why he and Ms. Klein would love to receive regular chairs.


As recently as the late 1980s, playing in a Broadway musical was not considered the most desirable gig for a musician. Most professionals sought better-paying work in jingles and recording sessions. But as that work dried up, due in part to samplers and digital-audio software, the ace musicians gravitated toward theaters near Times Square.


But just as the competition for spots in a live Broadway orchestra has increased, the pit itself has contracted.


“The average number of full-timers per show has gone down by half since the 1950s and ’60s,” said Robert Meffe, director of music at San Diego State University, the author of a paper on the shrinking pit orchestra and himself a former sub.


According to Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, there are only 349 full-time players on Broadway now. That means that all players — regulars and subs alike — must be in top form. “There’s a lot of pressure,” Martha Hyde, a frequent substitute, acknowledged.


“I subbed on ‘Matilda’ today — mostly flute,” said Ms. Hyde, who has been doing this work since 1988. “Tomorrow I’m playing second clarinet and second flute on ‘Phantom,’ and the next evening I’m playing alto sax and lots of clarinet solos on ‘Chicago.’”


“It’s a little bit like landing an F-14,” she added.


“But your job is not to stick out or make a big statement. You emulate the regular; you have to be willing to be a chameleon.”


Brian Usifer, 33, the music director, conductor and first keyboardist for “Kinky Boots,” makes sure his subs fit in. Every replacement starts in an audition phase. On a sub’s first night, though, he tends to allow the occasional error to pass. “It’s O.K. if a few mistakes happen early,” he said. “It breaks the tension.”


Both cast and orchestra can see him in the video monitors, he noted, saying: “I try not to show it in my face if something goes wrong. But when you have a sub who is good and who everybody likes, I don’t have to worry about them.”


Though the pressure and lack of job security are challenging, Ms. Hyde sees some advantages to subbing. “It forces you to keep your skills razor sharp,” she said, “and you play with more people.” That can mean more contacts for future jobs.


Even so, most subs supplement their Broadway stints with other work. Mr. Schiller has worked as a composer, arranger, touring musician, copyist and instructor. Ms. Hyde is a member of a chamber trio called the New River Ensemble, which sometimes plays live to silent films by Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton.


The route to a regular gig is not predictable, as seniority does not necessarily determine who gets those jobs. Contractors, hired by producers to put together orchestras in tandem with music directors, make those decisions, and personal connections can trump other factors.


Despite the competition, Ms. Hyde says that she has found much camaraderie on Broadway. She has been a regular four times, in shows including “Kiss of the Spider Woman” and “1776.” Whenever she gets a chair, she hands out sub slots to musicians who have helped her in the past, but also makes an effort to aid hopefuls. “If no one gives the new people a chance,” she said, “they can’t break in.”


Tino Gagliardi certainly broke in: He played trumpet in and out of Broadway pits for 30 years, as a sub and as a regular, and now he’s president of Local 802. “Being a sub is far more difficult than being a regular,” Mr. Gagliardi said. “Regulars only have to know one book.”


“Once,” he said, “I was subbing on five different shows and was so busy that I actually walked into the wrong theater. It’s a very hard way to make a living.”


But those F-14s still need replacement pilots. The goal, as Ms. Hyde put it, is “to make it as seamless as possible.”


“If the other musicians across the pit don’t notice that there’s someone different playing the part,” she said, “you’ve done your job.”


[This article was originally published in the “Metropolitan” section of the New York Times on Sunday, 27 July 2014.  Gabriel Cohen’s debut novel Red Hook was nominated for the Edgar award for Best First Novel, and he is also the author of four other novels and the nonfiction book Storms Can’t Hurt the Sky: A Buddhist Path Through Divorce. A writer, freelance journalist, teacher, and editor, he has written for The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Gourmet.com, Shambhala Sun, the New York Post magazine, and Time Out New York. He teaches writing at Pratt Institute and New York University.]

 

'Pageant' (1991)

[One day recently, when I was out and about, I spotted an ad on a phone booth in my neighborhood announcing the coming of a musical called Pageant.  I’d been out of town for several weeks, so I hadn’t seen them before.  Now, years ago (1991, it turns out), I reviewed a show called Pageant, a drag beauty contest, and I wondered if this was the same play.  I didn’t remember to look it up by the time I got home, however, but when I finally did, I found that the production is billed thus: “Like every beauty pageant you've seen before, Pageant features contestants desperately vying for a glittering tiara.  With swimsuit, talent, and evening gown competitions – the show includes both the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat! Unlike some beauty pageants you've seen before, the female contestants are all played by men.  And the audience gets to select the winner each night.  Filled with excitement and suspense, but first and foremost, beauty.”  Well, the new production opened on 14 July, and on the 15th, the review was in the New York Times.  It is the same play, a parody of beauty pageants, which ran for 462 performances Off-Broadway from 23 April to 7 June 1991, with subsequent productions in Los Angles, San Diego, San Francisco, Chicago, Sarasota, Oklahoma City, Richmond, St. Paul, and London, as well as Australia and Japan.  I saw the performance in May and my notice for the première appeared as “Skin Deep and Heart Shallow” (which referred to Pageant and another, unrelated play) in the  New York Native on 20 May 1991.  I’ve reedited it slightly so that it’ll make more sense to a reader 13 years later (and, in some instances, just because I wanted to).]

 

The conceit of the musical spoof, Pageant, which has a book and lyrics by Bill Russell [later Side Show, 1997-98] and Frank Kelly and music by Albert Evans, at the Blue Angel, a night club on on West 44th Street in the Theatre District, is a competition for Miss Glamouresse.  The send-up is that all the contestants are men in drag, including evening gown and swimsuit.  The joke is that the book and, especially, the lyrics constantly refer to the femininity of the contestants (the opening number is “Natural Born Females”), whereas it is clear they are men.

 

The drag is somewhere between Corporal Klinger, Jamie Farr’s character on MASH, and La Cage aux Folles.  The dancers are not especially feminine and their maleness is only partly disguised.  While they have shaved their legs and underarms, they have distinctly male dancers’ bodies, particularly their arms which, though not exactly hirsute, are unshaven.  We are obviously expected to note the dichotomy of the dancers’ maleness and the femininity of the text and behavior.

 

Pageant includes two other jokes, too.  One is that the sponsor, Glamouresse Cosmetics, markets absurd products, samples of which the contestants hawk.  We are treated to demonstrations of Lipsnack, a lipstick that doubles as a snack for women with no time to eat on the run—it comes in 27 flavors from “Roast-Beef Red to Poached-Salmon Pink . . . Yum!”—and Smooth-As-Marble Facial Spackle, a make-up for pitted skin which also comes in “heavy duty for gouges and scars.” 

 

The other joke is that the contestants aren’t terribly good at this stuff.  Their talent exhibitions are all slightly off, and tacky.  Miss Industrial Northeast (Joe Joyce), who studies hairstyling by mail (“The lines at the post office wear me out!”), plays the accordion, but inexpertly; Miss Texas (Russell Garrett), who “works with the beauty-impaired,” does a lariat-twirling routine (with a toy horse), but she’s no Will Rogers; Miss Deep South (David Drake), who is a double major in Home Economics and Cancer Research at Miss Frink’s Female Academy, doesn’t quite keep her lips still in her ventriloquist act.  The whole thing is intentionally pretty hokey.

 

The performances, which also include Randl Ash (Miss Bible Belt), John Salvatore (Miss West Coast), Dick Scanlan (Miss Great Plains) and J. T. Cromwell as M.C. Frankie Cavalier, are energetic and skillful, and the evening, at an hour and forty-five minutes, goes by pleasantly.  (There was also a billing in the program—called the Beautybill, “an authorized parody edition of ‘Playbill,’” according to a note on the back, for this production—there’s also a “Standby Contestant,” Miss U.S. Territories and Possessions, played by Tony Parise.  I presume Parise, who also served as co-choreographer, would step in if, for any reason, one of the regular contestants cannot fulfill her duties.)  I particularly liked Miss Bible Belt’s sermon-in-song, “I’m Bankin’ on Jesus” (“The Bible’s my bank book!”)  The cabaret locale encourages drinking (no minimum; you can have dinner, too) and rooting for the contestants, and this obviously helps in the enjoyment.  The chap behind me had a hell of a time cheering and laughing, and there were not a few whistles from the house.  Frankie Cavalier picks five “judges” from the audience (they are preselected) who elect Miss Glamouresse 1991 and her runners-up, so the outcome is different each night. 

 

You’ll get the most out of Pageant if you either hate beauty contests or love them, but have a sense of humor about it.  If you don’t care one way of the other, you’ll find less in this show—conceived, directed and choreographed by Robert Longbottom [later Side Show; The Scarlet Pimpernel, 1997-2000; Broadway revivals of Flower Drum Song, 2002-03, and Bye Bye Birdie, 2009-10]—to keep your interest.

 

[I didn’t cover the physical production in the Native review, so I’ll list the credits here at least.  Pageant’s set was designed by Daniel Ettinger, the costumes were by Gregg Barnes, the hair and wigs by Lazaro Arencibia, and the lights by Timothy Hunter.  James Raitt (who was a cousin of actor John Raitt and his daughter, singer Bonnie Raitt) provided the orchestrations and musical arrangements and also directed the three-musician ensemble of piano (Raitt), drums (Jeff Potter), and synthesizer (Martin Erskine).  (I believe all the principal members of the production team for the première of Pageant are still alive except Raitt, who died in 1994 at 41.)]

 

*  *  *  *

[Since my old review is so short (being only half of that week’s column), I thought it might be useful to run New York magazine’s and the New York Times’s original reviews, both of which were also rather brief, as well.]

 

“STATES OF SCHLOCK”

by John Simon

New York, 27 May 1991

 

But color is certainly not lacking from Pageant, which may be the rowdiest yet also sweetest farce in New York today.  Playing at the Blue Angel nightclub, this drag-show takeoff on Miss America and other beauty pageants is both angelic and a bit blue.  Written by Bill Russell and Frank Kelly, directed by Robert Longbottom, and with albert Evans’s music arranged and orchestrated by James Raitt, this deft parody, funny without being too fey, satirical without becoming too savage.  It is in fact consistently droll and often a hoot, and everyone involved in it did and does handsomely, which is arguably better than prettily.  The men enacting the competing beauty contestants are neither pretty nor effeminate, which considerably heightens the hilarity.  Go!

 

[This was part of an omnibus review covering several performances, and the headline is a travesty of States of Shock, the title of a Sam Shepard play running at the American Place Theatre which Simon obviously didn’t like.]

 

*  *  *  *

“THEATER IN REVIEW”

by Stephen Holden

New York Times, 8 May 1991

 

There has never been a beauty contest quite like the Miss Glamouresse competition, a fake television special being held nightly at the Blue Angel under the title “Pageant.” At each performance, a panel of judges selected from the audience chooses between the same six finalists who compete in the traditional categories and hawk such Glamouresse beauty products as Smooth-as-Marble Facial Spackle and a nutritious lipstick called Lip Snack that comes in 27 shades and flavors.

 

When Frankie Cavalier (J. T. Cromwell), the ceremony’s leathery-faced answer to Bert Parks, introduces the contestants, he lauds them for being “each and every one a natural-born female.” They are not, of course. Amusingly costumed as parodies of regional stereotypes, Miss Texas (Russell Garrett), Miss Great Plains (Dick Scanlan), Miss Deep South (David Drake), Miss Industrial Northeast (Joe Joyce), Miss West Coast (John Salvatore) and Miss Bible Belt (Randl Ash) are drag performers who gleefully caricature the smiles, swivels and teary-eyed nonsense of it all.

 

For her talent segment, Miss Great Plains, whose name is Bonnie Louise Cutlett, delivers a screamingly funny dramatic recitation called “I Am the Land,” which begins portentously with the lines, “I am a handful of dirt,” and goes downhill from there. Karma Quinn, the new-age-fixated Miss California, lurches through an interpretive dance called “The Seven Ages of Me.”

 

Ruth Anne Ruth, Miss Bible Belt, sings a money-obsessed country-gospel song, “Banking on Jesus,” which declares, “My wealth earns interest that’s eternal.” Miss Industrial Northeast, Consuela Manuela Raffela Lopez, clomps around on roller skates while playing “The Beer Barrel Polka” on accordion.

 

“Pageant,” which was conceived, directed and choreographed by Robert Longbottom and written by Bill Russell and Frank Kelly, belongs to the same camp genre as the popular musical revue “Forever Plaid,” a tongue-in-cheek tribute to squeaky-clean male pop groups of the 1950’s.  [Forever Plaid, conceived and directed by Stuart Ross, was produced by Gene Wolsk at the Triad Theater (then called Steve McGraw's Theatre) on West 72nd Street, ran for 1811 performances between 20 May 1990 and 12 June1994.  James Raitt was the musical director of both shows. ~Rick] Although its style is broader than “Forever Plaid,” “Pageant” also celebrates and ridicules kitsch American culture with the same sense of enjoyment.

 

It is also one drag show that is not at all misogynistic. The contestants are portrayed as a lovable bunch of big-boned gals. It is the ritual itself, which forces the contestants to behave like obsequious wind-up toys, that is under hilarious attack. Indeed, the roles could have been played by women. Having them played by men, however, carries the whole charade to another level of zaniness.

 

[The current revival of Pageant opened for previews on 29 June 2014 at the Davenport Theatre on West 45th Street west of Times Square and is scheduled to run until 1 September.  There have reportedly been a few updates to the script to bring it from 1991 up to 2014 (references to Twitter and Duck Dynasty), but it’s apparently otherwise the same play.  (Other up-dating include the addition of an African-American contestant—Miss Bible Belt—and one with “a thick, vaguely Hispanic accent”—Miss Industrial Northeast; in the première staging, all the cast was Caucasian.)  When I first saw the ad on that phone booth, my second thought, after wondering if it was the show I’d seen all those years ago, was that Pageant didn’t strike me as a play that would have a life 13 years after it first ran.  It was kind of a nonce show. (I confess that I, for one, have no desire to see it again.)  In the Times, Charles Isherwood seems to agree: “[B]ack in 1991, when the show made its debut, the idea of a beauty pageant parody featuring men in drag seemed novel and a little loopy.  Today, when a man in a spangled dress would hardly raise an eyebrow sashaying down Main Street in Disneyland, the concept feels almost quaint.  Beauty pageants, for that matter, have now practically evaporated from mainstream culture.”]