Broadways in love with Broadway. Well, somebody has to be.
Im not opposed to revivals. Indeed, I was happy to see three — Gypsy, Man of La Mancha and Nine — open last season and last through the summer. For all their familiar luster as musical plays with terrific songs or heart-tugging themes or fabulous sets, these are star-driven shows. Bernadette Peters, Brian Stokes Mitchell and Antonio Banderas are supposed to bring in the crowds; if they dont, or if they leave, the show suffers the way a no-star production doesnt. (Thats why producers love a Mamma Mia.) To those who have paid their $100 or so to spend a few hours indoors of a summers evening, the lead actors do bring star power. But these days, what exactly is that?
Its an allure that transcends speaking or vocal talent. At least thats the case with Banderas, whose English seems to have been learned phonetically. Learned poorly, I thought as I sat there — whats he saying? whats he singing? Banderas must get by on charm, and he does so, gliding through the role of Guido, an Italian director stranded between a forlorn film project and a flotilla of women who seek his favors, his fidelity, his love. (Nine is based on Federico Fellinis film 8-1/2.) Give him or the CD producer credit: his enunciation is more precise on the cast album.
I remember Tommy Tunes 1982 production of the Maury Yeston-Arthur Kopit musical play as a pristine entertainment. Raul Julia played Guido, but the director was the star. His earlier productions, A Day in Hollywood, a Night in the Ukraine and Cloud 9, boasted beaucoup polish and pizzazz; and Nine, with its actors perched on movable white blocks of various sizes, was a sexual Rubiks cube. A graphic delight, but, as I recalled it, emotionally and musically on the arid side.
Surprise! The new Nine shows how Ive matured in two decades (or how severely my musical standards have slipped). Yestons score had a lot more melodic grace and invention than I remembered, and Kopits book solved the movies problem of a mid-life crisis rendered as fantasia. I still prefer Tunes visual elegance and blocking genius, but David Leveauxs nicely manages the task of seeming to give equal time to all the houris of Guidos memory and imagination, played with varying degrees of beguilement by Laura Benanti, Mary Stuart Masterson, Chita Rivera, Jane Krakowski, et al.
The one theatrical innovation — a pool, with ankle-deep water, that appears in the second act — serves little purposes but to put the cast in constant jeopardy of catching cold, or colds. Just because it worked in Metamorphoses doesnt mean every actor on Broadway should get wet.
On a scale of ten, I give Nine a five.
THE MANMost times, award ceremonies are a certifying of the artistic status quo. All year long, music, movies, shows drive into unexpected byways or gaping ditches, producing great stuff or anti-matter; and at the Grammys or Oscars or Tonys, the prizes go to those who chose the careful middle of the road. (Now that I think of it, why was that term coined to define caution? Isnt the middle of the road a dangerous place to drive?)
This years Tony awards, though, were bizarre beyond belief. To choose Hairspray at the best new musical was a safe choice. To name Marissa Jaret Winokur the best actress in a musical, and Harvey Fierstein best actor, stirred outrage in a show-lovers breast. Bernadette Peters in Gypsy may not have erased memories of Ethel Merman in the 1959 original, but hers was the most brutally honest musical turn of the season. As for Fierstein, a frog-voiced camp artist in a supporting role, he was hardly on the same planet as Mitchell in Man of La Mancha. Nothing personal, but hes a moon, an asteroid, a pebble to Mitchells sun.
I know people — Im married to one of them; I am one of them — who think Mitchell is the most compelling reason for Broadway to exist in the 21st century. Stokes, as he is known, is certainly the one genuine Broadway-bred matinee idol on the stage today. (The horde of swooning fans outside his stage doors attests to that.) Hes what baseball scouts would call a five-tools player: hes got looks, grace, power, acting skill and a gorgeous baritone voice. As Coalhouse Walker, he gave Ragtime a depth beyond its hectoring social message. He was the randy, roistering soul of the Kiss Me, Kate revival, and a wonderfully vain tough guy in the Encores! concert version of Do Re Mi. He proved his non-singing thespic chops in August Wilsons King Hedley II and topped all these superb pieces this season with Man of La Mancha.
In its first incarnation, the show, with book by Dale Wasserman, lyrics by Joe Darion and music by Mitch Leigh, ran for five and a half years, from late 1965 to June 1971, and was revived twice in the 70s with its original star, Richard Kiley. I guess its a one-song show, but that song, The Impossible Dream (The Quest), is a dead-serious inspirational anthem that still leaves audiences in tears as it builds, Bolero-like, from a whispered prayer to a declaration of spiritual defiance. Coming at the end of both acts, it guaranteed that theatergoers would sail outside wrung from this upwardly moist experience.
That the singer, Cervantes Don Quixote, is certainly delusional, possibly mad, doesnt vitiate the songs potency. For the character, especially as inhabited by Mitchell, makes a convincing case that he is sane and the real world mad — that optimism and gentility are preferable to cynicism and cruelty. For him to mistake a whore for a lady (I ask of my lady that I may be allowed to serve her) is to see into her heart, where goodness has not quite been evicted by her mean circumstances.
And since, in the current Jonathan Kent production, the whore-lady is played by Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, this Dulcinea can walk that fine line of bitterness and pity. (Think of it: two actresses named Mary Mast- in the same Broadway musical season.) Mastrantonio, rarely well used in her film work, has entranced on the stage for two decades, in Andrei Serbans 1985 production of The Marriage of Figaro and that cult favorite, Galt McDermots The Human Comedy. Her dark beauty and full-bodied soprano voice — sometimes quavering, usually robust — make her a splendid stage companion to Mitchell.
Its his show, of course. He gives equal weight to the two characters he plays: the honorable Cervantes, using his poetic passion and wiles to defend himself in the prison to which he has been condemned, and the daft Don, whose simple sanctity may make him the one sane man in a mad universe. Mitchell convinces me that he should be a bigger star in many media (where are the top movie roles? wheres the solo CD?) or, better still, be on stage every night. Man of La Mancha has closed, after a nine-month run, but Mitchells majesty will live in the memories of those privileged to have been there when he realized the impossible dream of restoring masculine glamour and thrilling technique to a Broadway desperately in need of both.
THAT GYPSY
The revival of Gypsy has a higher bar to straddle, because, by consensus, this is the great American musical. Book (Arthur Laurents), lyrics (Stephen Sondheim), tunes (Jule Styne), choreography (Jerome Robbins), the immediate and haunting impact of a star (Ethel Merman), vision— the works. Its the Citizen Kane of musicals, at least in esteem. In other ways Gypsy is closer to a showbiz Gone with the Wind: a period drama of a woman whose hurricane will triumphs over all obstacles and all those she would have love her; and a consolidation, an apotheosis of traditional technique, rather than a radical, Kane-like break with those traditions. Its not really different from other musicals that came before. Its the same but better. Best. Great. Everyone thinks so.
Gypsy is the definitive tale of showbiz striving — bad breaks, no breaks, heartbreak, then the big break — disguised as a musical version of high-class stripper Gypsy Rose Lees memoir of the same name. Goaded by their mother Rose Hovik, June and Louise play a kids act in the vaudeville of the 20s, with Rose believing that June is the star: Baby June headlines the show, while Rose plays the front end of a cow. In the 30s, with vaudeville dying and the act growing whiskers, June bolts, and Rose is left with the leftover, Louise. A demeaning booking in a burlesque theater gives Louise the chance to emerge from Mommas shadow and become cafe societys favorite ecdysiast. (June turned into actress June Havoc.) As Rose says toward the end, in a rare lapse into satisfaction, I always promised my daughter wed be a star.
The fevered, unforgiving heart of the show is Roses mother love, her smother love. Roses erstwhile sad-sack boyfriend Herbie describes her as a pioneer woman without a frontier. Thats not quite true, for Rose is the gunslinger who strides into a producers office and demands that he put her girls in the show or get outta town. Shes also, by herself, all the cattle that stampede down dusty Main Street. (Rose, sharply, to an impresarios secretary: Dont you dare answer that phone when Im yelling at you!) The woman has no scruples, no emotional down-time, no femininity unless she can use it to get a booking, no frame of reference outside the business of show. (Herbie: Dont you know theres a Depression? Rose: Of course — I read Variety.) Like a shark, she has a single mission: to push her daughters toward the stardom that fate or circumstance denied her. I was born too soon, she says, and started too late.
Sondheim and Styne brilliantly express this hot-plate ambition in Roses two signature songs, the first-act closer Everythings Coming Up Roses and the second-act climax Roses Turn. In the first, Rose convinces herself to transfer her star-lust from June to Rose; and when she sings, shouts, brays, Youll be swell, youll be great, thats not a prediction, its an order from an Old Testament God. Roses Turn, which is to sung monologues what To be or not to be is to spoken ones, the now-abandoned momma spits out her bile: All this work and what did it get me? / Snapshots full of me in the background. Its the supreme mad scene in modern drama, and reveals Gypsy as the all-time monster musical.
The star of the 1959 original was Ethel Merman, who made her Broadway debut when Gypsy and June were still babies, was a creature of the period in which this period musical is set — a dinosaur in a musical about a dinosaur. She blasted her songs to the last row of the balcony in the theater down the block. Her gift for clarifying every lyric syllable made her Cole Porters favorite interpreter. For a lesson in the devolution of Broadway belting, listen to her renditions of songs from Anything Goes, then Patti LuPones in the 80s revival. Merman mines the wit in every word; LuPone cant be bothered with consonants. One is a whip-crack, the other mush.
To modern ears, though, Merman had schoolteacher notions of enunciation. An anti-mumbler, she hit those final Ts (greaTTT, waiTTT) with a hammer, while adding vowel endings to one-syllable words (Some-a hum-a drum people; Youll be swell-a). Its one way for a singer to take a breath while emitting a sound, but its a cheap way. She was terrif on the brassy and comic songs, but could stomp with verbal jackboots on the softer pieces. Her performances didnt dig into subtext, the way Sinatra or Sarah Vaughan could do. Merman sang the song — and, Laurents complained, tapped her foot to keep time, even during the sad numbers. (You can also hear her snapping her fingers during Some People.) Her vocal precosity could seem inhuman to some. Sondheim called her the singing dog.
To her face? I wonder. For Sondheim, who wrote the lyrics to Leonard Bernsteins melodies for West Side Story (also with a Laurents book and Robbins staging), was to have composed the full score for Gypsy, until Merman nixed the idea. Her postwar stardom was based on two Irving Berlin hits (Annie Get Your Gun and Call Me Madam), and, according to Martin Gottfrieds liner notes in the 1999 expanded CD of the original cast album, she wanted someone with a track record. So Styne, who had worked with Robbins on High Button Shoes, got the call.
Styne, the old pro who had graduated to Broadway from pop tunes and Hollywood musicals, knew how to write for a star — this star. Give her a big note to start with, and a big note to finish. (Everythings Coming Up Roses begins with Cur! Tain! Up! and ends for you and for Meeeeee!) And Sondheim, whatever his misgivings and grudges, wrote perfect Merman lyrics. They played to her need for guidelines for vocal emphasis (Weve got nothin to HIT but the HEIGHTS) and her fondness for short, punchy couplets. (Theres just a single word of more than one syllable in Some people sit on their BUTTS, / Got the DREAM, yeah, but NOT the GUTS!) I suspect that Sondheim relished the opportunity for subversion: to expose Mermans purported heartlessness, and make the singing dog perform the fabulous trick of soiling her own blanket.
THIS GYPSY
They didnt care for Merman in Hollywood either, at least as a movie star, so Rosalind Russell played Rose when Gypsy was filmed in 1962 (with Natalie Wood as Louise). Since then, the show has given employment to many an aging movie actress, TV cop lady and bathhouse chanteuse. Angela Lansbury starred in an acclaimed revival in London and New York in the early 70s; Tyne Daly presided over a Broadway revival in the 90s; and Bette Midler did swell by Rose in a TV movie version. Now its Peters turn, and its hard to believe that shes four years older than Merman was on that first opening night. Bernadette at 55 is still the petite soubrette with the kewpie-doll face, the Betty Boop voice and the Mae West bosom. But nearly 30 years have passed since she starred as Mabel Normand in Jerry Hermans Mack and Mabel, so shes entitled to play grownups.
When I saw the show, Peters was battling hoarseness — had she spent some time in the Nine pool? — and when she coughed a few times in her first scenes, the audience seemed fretful that she might not last till 10:30. But she refused to cheat; she invested full lung power in every note, every word. Her cold may have helped her performance; the gravel in her voice gave her gravitas. (Which, to be fair, she also has on the new CD of the show.) Like the lifetime comedienne she is, Peters expertly milked the laughs in the show (especially in the cow number — its a moooo-sical) and revved up the sexuality. In a very un-Mermanish gesture during Roses Turn, Peters kneads her capacious breasts and simulates sex as she sings, Have these eggrolls, Mr. Goldstone. Shes doing a strip-tease more primal than Gypsy ever dreamed of.
Roses ambition can more clearly be seen as thwarted libido, not simply pure ego. The husbands she runs through like so many quick tantrums (But Momma gets married / And married / And married / And never gets carried away) are poor substitutes for the feral love she feels for her daughters. And that love is a stand-in for the love she was never able to give herself, or to accept.
We hear that kids dont want to see Broadway shows; the old songs sound like Gregorian chants to them; they go for the harder entertainment. Well, Gypsy is an adamantine musical that should appeal to every teen who thinks his life is a horror movie and his parents are gargoyles. Come to the Shubert Theatre, children. We have a Medea, or a family fun-house mirror, set to music. And honestly, if you cant respond to the songs, the drama or the pang of this show, thatll be a signal you have some growing up to do.