Double, double, toil and trouble, as Shakespeare’s Three Weird Sisters aptly said in his Scottish play.
The trouble with “Do Re Mi,” which capped this season’s Encore Series of Great American Musicals in Concert at City Center last weekend, proved twofold.
First, because of the short-lived nature of that Encore beast, it wasn’t with us long enough. Performances this dazzling – because there were so few of them – seem disappointingly meager. Second, though “Do Re Mi” may be only a good, second-tier musical, compared with what is usually being offered as musicals nowadays, that comparison is troublingly invidious.
Now, rather more seriously, the trouble with “The Cider House Rules,” currently at the Atlantic Theater Company, is that John Irving is no Charles Dickens. And the trouble with John Guare’s “Lake Hollywood,” ending Guare’s retrospective season at the Signature Theater Company, is that John Guare is sometimes no John Guare.
But I get ahead of myself. Back, with great pleasure, to “Do Re Mi.” When I called it earlier a second-tier musical, I didn’t mean to sound disparaging, but it was never, even when it was first produced during the 1960-1961 season, regarded as even potentially one of those cream of the cream classic Broadway musicals.
A little like “Guys and Dolls,” a little like the lesser “Bye, Bye, Birdie,” it boasted a pretty good score by Jule Styne (though only “Make Someone Happy” survived to become a hit), typically deft and brilliant lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and high-powered and outrageous performances from Phil Silvers and Nancy Walker. Yet Garson Kanin’s book fell apart, and his inexperienced staging left an awful lot to be desired.
However, they don’t write musicals like “Do Re Mi” nowadays, do they? And when compared with most of the pseudo-operatic pabulum now being portentously served in the name of mainstream musical theater, even a modest, flawed show like “Do Re Mi,” given the right cast and staging, comes across like “Oklahoma!” redux. Here it was emphatically given the right cast and staging.
Kanin’s original story concerns Hubert Cram, a nebbishy little guy continuously chasing an ever more elusive success; his long-suffering wife, and his bright idea to persuade some Mafia associates (at one time he went for their coffee) to go legit, more or less, and invest in jukeboxes.
The book had been spruced up by David Ives, while both the staging by John Rando and the choreography by Randy Skinner glittered with expertise and gleamed with love, providing Styne, Comden and Green every chance to exercise their mysterious magic.
All the same, the bottom line of the Encore presentations is usually, as here, the remarkable quality of the performance. Obviously for a concert-style production you can offer the kind of dream-team cast it would cost a film star’s ransom to bring together for a normal run.
Nathan Lane has become Broadway’s brightest comedian, a musical comedy star of fathomless talent, and here he turns the Phil Silvers role into pure gold. Producing a wonderfully sly and apt homage to Jackie Gleason, Lane sings and prances like a man uniquely in his element.
The entire cast was an unalloyed delight, including, of course, the always admirable Randy Graff in Walker’s old part, and Brian Stokes Mitchell and Heather Headley as the daft young lovers. At least until we have musicals again, we can always have Encores in our past, present and future.
*
I have never been able to finish a John Irving novel, and have never even tried “The Cider House Rules.” Nor, I admit, am I tempted by the current dramatization, adapted by Peter Parnell and conceived and directed by Tom Hulce and Jane Jones.
The odd play, which seems to last forever but really doesn’t run much more than three hours or so, is in effect a pallid mixture of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s wonderful adaptation of Dickens’ “Nicholas Nickleby” and the quaintly cute theatrical methods of Thornton Wilder.
The novel tells of a young orphan growing up into an older orphan (very Dickensian, and stressed by actual references to “David Copperfield”), at an orphanage that doubles as an unofficial abortion clinic.
A few of the characters are interesting, but the action is creaky, and the style of presentation – with heavy-handed use of third-person narrative – is pompous and unattractive. Some of the acting, however, is unusually vibrant, especially Josh Hamilton as the Orphan, Colm Meaney as Dr. Larch, the prickly, idealistic full-time orphanage head and part-time abortionist, and Jillian Armenante as an unnaturally tough child of nature.
*
Another disappointment comes with the new John Guare play, “Lake Hollywood.” Guare is a disconcertingly variable playwright. At his best, in say “The House of Blue Leaves” or “Six Degrees of Separation,” he can combine fantasy and reality in a fashion both affecting and buoyantly poetic, offering a world view simultaneously bizarre and profound.
He is, however, like so many of us, not always at his best. At those times, he can confuseanecdote with narrative, eccentricity with character and phrases with dialogue.
The idea behind “Lake Hollywood” – taking a couple at the beginning of their relationship and revisiting them 60 years later – is fascinating. If only Guare had used it properly. The two acts of his play have far less relationship to one another than might have been hoped, and, thus unhinged, the evening is left flapping forlornly in the wind of the playwright’s fancy.
There are nice lines, sweet ideas and gallant acting, but in “Lake Hollywood” everything is finally submerged and waterlogged. Sheer imagination never wrote a play. It needs actual writing.