Today, my friend Greg and I went on safari to the wilds of Connecticut. Why did we do this? To make a pilgrimage to a place neither of us had been before...the famous Goodspeed Opera House in the tiny hamlet of East Haddam. We went to catch their production of the 1974 musical Mack and Mabel, which stars Scott Waara and Christiane Noll in the title roles.
This is one of those famously troubled shows (Hello, Chess!) that has probably never been played the same way twice. Every major production since the 1974 original has made alterations to Jerry Herman's score or, more usually, Michael Stewart's libretto, which has born the brunt of the blame for the show's failure.
This version is, I believe, based on the revisions that were made for the 1995 London production, with a revised book by Francine Pascal, sister of the late Michael Stewart.
The story is still a fictionalized version of the story of early film pioneer Mack Sennett and his relationship with Mabel Normand, one of the biggest female stars of early Hollywood. Did I say "fictionalized?" Truth to tell, these two people had a long and complicated relationship, but the events of the musical are almost entirely fiction, reality either not being good enough or being way too complicated and overwhelming for the musical's creators.
Christiane Noll is as steadily working an ingenue as we have in musical theatre today. And here, as Mabel, she proved why that is the case. She is charming and believable in her transformation from gawky deli delivery girl to Hollywood star. She is undercut in the second act by this libretto's conscious effort to de-emphasize Normand's drug and alcohol abuse and other health issues and its constant refusal to theorize or comment upon her supposed involvement in the murder of director William Desmond Taylor. Basically, Noll has nowhere to go in the second act and nothing to play. But she does it charmingly.
Scott Waara disappointed as Mack Sennett. He lost me in the opening scene and number. It may not have been his fault. Again, the libretto tries to soften the character and tries to have things both ways. It wants a Mack who's cuddly and charming, yet also a self-involved asshole. And, while there are some actors who might be able to pull this off (I can't think of one off the top of my head), Waara is not one of them. He's playing a teddy bear under a gruff exterior, more suited to a role like 42nd Street's director character, Julian Marsh. Every moment seems dedicated to "I want YOU, Audience Members, to like me, in spite of some of the things you see me doing." And it didn't work for me.
And now we come to Donna McKechnie. The Broadway legend (a legend based on a single performance; take THAT, Carol Channing) appears here as Lottie Ames, a fictional role that seems to be part actress and part Sennett business manager. Like most of the characters, there's not much there in the text for McKechnie to play and we're never sure what her character is doing at any given time. But McKechnie gives it her all and belies (for the most part) her 60-something age.
Her big moment is the famous "Tap Your Troubles Away" number in the second act that was originally intended as a smiley face (but lyrically pointed) counterpoint to Mabel's second act descent into drug and alcohol addiction and tuberculosis. This production eschewed most of that and pretty much let McKechnie do what she does best, even including her iconic Cassie back bends. Dance-wise, she may not be the athlete she was 30 years ago, but she more than holds her own here leading a line of chorines 40 years her junior. I can't figure out why she hasn't yet played an engagement on Broadway in Chicago...she IS Roxie Hart.
The most incredible thing about her performance is what happened at the end of "Tap Your Troubles Away." As might be expected, she posed with chorines on the final beat and held it through the expected applause. The audience went wild. Wild. Did I say "wild?" There were shouts of "Brava!" People stood to applaud her. She broke her pose and acknowledged the crowd, the orchestra, and the girls in the number with her. She basked in the glory and love of the entire audience for quite a moment. And then remembered that this wasn't her nightclub act ("This isn't Vegas, Cassie!"). After getting a note or two from the orchestra to get her back on track, she went into a brief encore before concluding with the aforementioned back bends.
I've never seen anything like it.
I just sat there saying "What the hell is going on here?," and "What IS this?!" But most of the audience ate it up. Oh, to be a Broadway Star-cum-legend...
The direction and choreography by Arthur Allan Seidelman and Dan Siretta, who also did the "honors" for the recent TV movie version of A Christmas Carol that I've discussed here, was serviceable at best and horribly distracting at worse. Enough said.
Not that there weren't good things here. Many of the changes, notably the inclusion of an affair for Mack and having an already established character sing lead on a very "Mame"-like song called "When Mabel Walks In The Room," work wonderfully and are improvements. But, for most part, the show has exchanged one subpar libretto for another. It's a shame.
The score remains a classic, but the failings of the libretto do tend to point out the sheer extraneousness of many of the numbers.
This is just not a very good show and it looks like it never will be. It's time for the musical theatre community to move on. And I mean YOU, Mr. Herman.
Posted by Jere at December 12, 2004 10:41 PM | TrackBack