Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals

Review - Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella on Broadway

I don't often get the chance to see Broadway shows twice. By the end of the season, I'm lucky if I have time to see things once. But I recently had the opportunity to see the current Broadway production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella very early in previews and again after it opened. This gave me a chance to see how much the show had changed during the preview process. (More on this later. In short, the changes were fairly significant.)

Why, of all shows, would I want to see Cinderella twice? In all honesty, I've never been a huge fan of the various versions of the R&H Cinderella. To me, they all seemed rather thin (e.g. the Julie Andrews and Leslie Ann Warren versions) or bloated (the Brandy/Whitney Houston version), but never particularly enchanting. The original songs, of course, are lovely, but the TV treatments have usually left me feeling I would have been better off listening to the soundtracks.

I was in New York one weekend and was having dinner with my friend Geoff and he was telling me about the Broadway Cinderella, which he had seen at one of the very first previews. He made it sound like the show needed a lot of work, and I became intrigued. Not just rubbernecking intrigued, but that was certainly part of it. I knew I would eventually be invited to see the show as a member of the Outer Critics Circle, but I had a rare night when I was in New York and didn't already have a show to see, so I sidled over to the Cinderella box office.

It turned out that the show was indeed in need of a good deal of work, particularly in pruning a rather bloated and busy second act, with disparate story elements struggling to come together. As you may know, the Broadway production sports a new book by Douglas Carter Beane, a man who's certainly proved himself as a playwright (The Little Dog Laughed, As Bees in Honey Drown), although his track record with musicals so far has been spotty (Xanadu = yay, Lysistrata Jones = boo).

I have heard many complaints about the liberties that Beane has taken with the story (making one of the stepsisters sympathetic, adding a subplot about a political upstart who wants to confront the Prince about the plight of the poor, eliminating the king and queen from the story, etc.). The changes didn't bother me. I mean, it's not as though the Cinderella story hasn't already changed considerably over time. The question is, does Beane do it well?

Well, sometimes. Beane manages to add some much-needed humor to the piece, although it sometimes crosses over into anachronistic snark. And, as I said, the show I saw in previews needed some paring down. The first time I saw it, the second act contained a significant subplot about an election for prime minister. Beane tried to weave this in with the whole trying-on-the-shoe thing, and the result was forced and confusing. The second act has since been cut to the point where the election is only really mentioned, not depicted.

The cuts were necessary, but the threads are showing. If you blink, you'll miss who actually wins the election. And the more expedient second act has apparently necessitated some lightning-fast costumes changes, as evidenced by the addition of some cheesy overlay costumes - Velcro numbers that barely conceal the costumes from the previous scene beneath - which many of the chorus members now wear during the finale.

What remains of the book is mostly workable, although there is some genuinely contrived business regarding a book that comes into Cinderella's possession during act one. In act two, the Fairy Godmother makes a big deal out of making sure Cinderella takes the book with her on her second trip to the palace. (Oh, yes, a book. That's exactly what an incipient princess needs to bring with her to a royal banquet. A book.) Upon Cinderella's arrival at the palace, there's some more forced business about the Prince suddenly remembering a chapter from the book that might just save the day. "Of course!" he cries. "Chapter two!" We never find out what's actually in chapter two, nor what the entire book is about for that matter, but I guess chapter two must have an election of some sort, because that's how the Prince suddenly gets the idea to hold the election.

To Beane's credit, he playfully points out some of the more ridiculous aspects of the original Cinderella story. At one point, Gabrielle asks Cinderella, "How did you ever dance in glass shoes?" I would love to have seen Beane more directly address the whole notion of the Prince insisting on trying the glass slipper on the foot of every young woman in the kingdom. I mean, why is it that the Prince isn't paying attention to something a bit more distinctive about these women, like, I don't know, their faces? Has he developed a sudden but temporary case of prosopagnosia?

The glorious Cinderella score has been supplemented here by some somewhat perfunctory R&H trunk songs. The first time I saw the show, there were six added numbers, including “I Have Loved and I've Learned” (a cut number from The Sound of Music, sung here by the stepmother and stepsisters) as well as “I Haven't Got a Worry in the World,” (a song R&H written for the short-lived play Happy Birthday, and sung here by the newly sympathetic stepsister, Gabrielle, and her activist beau Jean-Michel). These two numbers have since been cut from Cinderella, and rightly so.

Four additional trunk numbers have survived the preview cutting process. The Prince's first song is “Me, Who Am I?,” a number cut from Me and Juliet. The new Jean-Michel character sings the rabble-rousing “Now Is the Time,” a song cut from South Pacific. The Prince and Cinderella sing the plaintive “Loneliness of Evening,” also cut from South Pacific. And the Fairy Godmother sings “There's Music in You,” an R&H song from the movie "Main Street to Broadway." All these songs have a certain utility here, but none of them could be considered a newly discovered gem.

The post-preview version of Cinderella, at least for my money, comes closest to working of any of the various versions to the R&H Cinderella, although even this version is a bit diffuse. Production highlights include a sumptuous visual style, with sets by Anna Louizos and costumes by William Ivey Long. Long provides some especially clever pieces for the various transformations. Chief among the production's assets is the near-perfect casting, led by the always appealing Laura Osnes as Ella herself, an offbeat yet charming Santino Fontana as the Prince, and Tony winner Victoria Clark as an alternately dotty and delightful Fairy Godmother. (Oh, and a special shout-out to chorus member Kendal Hartse, one of my very first students at the Boston Conservatory. BoCo, represent!)

I get the sense that this Cinderella is going to be around for a while. At the first performance I attended, the Playbill was black-and-white. By the second performance, the Playbill had gone to full-color. That's usually a sign that a show has some cash in the coffers.

Review - Carousel at the Goodspeed Opera House

Here's the latest of my reviews for TheaterMania. This time it's a production of Carousel at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Conn.

There are those who think, in terms of the innovations that Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein brought together to create the undisputed watershed that was Oklahoma, that Carousel was even better. Stronger emotional content. More ambitious and successful integration of scene, song and dance. In general, just an overall better show. I happen to be one of these people.

Does the current Goodspeed production do Carousel justice? Click through here to find out.

Rodgers & Hammerstein's Allegro - A Staged Reading

Each semester for the past two school years, I've used the students in my musical-theater history class as academic guinea pigs, as it were, and put on a staged reading of a historically important but relatively obscure musical. Past shows in this series have been George M. Cohan's Little Johnny Jones, Irving Berlin's As Thousands Cheer, and Very Good Eddie, one of the seminal "Princess" musicals.

This semester, I wanted to put on a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, and I knew that show had to be Allegro (1947). The gentlemen certainly had their share of hits, but they did produce a few not-so-hits along the way, including Pipe Dream and Me & Juliet. These shows are not without their charms, but they can hardly be considered revolutionary. Allegro was.

For the uninitiated, Allegro was R&H's third stage show, after Oklahoma and Carousel, and came out shortly after their only musical written directly for the movies, "State Fair," which won them an Oscar for best song ("It Might as Well Be Spring"). And Allegro is one of the most important musicals that most people have never even heard of.

Allegro is nothing if not ambitious. The show represented a serious attempt on Oscar Hammerstein's part to craft an original story, rather than an adaptation, and reflected numerous innovations in the musical-theater form. Allegro was the first of what we now consider the "concept" musicals, shows that explore a particular idea rather than tell a specific A-to-Z story. (Other concept musicals include Love Life, Cabaret, Chicago, Company, and The Scottsboro Boys.) The concept for Allegro was originally a cradle-to-grave story of a certain earnest everyman, and how modern life presents challenges to his integrity. The birth-to-death idea proved untenable, so Allegro wound up being the cradle-to-midlife-crisis story of one Joseph Taylor, Jr.

Because the story had a rather ambitious temporal arc, Hammerstein made significant use of an omniscient Greek chorus, which comments on the action to both the actors and the audience. The show's physical production concept - an open playing area with a cyclorama for projections, and small set pieces that moved in and out of the playing area - represented a break from the literal realism of musicals at the time. Allegro also heralded the rise of the director/choreographer, in this case, Agnes de Mille. When we think of director/choreographers, we typically think of the men: Bob Fosse, Michael Bennett, Jerome Robbins, etc. But Agnes de Mille took on this dual role before any of those guys did. 

So, Allegro is unquestionably a significant show. But is it any good?

Despite the biggest advance sale of any musical up to that time, Allegro sharply divided audience members and critics when it premiered in 1947. While some thought it sublime and appreciated the sheer ambition and scope of the show, others found it pretentious, preachy, and boring. Until my experience of actually directing the show, I fell into the latter camp. In his libretto, Hammerstein expresses the dangers of social climbing and rampant materialism, and on the printed page, and on its two extant recordings, the show comes off as cold, humorless, and didactic. But the show really comes alive on stage, thanks in no small part to Oscar Hammerstein's warm and three-dimensional characterizations and Richard Rodgers' thrilling and tuneful score.

Another potential problem with the show is that the central love story seems at first to be cynical and empty. That was by design, but it can make for an unsatisfying experience. Joe grows up to wed his childhood sweetheart, Jenny. Act 1 ends with their wedding, in which everyone onstage seems to question whether this is really a good idea. It's the sort of thing Stephen Sondheim could have pulled off with alacrity, but Hammerstein seems have had a hard time making it compelling. (Sondheim actually served as a production assistant during Allegro's tryout period, and points to Allegro as providing inspiration for much of his later work.) One of the things I've tried to do with this production is make Jenny a believable and sympathetic person, someone who simply has her own ideas about what she wants from life, and not a heartless, calculating monster.

One of most important influences that the shows of Rodgers and Hammerstein had on musical-theater history was the integration of dance into the dramatic fabric of the shows they produced. This began with Oklahoma, which contains numerous examples of dramatically purposeful dance, including "Kansas City," "Many a New Day," "The Farmer and the Cowman," and of course the famous dream ballet, AKA "Laurey Makes up Her Mind." Following this, we had Carousel, which includes a stunning opening pantomime set to some of Rodgers' most compelling and evocative music, the "Carousel Waltz," as well as an alternately raucous and heartfelt ballet that shows the central character, Billy Bigelow, the full extent of the damage he's done to the life of his daughter. And perhaps most thrilling of all is the glorious "Small House of Uncle Thomas" in The King & I, one of the best examples of dance that serves a central and thematic narrative purpose.

Perhaps not surprisingly, since Agnes de Mille was at the helm, Allegro originally had quite a bit of dance, including four separate ballets. Because I only have 5 rehearsals for these staged readings, it's really not possible for me to choreograph any complicated numbers, so I had to cut most, if not all, of the dance. But I think it's really interesting to note that the show's story still works without the dance, which probably means that, with all due respect to Agnes de Mille and her collaborators, the dance for Allegro isn't really all that central to the message of the show. Additive, yes, but not requisite.

Allegro has performances this Monday, April 11th and Tuesday, April 12th, both at 8 PM at The Boston Conservatory's Zack Box Theater. Admission is free, and seating is unreserved, general admission. If you're in the Boston area and would like to attend, shoot me a message. Remember that these are bare-bones productions, produced on less than a shoestring, and designed to showcase the work itself. Come experience some terrific young performers, and the glory of some of Rodgers and Hammerstein's best but least-known work.

Review - South Pacific on PBS

This past Sunday, the critically acclaimed and (presumably) financially successful revival of Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific closed after 996 performances. That's less than half of the run for the original production, which came in at 1925 performances, but it's certainly a respectable number, especially considering that the revival was originally only supposed to run for a few months.

Just prior to closing, South Pacific aired live on PBS stations under the auspices of Live From Lincoln Center. This gave me a chance to evaluate the production, and the piece itself, afresh. Regular readers will recall that I consider South Pacific the most overrated musical of all time, and that the revival did nothing to change that view. (Read my review.) After watching the PBS broadcast, I still feel that way, but I will admit that I found more to appreciate in the show this time around.

For one, the show was making more dramatic sense this time. I've never quite understood how Nellie can go from singing "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair" to "(I'm in Love With) A Wonderful Guy" in a matter of mere minutes. But this time, mostly through the effectiveness of Kelli O'Hara's nuanced performance as Nellie, the sequence of emotions seemed more plausible.

I've complained before about the lack of extended musical sequences in South Pacific. The show has always felt too choppy, too stop-and-sing, especially coming from the two men who rendered plodding show structure obsolete. "Honey Bun" is simply an embarrassment, not because of the song itself, which is fine for what it is. But it represents one of the only examples I can think of when Hammerstein and Rodgers included a song for a song's sake. It serves no dramatic or thematic purpose: it's just there for entertainment. Again, Rodgers and Hammerstein were the men who obviated that kind of song. (Oh, and that reprise. When the soldiers and the nurses are walking in slow motion singing "Honey Bun." WTF?)

But this time I was captivated by the finale of act 1, which features a smart series of mini-reprises ("Wonderful Guy," "Twin Soliloquies," "Cockeyed Optimist," "Wash That Man," and "Some Enchanted Evening"), which effectively summarizes how we've arrived at this point in the show, and underscores the emotional subtext of the relationship between Nellie and Emile.

The best sequence remains the "Carefully Taught" scene, followed by Emile's moving intermezzo ("I was cheated before, and I'm cheated again, by a mean little world of mean little men..."), which then leads into the stunning "This Nearly Was Mine." This is truly thrilling theater, and for me it hints at what the show could have been. Paulo Szot's delivery here was masterful. I was particularly moved by his pianissimo delivery during the second verse. Szot seems to have gained a considerable (and distracting) amount of weight since the show opened, but the emotional impact of his singing remains undiminished.

But, on the whole, South Pacific remains hampered by labored plot machinations and emotion-sapping exposition. The pathos of the show disappears when the book stops to address the dull, obligatory military storyline. Every time those frickin' maps descended from the fly space, I audibly groaned. When we're watching Nellie and Emile, the show works. When they're not on stage, it falls flat.

When I saw South Pacific live, it was early in previews, and it seemed at that point that Loretta Ables Sayre and Danny Burstein hadn't yet grown into their respective roles as Bloody Mary and Luther Billis. I'm happy to report that both seem to have progressed over the course of the run into far richer and more effective performances. Sayre was a lot more layered and engaging, and Burstein brought a lot more of the wonderful individuality and creativity that he's exhibited in previous roles, particularly that of Adolpho in The Drowsy Chaperone. There were a few times that Burstein's performance seemed a bit too close to a Bert Lahr caricature for my tastes, but those moments were thankfully fleeting.

The major hole in the cast for me was Andrew Samonsky as Lieutenant Cable. I found Matthew Morrison bland and forgettable, but Morrison's performance was masterful compared to that of Samonsky, who came off unbearably smug and mannered beyond reason. His gait seemed borrowed from a bad John Wayne impersonator, and he had this annoying mannerism of sniffing and humming in rapid succession when he was trying to be sardonic. On the whole, Samonsky made me sort of glad that...well, let's just say that I found the denouement of the show ironically satisfying.

I recognize that South Pacific fans are legion and ardent, and I certainly wish them well. But after numerous earnest attempts at connecting with the show, which significantly predate the production at hand, I remain unconverted as to most of its supposed charms.

Who can explain it? Who can tell you why?