http://www.theatermania.com/peterfilichia Read Peter Filichia's Diary every day on TheaterMania.com en Copyright 2008 - TheaterMania.com Gypsy, and afterward, we went back to see Merman, When she asked me, ‘What are you going to be when you grow up?’ I said, ‘A showgirl.’”

Well, that didn’t quite happen, but Brochu certainly went into show business. He wrote the book for The Last Session (and directed it, too) and co-authored The Big Voice: God or Merman? (and appeared in it as well). Now he’s playing Zero Mostel in Zero Hour, the one-man show he’s also written. It’s at St. Clements – only eight blocks away from the stage door where his father, a Wall Streeter for whom Merman was a client, introduced him to the legend.

As much as an impression as Merman made, David Burns, another of his father’s clients, made an even greater one. “We had front row seats to Do Re Mi,” he says, citing the 1960 musical. “I thought Davey was the greatest thing I’d ever seen. Afterward, we went to Toots Shors, and Davey told me I was always welcome to come see him after any show. So after he got A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, I went to see him.”

Young Jim was dressed in his uniform from La Salle Military Academy. During the wait, he did what so many of us did or would have liked to: He walked on stage to say that he’d been “on Broadway.” Trouble is, en route, he banged right into Zero Mostel.

“He was soaked, and the costume was so wet,” Brochu says, still with reverence in his voice. “And he stepped back and looked at me in my military uniform, and said, ‘Who are you, General Nuisance?’ When I said, ‘I’m here to see Davey Burns,’ he said, ‘Well, you never come to see me.’ So after that, whenever I went to see Davey, I went to see him, too. I’ll never forget the time I saw him unleash his fury one of the proteans, threatening to throw him into the orchestra pit for something he’d done. But then he turned, saw me, grinned that grin and said pleasantly, ‘Sergeant Brochu, so nice to see you.’”

Brochu will also never forget when he was performing in the 1970 musical Unfair to Goliath at the Cherry Lane – and not just because Jerry Tallmer in the Post said, “If they ever do The Zero Mostel Story, Jim Brochu is my choice for the lead.” During the run, he was walking on Broadway and 50th, and saw Mostel.

Says Brochu, “When I excitedly said, ‘Z! Z!’ he muttered, ‘What do you want?’ I told him, ‘I’m an actor now,’ and he said, ‘I’ll be the judge of that.’ That’s all I needed to hear. ‘Then come see me!’ I said. He of course said, ‘Why would I want to do that?’ and I changed the subject to say, ‘You know, I’d really like an autographed picture of you.’ And he screamed at the top of his voice, ‘YOU’RE NOT WORTHY!’ and walked up 50th Street.”

But three nights later, Mostel was in the audience. “He didn’t come back afterward,” admits Brochu, “so I assumed he hated the show and me in it. But the next night I got to the theater, there was a manila envelope waiting for me. Inside was a picture, on which he’d written, ‘To Jimmy, with my admiration, Zero.’”

He was worthy.

Brochu would never see Mostel alive again. Seven years later, Mostel died in Philadelphia after playing a performance as Shylock in The Merchant, Arnold Wesker’s radical take on The Merchant of Venice. “I’ve spoken about it to Marian Seldes, who was in the cast,” says Brochu. “She told me that Zero envisioned Shylock as a thin man, so he went on this radical diet. He was living on cigarettes, coffee and a protein shake, and she believes the diet helped cause his death.”

Brochu’s show is set only a few days earlier. “Before Zero leaves for Philadelphia, he gives what will be his last interview to the New York Times,” he explains. “It’s not an interview he wants to do -- not at first. In fact, he’s actually painting all the way through it. He was quite a painter. He used to say, ‘I’ve done 25 Broadway shows, 50 films, and 10,000 paintings – and the only thing I’m going to be remembered for is The Producers.’”

Maybe Mrs. Mostel had something to do with that. Says Brochu, “At the same time Hal Prince offered Zero Funny Thing, he got an offer to play King Lear in Russia. He liked to say, ‘I thought Lear would have more laughs,’ and that’s the part he really wanted to do. But Hal was offering $4,000 a week – and Kate said, ‘My dear, if you don’t take it, I’ll stab you in the balls.’”

Perhaps playing less-than-Lear-like roles is the reason Mostel became terribly undisciplined in the parts he did perform. Brochu of course knows the stories of Mostel’s fooling around and not sticking to the script. “I saw him do it at Westbury, when he was doing Fiddler,” Brochu says. “After ‘Do You Love Me,’ he went up the aisle and said out loud, ‘And that night, Tevye had Golde, Golde had Motel, Motel had Bielke …’ Fooling around like that is not something I would ever do myself, but, well, how do you slap the hand of a genius?”

Maybe, too, all this was a strange backlash at being blacklisted. “Zero saw what had happened to Phil Loeb,” says Brochu, referring to an actor who was blacklisted and killed himself. “Six weeks after Loeb had committed suicide, Zero was called up in front of the same committee. There went his television and Hollywood opportunities and the big money.”

Another financial problem was the alimony Mostel was paying his first wife, too. “Marrying Kate had caused additional strife,” says Brochu, “because she was Gentile, so his parents disowned him for marrying outside the faith. Even when his mother was dying and he went to the hospital and brought his son Josh -- whom his mother had never met -- she wouldn’t see them.”

That story was one of two that inspired Brochu to write Zero Hour. “The other one,” he says, “concerns the night Fiddler was to open. I’m told that before the show, Zero was sitting outside the stage door on the curb, not wanting to go in and do the show. Why? I think he was thinking, ‘How could I go on the stage and play a man who disowns his own child for marrying outside the religion just as my parents had disowned me? Tevye says, ‘If I bend that far, I’ll break.’ But I wanted my parents to bend that far.’”

Brochu started writing around the time he turned 60. “I realized I was getting close to the age that Zero was when he died (62),” he says. “So I sat down, wrote, and the play just flowed from me. We opened in L.A., and I was scared when I heard a lot of Zero’s friends were coming -- including Theodore Bikel, with whom he was very tight. When he didn’t come back after the show, I thought he hated it and me in it. But the next day came an e-mail that said, ‘Thank you for bringing back a volcano we thought was extinct.’”

“What’s really funny,” Brochu says, “is that I recently found my high school yearbook, and was flabbergasted to see what one of my classmates wrote: “To Jim Brochu, the Zero Mostel of La Salle.”

Now he’s the Zero Mostel of off-Broadway, too.

You may e-mail Peter at pfilichia@aol.com
]]> Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:01:00 0600 Annie Get Your Gun), good times (the road show of Wait a Minim), moderately good times (the tryout of Irene), good-and-bad times in one show (the tryout of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue), bad times (the tryout of Joan Rivers’ Fun City), and utterly terrible times (the tryout of Ari).

But I haven’t been in this house in almost 30 years, since the tryout of Tricks of the Trade, which moved to New York and then played one Broadway performance. I’m appalled to see that since then, the interior of the house has been painted a ghastly grammar-school green. During the ‘60s and ‘70s, it was solid white. But shouldn’t the National be decked out in red, white, and blue?

That’s all right. All is forgiven when I see what’s on stage. Though it’s the ugly-as-sin chain-link, industrial-inspired set for Jersey Boys, I swoon when I see how well it fits the stage.

The last time I saw this National Company of Jersey Boys was April, 2008 at the Fox Theatre in St. Louis. That showplace is, without a doubt, the most beautiful theater in which I’ve ever set foot. When the powers-that-be were planning the renovation, they decided to replicate the movie palace as it was in 1929. Here’s how the website describes it: “With scrupulous attention to detail, thousands of square feet of ornate plaster work were recreated on site. Original glazes and colors were duplicated. Craftsmen used a technique known as scagliola to create plaster columns which appear to be marble. 7,300 yards of elephant carpet, duplicating the original pattern from 1929, were especially designed and woven for the Fox. Each of the 4,500 seats had to be removed, renovated and re-installed. Missing art glass was authentically reproduced. The magnificent 2,000 pound chandelier in the auditorium was lowered, cleaned and relamped. Missing brass light fixtures and door pulls were reproduced.” You get the point.

Fine, but there was only one problem: The Boys and their set were much too small and utterly lost on the vast Fox stage. And though I was in Row K, I felt as if I were in the third ring at the Met.

That’s the flaw with these beautiful movie-palaces-turned-into-road houses: They’re beautiful, but terrible places to see shows.

Now at the National, I was in Row L, technically only one row’s worth of distance back. But it sure didn’t seem like it. I could savor the musical for the first time since I saw the original at the August Wilson.

You know what Jersey Boys has? Seriously: One of the best books ever written for a musical. I mean that. Some may say, “If that’s true, that just goes to prove that books of musicals usually stink.” Well, that’s true, too, but Jersey Boys does exactly what it sets out to do, and does it splendidly.

True, the show has a built-in advantage because the group called itself The Four Seasons. That’s what allowed bookwriters Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice to think of the excellent and unique structure of splitting the story into seasons: Spring, when the lads are just starting out; summer, when they start to succeed; fall -- not “autumn,” mind you, because the word “fall is needed because the group does take a fall here; and winter, to show their various states of content and mostly discontent.

Had the group succeeded with any of its previous names - The Variety Trio, The Variatones, or The Four Lovers - Brickman and Elice might not have succeeded, for those names wouldn’t have inspired such a structure for their story.

But maybe they would have, for Brickman and Elice’s accomplishments go deeper. During the first 10 minutes, we’re told that both Tommy DeVito and his brother spent time in jail. Then we see some breaking and entering, and hear about vigorish and money-laundering. “You lie to your wife” is stated as an understood fact of life. Valli’s wife is definitely characterized as an out-and-out alcoholic, and their daughter’s overdose isn’t glossed over, either.

Compare this to all the press that Lennon got when Yoko Ono’s refused to allow mention of one of her husband’s important female companions. Jersey Boys may not be 100% truthful, but telling all these warts-and-all events does give an audience confidence that they’re not getting a whitewash. Even the line “None of us are saints” is followed by another that seems saturated with truth: “You sell 100 million records and see how you handle it.”

Brickman and Elice also show that the boys never lost the common touch. There’s also that marvelous moment when on-stage story-telling merges with real-life: The boys are doing their first concert after they’ve had a hit with “Sherry,” and when they finish, we -- this very night at the National Theatre -- applaud them so wildly that we become the stand-ins for the audience at that first concert. The boys react with wide-eyed surprise, as if they’re hearing thunderous applause for the very first time.

Not every decision Brickman and Elice made was stellar. Why include “My Boyfriend’s Back” sung by three women pretending to be The Angels, the group that made this song a 1963 hit? Just as the staff behind Hello, Dolly! noticed in Detroit that people didn’t want the first act to end with a song sung by Vandergelder but much preferred to hear from Dolly instead, we don’t want to know about the girl group, no matter how entertaining or nostalgic the song. Get back to those boys! They’re interesting enough. And having Frankie sing “Bye Bye Baby” after his daughter’s death is clunky, too. “Baby” in the original song referred to a girlfriend, not a child, and the term doesn’t ring true in this forced context.

I must admit that once again I heard some echoes from previous musicals. Did Brickman and Elice purposely homage them? There’s a line about “infinite possibilities,” a two-word phrase that is used in A Funny Thing Happened and “Why does everybody leave?” a four-word phrase from Gypsy. Then there’s Gaudio’s saying, “I’m not drawn to the old neighborhood, I don’t go back to the old neighborhood, I don’t give a fuck about the old neighborhood” that mirrors Val’s statement in A Chorus Line: “I never heard about The Red Shoes, I never saw The Red Shoes, I didn’t give a fuck about The Red Shoes.”

Steve Gouveia as the efficiently irrelevant Nick Massi is the only holdover from the cast I saw in St. Louis. Matt Bailey, who’d played multiple roles then, has now been promoted to Tommy DeVito, and he seems so Italian I’m not sure if he’s an Italo-American who changed his name (I’d buy that) or just a fine performer. (I’d buy that, too.) As Bob Gaudio, the charmingly naïve Andrew Rannells has given way to the equally efficient Josh Franklin, while Christopher Kale Jones has abdicated as Frankie Valli, with Joseph Leo Bwarie taking over. He, though, no more than Jones, can sustain the falsetto that John Lloyd Young so seemingly effortlessly brought to the role. Still, the audience loved him, and the show.

Because they could see it. Because they could hear it. Because the sound system wasn’t overtaxed by an enormous house. There was a time when touring companies routinely booked theaters the size of the National, with its 1,676 seats. Now they almost always go to place like the Fox, which has 4,500 seats. That’s how you make big money on the road. Producers care less about your enjoying yourself and more about how many seats they can sell.

But for an audience member, being in such a vast house means you’re sometimes not inclined to applaud; you’re so far away that your handclapping would seem like a voice in the wilderness. Like it or not, part of the appeal of applauding is making your voice heard. Can it be in the Fox? It sure can be at the National. Credit the Jersey Boys producers for doing it right this time.

You may e-mail Peter at pfilichia@aol.com
]]> Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:01:00 0600 Ragtime, expert director-choreographer Marcia Milgrom Dodge has her orchestra purposely pretend to do some last-minute tuning up, as if this is a Big Classical Event.

In fact, it is. Ragtime is already a musical theater classic, so when the lights fade fully to black, the audience applauds and cheers for a second time. Then, when the curtain goes up, and the crowd sees the entire 33-member cast on stage – the (in alphabetical order) Jews, “Negroes,” and WASPS – the applause and cheers reach their zenith.

Three cheers for Ragtime, and no one has yet even said a word or sung a note. It’s a real, “Welcome home!” -- almost as if to say, “We’re still sorry that the Tony-voters chose that show with the razzle-dazzle costumes and direction, but with a book full of fart jokes and a double entendre that, if Walt Disney had been alive to hear it, he would have fired everyone on the spot.” (Remember? Scar: “I need to be bucked up.” Timon: “You've already bucked up royally.”) Well, as the Baron says in Ragtime’s second act, “Anyone can get lucky in America.”

Right away, we see that Dodge has added little touches that prove she’s intently thought about every Terrence McNally line and Lynn Ahrens lyric. Father (Ron Bohmer) gives a jaunty gesture when discussing his enthusiasm for amateur exploration. Younger Brother (Bobby Steggert) now has a far more threatening and dangerous air about him. Evelyn Nesbit (Savannah Wise) pauses before telling us where Penn Station is, because the bubblehead simply can’t remember. All this happens before the final chorus of the title song, where we see the blacks and the Jews wildly dancing, while the uptight WASPS are taking only rudimentary and tentative steps.

Derek McLane’s skeletal set resembles the Great Hall at Ellis Island. It’s a spare Ragtime: Even the piano and the Model T are skeletal. And though the vehicle – the symbol of American success -- should be more ornate, having a sketch of a car is better than what the Paper Mill Playhouse offered some years ago: Believe it or not, no car at all.

The lavish sets that the original Ragtime had are not, no matter what anyone says, “trappings.” Grand scenery is to be appreciated. But Ragtime is a strong enough show to withstand decisions made all in the cause of economy. At least we’re getting a larger-than-usual cast and orchestra. That this production is on a smaller stage and in a small theater than the original was at the Ford (Hilton) helps, too.

What’s more, Dodge wisely directs much of the action right at the lip of the stage so we can better see and hear everything. (Wish more directors would.) She makes “Crime of the Century” a razz-ma-tazz vaudeville number, with purposely garish Santo Loquasto costumes, including a very clever one for Harry K. Thaw that morphs into something more interesting.

Here’s another nice Dodge detail: Once father arrives home from his North Pole expedition and complains about an injury he sustained, he limps for the rest of the show. It’s the first chink in an armor that will see many more before long. Father in the first act refuses to shake a black man’s hand; in the second, he does. Even he learns.

The crowd excitedly applauds Coalhouse and Sarah’s “Wheels of a Dream” -- not just because Quentin Earl Darrington and Stephanie Umoh sing it beautifully, but because audience members also revel in their happiness, and want for them what the lovers want for themselves. We see so many love stories in musicals, but never one with as complicated a past as Coalhouse and Sarah’s: He abandons her, she abandons her child, but eventually there’s forgiveness and love is restored. Beautiful.

After we see what they’ve gone through, both of their future personal tragedies make a greater impact. How quickly good fortune and life can be taken away. That’s America, too. And that’s why Dodge inserts an incisive commentary after Sarah’s death: Those cast members watching from above have each been holding a little American flag to welcome the presidential candidate's arrival. Now they let them drop to the floor, as a statement of how they believe less in the American Dream.

As the entr’acte plays, some audience members applaud in rhythm. Smart to start Act Two differently from the original, where there had been a scene between Little Boy and Houdini. Dodge shows us only Coalhouse, a far cry from the filled stage we saw at the top of Act One: he feels all alone now that Sarah is dead. (Why, though, must he say that says Sarah is “the only thing I cared for,” much as Emile says of Nellie in South Pacific; both of these men are fathers, and have something else very worthwhile to care for.)

But there’s still plenty of Good America shown in the musical. When Tateh (Robert Petkoff) promises his daughter, “Apple pie from off a china plate, pretty dresses, pretty dolls,” he’s able to make that happen. The captain on the boat on which Father is sailing, says, “It’s men like you who will keep (this country) great.” Not exclusively, as we’ll see.

At least when the 1998 Tonys were dispensed, Ahrens and composer Stephen Flaherty were justifiably rewarded. Interesting that Generation X’er Flaherty, even when he was just starting out in the ‘80s, composed traditional sounding theater music. When dealing with a period piece, he felt no need to write anachronistic rock for it. Other theater writers believe that we’re now in an era where a segment of the population wants to hear rock, so rock must dictate the sound of their show. Not Flaherty. He had to write for three different classes of people with three distinct sounds in a long-ago era, and he got it all right – beautifully right, stirringly right, from each waltz to (of course) ragtime song.

Ahrens' work is just as impressive. Look at the beautiful subtext of “Our Children,” as Mother and the Baron sing about their kids bonding, when they’re really bonding themselves. “He Wanted to Say” offers a moment that Bertolt Brecht would have admired (and he was not an easy man to impress). But perhaps Ahrens’ best moment comes in “Back to Before.” Saturday’s audience gives it the strongest applause of all. Sure, we’re thrilled by Christiane Noll’s galvanic rendition and the melody, too – but the message and implications of the song get their due, too.

McNally, of course, was the ol’ pro of the group; Flaherty was still in his terrible twos when the playwright first saw his work on Broadway. But, oh, did McNally distill a difficult and long novel extraordinarily well. And if you don’t shed a tear at the end of the show, when we have a brand new family of five, then don’t bother trying to be my friend.

Has there ever been a more wonderful human being ever shown in musical theater than Mother? (Credit to Ragtime novelist E.L. Doctorow, too, of course.) The average woman of her station who discovered “a Negro child” in her backyard would have snarled, “Oh, get this filthy thing away from me.” Mother’s inclination is instead to provide for both mother and child. That’s not your average New Rochelle housewife today, let alone in 1906. Mother always does the right and noble thing, no matter how many obstacles (such as her husband) are in her way. Late in the show, Younger Brother says, “I have always loved and admired her.” You and the rest of us, bro.

Most Broadway shows get standing ovations. Some of them happen as soon as the curtain goes up for the curtain calls. Some get their standing o’s piecemeal; with a few people standing for a few cast members, and then the rest of the audience saying, ‘Oh, what the hell, why not? Let’s not feel left out, either.” But many of the Saturday matinee Ragtime crowd stands the second the show ends – BEFORE the curtain rises for the calls.

Ragtime will be one of the six of musicals that first lost the Best Musical Tony but eventually won the Best Musical Revival Tony. (Sweet Charity, Gypsy, Chicago, Into the Woods and Hair are the others.) I’d say it’s the revival of the century, but there are 91 years to go. Nevertheless, I hope that it’s still running in seven years so that its original producer Garth Drabinsky can get to see it, too.

You may e-mail Peter at pfilichia@aol.com
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