Comedy‘s Coming

All right, class: Before we all attend Patricia Hoag Simon’s production of the underappreciated musical The Human Comedy at Marymount Manhattan College, let’s take a look at the 1943 movie version of the William Saroyan novel and we’ll see why librettist William Dumaresq and composer Galt (Hair) MacDermot deserve to be appreciated for their 1984 effort.

The story follows Homer Macauley, a 14-year-old boy who’s dealing with a number of hardships. First, it’s 1943 — which means wartime. Given that Homer’s father has died and his older brother Marcus has been drafted, the responsibility is on the teen to bring home the bacon for his widowed mother, younger brother Ulysses, and sister Bess, who’s studying in college — where the family wants her to stay. In the excellent film, Homer (a never better Mickey Rooney) is seen just having landed a job at a telegraph office. His boss is telling him to “Be polite to everybody. Take off your cap in elevators and, above all things, don’t lose a telegram. And if anything comes up that you don’t understand, just come to me.”

Well, in fact, Homer questions his own ability with singing telegrams. His boss says that it’s no big deal to deliver one, immediately assuming that the boy has a good voice. He does say, “Let’s see how you’d do it” and Homer then delivers a perfect rendition of the famous “Happy Birthday” song. “That’s fine,” says the satisfied boss. It’s a nice enough scene, but not nearly as good as what happens in the musical. Here, Homer has not yet landed the job — so there’s much more at stake for him. What’s worse, one of his would-be bosses says, “You’re a little bit young for the job,” making us worry for him. Then another boss demands, “Can you sing? Sometimes we have a telegram requiring you to sing. Can you carry a tune, or do you sing flat?”

So now Homer has to audition, and if he doesn’t come through, it’s going to be hard for him and his family’s finances. The boy then goes into one of MacDermot’s most felicitous melodies, “I Can Carry a Tune,” as he insists: “I can carry a tune while on the run, howl at the moon, sing at the sun…I can carry a tune at the drop of a hat, at weddings or funerals, just like that…I can make up tunes like the rest of them, do-re-mi with the best of them. I’ll sing my songs anytime…I’ll sing for a nickel or dime…I can carry a tune anywhere I go, in the bath or on my bike, even studying math, for the love of Mike! While counting sheep or in my sleep, anyplace you like. Why, I can even sing under water — better than Neptune’s Daughter!”

Yeah, he desperately wants the job, and he’s so endearing that we just as much want him to get it. But then one of the bosses says, “Do you know how to sing ‘Happy Birthday’? We’ll see if you can carry a tune.” And now Homer sings the famous song — terribly. God-awfully, in fact, nowhere near the melody (which smartly saved the production from paying royalties to the tune’s composer). But, oh, does the boy throw his heart and soul into it! When he gets to the name of the person who’s having the happy birthday, “Methuselah,” he sings with amazing zeal, knocking himself out, stretching the name over literally dozens of measures of music — always atrocious, never on-pitch, which is the fun of it. Yet, even while we’re laughing, we’re concerned that he won’t get the job. But the moment he finishes, the bosses look at each other and, each knowing that the kid wants it so bad, say, “That’s good!” The kid’s hired and we breathe easier, because we’re happy for him and because we’ve finally stopped laughing at how poorly he sang.

But be careful what you wish for. By getting the job, Homer soon finds himself delivering telegrams that don’t sing — ones that pass on the painful message that a young man has been killed in action. Hardest of all to read, of course, will be the one that says his brother Marcus has died. It’s the serious nature of the show that prompted Patricia Hoag Simon to revive it.

“Not long after 9-11,” she says, “I was talking to my ex-husband, who asked what I was going to do with my Marymount students to respond to this. I immediately thought of The Human Comedy, because one of its messages is that people can live on through their survivors. Even though the show’s not well known, Dr. Mary Fleischer, the chair of our Division of Fine and Performing Arts, thought it was a great idea. Well, my ex knew an executive who was crazy about Galt’s music for Hair, so the next thing I knew he got me a grant for $10,000 to do the show. We’ve since got support from the Frederick Loewe Foundation as well.”

Still, Hoag Simon worried that she might be over her head when she spoke to a musician friend. “He told me that the show’s rhythms are so complicated that I wouldn’t be able to do without Galt himself as musical director. I wrote to Galt and he called back to say the music was really complicated. By the time I got off the phone with him, I was resigned to the fact that he wouldn’t do it.” (“I’m getting old,” says the composer. who recently turned 74. “I can’t go around playing these shows forever.”) “But,” says Hoag Simon brightly, “five minutes later, he called me back and said he’d do it. It’s very moving to me that Galt is working with a new generation.”

In addition to his blue-chip Hair in 1968, MacDermot also had a Tony-winner with Two Gentlemen of Verona in 1971. After those two, his Broadway scores — though full of excellent music — didn’t fare well. Dude ran 16 performances in October 1972 and Via Galactica didn’t even run half that long (seven performances) in December of that same year. A dozen years would pass before MacDermot was on Broadway again with The Human Comedy.

“It started,” he recalls, “when I was asked by someone at Banff Cultural Center of Canada to write an opera. I said ‘Sure, but on what subject?’ The man said, ‘Choose one.’ Well, at the same time, someone told me to read Saroyan’s The Human Comedy, which I wound up really liking. I called Bill Dumaresq.” This was the fellow with whom MacDermot had worked on the London musical Isabel’s a Jezebel in 1970. It only lasted 61 performances — the fact that its subject was abortion had to have been a drawback for some audiences — but, again, the score is excellent.

MacDermot reports that Dumaresq loved the 1943 movie version of The Human Comedy. The team had about a quarter of the first act done when they went to Banff to play the score for the impresario. “I don’t think the guy liked it,” he says — I’ve always found that MacDermot never sugar-coats anyone’s bad reaction to his work — “but what he said was ‘We need a subject that’s Canadian.’ He hadn’t said that before. So I said, ‘We can’t set it in Canada, so we won’t do it for you.’ Bill and I spent the rest of the year finishing it, and when we played it for Joe Papp, he agreed to produce it. Banff never called me back.”

Though the collaborators wrote the show to be staged conventionally, director Wilford Leach — who had just come off that famous Pirates of Penzance revival — saw it as an oratorio to be done in the small Anspacher. People singing at music stands worked well enough that a Broadway transfer seemed inevitable — “but they didn’t change anything,” says MacDermot. “It was lovely to watch those kids from 10 feet away and you didn’t mind that there was no action or choreography. But on Broadway, you did.” So The Human Comedy played more previews (20) than actual performances (13) during its 10-day April 1984 run. Interesting footnote: As Bess, there was future star Mary Elizabeth Mastrontonio. And an even bigger star of today, two-time Tony winner Donna Murphy, was her understudy.

Hoag Simon was living in Florida at the time and missed the show. “But I later stumbled onto it in a record store,” she says, referring to the disc that came out more than a decade after the Broadway production. “It was addictive. I had to see it. And. whenever I want to see a show, the way I get to do that is by directing it.”

Hence this new production. “We’re staging the overture,” she says. “You’ll see a Mexican woman sending her son off to war. You’ll see Homer’s father pass away and go to the great beyond. You’ll see Marcus drafted and sent off to begin his training, and we’ll trace him through the whole first act; you’ll see him made into a soldier, so that we’ll have a sense of who he is and will really miss him when he’s killed. When the kids are singing the chorus sections, they’ll be up above as themselves in 2003, watching what’s happening in the playing space. When they step into it, then they’re in 1943. I’m hoping that it reflects what we’re feeling now in this country — that we’re all little families hunkering together, the way families did back then.”

The Human Comedy plays March 5-9 at Marymount Manhattan College, 221 East 71st Street, New York City. Performances are Wednesday through Saturday at 8pm. Tickets are $10. But on Sunday, March 9, at 2pm, there’ll be a benefit to raise funds for a college scholarship to honor a firefighter lost on 9/11, and tickets for that performance are $100 and $75. Mail order tickets are now available for the benefit; send a check for the number of tickets you want, as well as a self-addressed, stamped envelope, to Human Comedy Benefit, c/o Dept. of Theatre, Marymount Manhattan College, 221 East 71st Street, New York City, or call 212-774-0760.

********************

[To contact Peter Filichia directly, e-mail him at pfilichia@aol.com]