A Tale of Six Cities

Good Lord, I’ve been doing a lot of flying, driving, and running around the country. I’ve packed up the luggage, la-la-la, unpacked the luggage, la-la-la, en route to a half-dozen different cities, where — surprise! — I saw a half-dozen shows.

First was New Brunswick, New Jersey, where I caught the tour of Seussical. I was fascinated to see that director Stafford Arima cast a David Shiner look-alike as the Cat in the Hat. Shiner is a wonderful physical comedian but he does, sad to say, lack the musical theater gene, which caused him to seem awkward in this show. But newcomer Peter Roman certainly has musical theater in his soul, voice, and feet.

While watching the show, I thought of what John Waters wrote in The New York Times around the time of the premiere of the musical made from his Hairspray: That he fondly imagines the day when the show gets its inevitable high school productions and a heavy-set girl and an equally heavy drag queen boy will star in roles tailor-made for them. Well, heavy-set boys also have another role to which they can look forward: Horton the Elephant in Seussical. Bless Lynn Ahrens and Steve Flaherty — not to mention Eric Idle and, of course, Dr. Seuss — for writing such a sensitive, caring character. Randall Frizado did Horton proud on this stop of the tour.

The next day, I flew to Cincinnati, Ohio, where I’m critic-in-residence at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. This spring’s mainstage production was The Mystery of Edwin Drood, a show I’ve never much liked, as can be proved by my walking out of it when it was trying out in Central Park and then again after it moved to Broadway. But Drood (as it was officially renamed on Broadway, though I’ve never seen another production that used that one-word title) was the show that director Aubrey Berg wanted to do, so I had to bone up on it. For a solid month, I listened to the cast album — the original issue that includes the alternate endings for the various suspects.

You may recall that, in the second act, the action stops dead and the audience votes on whom it believes murdered Edwin Drood. The character selected by the crowd then sings his or her confession. But, alas, so many of these pieces were written to be sung so lickety-split fast that I wondered if an audience would have a hard time understanding the explanations. The first night I saw the CCM production, the crowd opted for Rosa Bud, and Ashley Brown — who’d already brought down the house with her
glorious rendition of “Moonfall” — launched into her musical diatribe. The next afternoon, Princess Puffer was judged the culprit; so Betsy Wolfe delivered her confession, which is set to the tune of Puffer’s earlier showstopper, “The Wages of Sin.” I daresay that it went over much better because Puffer’s song has a much slower tempo and more deliberate pauses after many phrases, so the audience could glean what was going on. Rupert Holmes erred, I think, in setting most of the confessions as fast-paced limericks.

Onto Marblehead, Massachusetts, where I caught The Music Man, Jr. as essayed by the Tower School, a middle-school. Why, you ask, did I attend such a production? One of my more faithful readers, Lucas McMahon, was portraying Professor Harold Hill — that’s why. The 14-year-old did a nifty job, showed lots of spirit, and beautifully handled the quick worldplay of “76 Trombones” and “Trouble.” The latter song, by the way, was abridged, as was “Rock Island.” I found fascinating the choices that the powers that be at Music Theatre International made when cutting the show for young performers. Of course, no grade school girl should be asked to sing “My White Knight,” and “It’s You” was also judged expendable. But would you have expected that “Marian the Librarian” would be excised and “Shipoopi” would stay in? At second glance, however, that seemed a good choice, for you wouldn’t want to give Harold an inordinate amount to do (“Sadder-but-Wiser Girl” is nowhere to be found, either) and, by including “Shipoopi,” another kid gets a chance to shine. (Eric Kanter did just that.) The rest of the score remained and the Tower kids performed it with endearing brio.

Cambridge, Mass. was next as I took in the 156th edition of the Hasty Pudding Show. Once again, Michael Mitnick and Derrick Wang, who wrote a marvelous show last year for seniors in high school who were visiting Harvard to see
if it would be the school for them, collaborated — albeit this time with Kieran Schmitt. As the Word Turns took place in Spellville, a town wonderfully obsessed with spelling. (Guess what 1945 movie starring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck was playing at the local cinema?) Everyone was getting ready for the big annual Spelling Bee but, somehow, Neil B. Formey was using it as a political ruse
to rule the world, though his son wasn’t pleased. (“That’s why I have the orphanage on speed dial,” dad warned his boy.) The plot involved stealing vowels that would be sold to the Russians, for they don’t have any in their alphabet. This plan, of course, was known as the Vowel Movement. Needless to say, the show contained de rigueur political references in this election year (“You’re the dumbest man I ever met — and I live across the street from George W!”) and there was some interference from a Dame Edna-type known as The Diction Fairy. When the time came for the spelling bee, quizmaster Abby Seas demanded, “Lynn, spell ‘Kremlin.'” Poor Lynn Guist pleaded, “Can you use it in a sentence?” — to which Abby Seas responded, “Sure: ‘Lynn, spell, “Kremlin.”‘”

Over the river and through Mass. Ave. to What the Butler Saw at the Huntington. I first saw Joe Orton’s posthumously produced farce when it made its
Off-Broadway debut in 1970, in a production that was most stylized. Exhibit A: When the randy Dr. Prentice wanted to tell the fetching Geraldine Barclay a certain fact, he picked up a book, opened the tome, and immediately — I do mean immediately — found exactly what he was looking for and started reading. Yes, that was funny, though such artificial directorial touches eventually wore
anorexically thin. But here, in Darko Tresnjak’s new production, Dr. Prentice opened the book, looked for the fact, moved some pages back, then moved forward, and only then found the word. Granted, it didn’t get a laugh, but it did set up one of the ground rules of farce: That the people on stage must play the work absolutely seriously. Orton stuffed Butler with plenty of what passed for craziness in 1965 (cross-dressing, sexual spanking, etc.), so Tresnjak knew he could bide his time until the play got in gear. While the Off-Broadway production soon ran out of stylized gas, this production kept building in its strange but hilarious reality.

The sixth city? Why, New York, of course, where King Lear struck me as dry as dust, performed on a dull unit set that would be a disgrace to a high school. On the other hand, Small Tragedy at Playwrights Horizons begins as if it were Noises Off but has a great deal more on its mind. I do wish, though, that Craig Lucas had focused a bit more, for the early emphasis on backstage chaos allowed the play to get away from him. Still, this story of how you should watch with whom you get romantically involved when you’re rehearsing a play is pretty good advice. Here’s hoping that the casts of Seussical, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, The Music Man Jr., As the Word Turns, What the Butler Saw, and King Lear don’t have the problems that one Small Tragedy character encounters in becoming involved with her leading man.

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