Somebody Loses and Somebody Wins
As I approach the Foothills Theatre Company in Worcester, Massachusetts, I pass the big city mall next door — which is virtually empty. “It’ll be torn down in August,” Foothills associate producer Bob Dolan tells me. “After all, it’s failed twice.” Says his wife Linda, “Actually, I think it’s failed three times.”
But Foothills hasn’t. This is its 30th anniversary season and, since 1987, it’s been ensconced in this handsome, charming, carmine-colored, below-ground space with 350 comfortable seats arranged in 13 rows of continental seating. Foothills does eight productions a year and I’m here to see the fifth show of the season, one that will bring me both pleasure and pain. It’s a musical based on an old movie. It takes place in the Roaring ’20s and it involves a young woman who, during her first song, goes off-stage and comes back in a different dress. Now she’s ready and determined to marry her boss, even though he turns out to be a little stuffy.
No, it’s not Thoroughly Modern Millie, a musical that brought me precious little pleasure and more than a dollop of pain. It’s The IT Girl, based on that old Clara Bow classic, IT, with a book by Michael Small and BT McNicholl, music by Paul McKibbins, and lyrics by McNicholl (who directed, too). The show’s pleasures are considerable and the pain I feel is just because too few people know about it. At least Foothills is doing what it can to rectify that situation.
As The IT Girl opens, young and attractive Betty Lou Spence is in a bright red dress, watching a movie. The film is such an enticing experience that she yearns to be in that world. In the best musical theater fantasy tradition, she goes offstage and returns in a new outfit — a black-and-white one, because the exciting, romantic, and dynamic life on the screen is much more colorful in its own way than her own real-life existence. Usually, a musical would use color to express excitement, but in the ’20s, black-and-white movies were the epicenter of big thrills. At this point, The IT Girl is less than four minutes old and it’s already come up with a fresh idea, which is something that Millie wasn’t able to find all night long.
Betty Lou is a shopgirl in Waltham’s Department Store (“where insanity is always in stock,” quips one of her co-workers). But she is interested in Jonathan Waltham, who “made money the old-fashioned way: He inherited it.” Betty Lou’s co-worker pooh-poohs her getting anywhere with the smart set because “They dance at the Ritz, while we dance at the armory.” Betty Lou’s response? “We both have feet, don’t we?” As it turns out, Jonathan does notice those feet — and everything above them. He is smitten, which irks Adela, the socialite who’s had her eye on him. Observes Jonathan’s best friend Monty, “They have a friendship that goes back for years. Some day, they’ll get married and put an end to it.” (That got a great deal of hearty laughter from the audience — but of course, any joke about the difficulties of marriage always gets a big laugh from husbands and wives who have learned better since taking their vows.)
Adela learns that Betty Lou is rooming with Molly, a single mother whose husband died from diphtheria. Aha! Adela makes Jonathan think that the child is Betty Lou’s and that she’s therefore a loose woman. In fact, Betty Lou has been pretending to be the infant’s mother in order to keep Molly from getting evicted; but when Jonathan hears the news, he knows he can’t let down his family by marrying an unwed mother. (“And your father would take away your boating privileges,” Monty adds.) So Jonathan offers to make Betty Lou his mistress. Now, how’s that for hot stuff in a musical set in the ’20s? While we eventually get the expected happy ending, the authors offer a bittersweet coda to once again remind us that real life isn’t as grand as the movies and that we learn how to settle for what we get.
While the sets and costumes are black, white, and gray, McKibbins’ marvelous music provides the color. If there’s a ’20s style of song that he failed to write for this show, I can’t think of what it is; there are a couple of Charlestons, some ragtime, some silent-movie-inspired music, a voh-dee-oh-do rouser, an intoxicating waltz, and two fetching quodlibets. But he’s also written a lullaby that’s so beautiful, I wish it had been around when my son was a baby so my wife and I could have sung it to him. All parents of current babies should learn this melody now! On the other hand, maybe this is not a good idea; the song is so winning that, when you stop singing it, your kid will probably cry out for more and will never get to sleep.
I’ll grant you that the show’s lyrics are occasionally clunky. Words are so crammed into Betty Lou’s second song, “Why Not?” that although I’ve listened to the cast album dozens if not hundreds of times, I still can’t easily make out what she’s saying. Later, Adela sings how she’s sabotaged each of her romantic rivals with “A Perfect Plan” that always backfires. In one case, “I threw a cockroach down the dress she’d worn,” then her victim started jiggling “and that is how the Charleston was born.” But the word “worn” is stretched over two measures, and not only does the consonant ending not sing well, this is also not the word that a person would use; she’d say, “I threw a cockroach down her dress” and leave it at that, but McNicholl needed the “worn” to rhyme “born.” Still, I prefer McNicholl’s efforts to hearing Millie’s recycling of Rida Johnson Young’s words to “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life” and its Chinese lyrics to “Mammy.”
The IT Girl has the vitality, imagination and sheer fun that those Princess Shows must have had right around the era in which this show takes place. Small and McNicholl have provided a generous number of snappy one-liners (Don’t like “Two’s company, three’s the result”? Try “She’s buried three husbands — and two of them were only sleeping.” Or, “Your father is a brilliant lawyer. They even named a loophole after him.”) But the book writers also took the time to make Betty Lou an admirable heroine; she’s willing to sacrifice her own reputation in order to help her friend.
The Foothills crowd didn’t come in with much enthusiasm. They must have wondered, what is this show that has been slotted between To Kill a Mockingbird and Miss Saigon? But little by little, The IT Girl won them over, and while I’m no fan of the now de rigueur “Whoo!” I was glad to hear the audience giving out with it after many a second-act number concluded. The arms-folded, show-me attitude that they had had at the start of the performance was gone. And how they adored Karen Q. Clark, an actress totally unknown to me, who made Betty Lou enchanting and mischievously intoxicating with a pixieish smile. By the time Jonathan realized that she’s got “IT,” we in the audience had known this for quite a while. Once again, I felt pain — knowing that if the gods of Broadway had smiled on The IT Girl instead of Millie, Clark might have been the Tony-winner we’d all have celebrated in 2002.
I caught The IT Girl on the penultimate day of its three-and-a-half week run. That, by the way, is precisely how long the show ran at the York Theatre Company in May, 2001. By then, Millie, which had debuted in October 2000 at the La Jolla Playhouse, was on its way. Well, as Fred Ebb wrote in And the World Goes ‘Round, “Somebody loses and somebody wins.” Millie got undeserved Tonys in a weak season and this show was IT out-of-luck.
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[To contact Peter Filichia directly, e-mail him at pfilichia@theatermania.com]
