Meet Them in St. Louis

If I told you that I spent the weekend seeing productions of Mister Roberts with its cast of 21, Arthur Laurents’s 1960 play Invitation to a March, and the 1959 musical The Nervous Set, where would you think I was? Would you guess St. Louis? The city that’s framed by the glorious Gateway Arch may not be known as a major theatrical player but perhaps it should be. Any town that offers me these three obscurities on a single weekend deserves some respect, and it has mine.

Of course, many would argue that Mister Roberts is hardly a theatrical obscurity, given that when the Thomas Heggen-Joshua Logan play closed on Broadway in 1951, only nine non-musicals had ever run longer. The 1955 movie version is famous, too. But in comparison to our current Broadway season — wherein three new plays have employed one performer each, another had two actors, and two had but three — how nice to see a stage literally filled with a score of stout-hearted men (and one lovely lady). Ed Stern’s production was crisp and moving, and anyone who didn’t have tears in his eyes — not only in the final scene but in the penultimate one, too — wasn’t sitting anywhere near me. Few of you will be able to see this so you’ll never now how wonderful Robert Elliott was as the Captain, Greg McFadden as Ensign Pulver, and, of course, Bill Doyle as Mister Roberts. But if you don’t know this extraordinary wartime comedy-drama, please rent the movie.

Anyone remember New York’s Equity Library Theatre at Riverside Drive and 103rd Street? That’s where you’d go to see forgotten plays (Johnny No-Trump) and musicals (Mary) in showcase productions featuring up-and-coming performers. Alas, ELT closed some time ago, but how nice to find that St. Louis has its own version and that its director, Larry Mabrey, chose to revive Invitation to a March. (Admit it: The only reason you know this title is because Sondheim wrote incidental music for the original production and you heard it on that Unsung Sondheim CD. To answer the question that all of you are about to pose: Yes, Mabrey had that Sondheim music pouring from speakers on each side of the stage.)

Mabrey’s sensitive production was proof positive that there’s some sensational talent in St. Louis. Laurents makes the point that his heroine Norma Brown should appear taller than Aaron Jablonski until she takes off her heels. And, indeed, the fetching Nicole Angeli in heels was taller than the equally fetching Michael Burton, but when she discarded them, the two performers were exactly the same height — just as called for by the script. This suggests that Mabrey auditioned a large number of actors until he got exactly what he needed. He didn’t settle for less.

By the way, I could really feel that the author of this play would go on to write Anyone Can Whistle, for both scripts deal with people choosing unconventional paths that others would judge crazy. When one character parrots standard 1950s sentiments on living conventionally, another charges, “You don’t think! You memorize!” Yes, here was Laurents getting a head start on the decade in which so many would reassess their values. Indeed, when the play opened, there were but three days to go before Kennedy was elected, effectively ending the Eisenhower years.

And speaking of forward-looking shows, there was The Nervous Set, with a book by Jay Landesman and Theodore J. Flicker, music by Tommy Wolf, and lyrics by Fran Landesman. Those who know their musical theater history may have guessed the moment I mentioned this show about the Beat Generation in my first paragraph that I just had to be in St. Louis, for here’s where the musical began in the 300-seat Crystal Palace on March 4, 1959. The Nervous Set was an immediate hit and stayed in town until May 2 — only 10 days before its Broadway premiere!

Today, starting in a regional theater and winding up on Broadway is the norm; but these were the days when a Broadway producer optioned a script and score, raised the money (more often than not) himself, and brought the show to Philly, Boston, or Baltimo’ before coming to Broadway. Starting out of town with no firm plans for Broadway was just one of the ways that The Nervous Set was ahead of its time.

There were others, as was confirmed by Scott Miller’s production of the musical at his New Line Theatre. For years, I’ve known the Columbia LP (now available on CD, thanks to DRG) and knew it sounded like no other cast album, what with a four-piece combo providing the jazz-infused music. But even its atypical-for-Broadway sound didn’t prepare me for the show’s astonishing iconoclasm. Many times, I’ve traveled thousands of miles and spent hundreds of dollars to see obscure musicals, but catching The Nervous Set at New Line turned out to be the most valuable theatrical pilgrimage I’ve ever made.

This was the first Broadway musical to open after Destry Rides Again and the last before Gypsy. It was eligible for Tonys in the same season that offered The Sound of Music and Take Me Along. Now, imagine a musical of that era featuring a drug addict who’s strung out on serious junk. (I don’t mean pot, though marijuana shows up in the show, too.) Then there’s the prescient scene in Act II that involves a very out-of-the-closet homosexual. (If there was a musical produced before 1959 in which one character asks another, “Are you gay?” I sure don’t know about it.) Add to this someone’s reference to Calamity Jane as “America’s first lesbian,” a joke about “beating your woman,” and a light-hearted lyric about a rapist. Miller unapologetically kept everything in; he told me, “I did the actual script that closed here in St. Louis just before the move to Broadway, where some changes were made.”

The show’s anti-hero is Brad, publisher of Nerves magazine, dedicated to beat culture (as Jay Landesman was with his Neurotica magazine). He meets Jan at a party, and while most musical theater heroes and heroines fall in love at first sight, here are two who go to bed right after their first meeting. Jan is conventional enough to want marriage but Brad is career-oriented (“I need money for the magazine.”) So when Sari comes on the scene, Brad gets interested in her and the three acknowledge their problem by singing “Spring Can Really Hang You up the Most.”

You may know this song for it truly is a jazz standard, but those who have the cast album won’t find it there. Wolf and Fran Landesman wrote it long before they thought of writing a musical and, by the time they did, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, and plenty of others had recorded it. After they shoehorned it into the score (and believe me, it felt it; the lyrics are not in Jan’s voice), the music publisher wanted too much money for it to be included in the stage version, so it was dropped when the show went to Broadway.

“Stop hating everything!” Jan eventually says to Brad. “Can’t we like something? How can you like yourself?” I’ll bet that few 1959 Broadway theatergoers disagreed with her. Fewer still attended The Nervous Set, even though the show didn’t have the original St. Louis ending that Miller kept in. Ready? Jan is so distraught that she overdoses on pills, and Brad is trying to revive her as the curtain falls. We never know if he does.

Now, I can imagine this being a big hit in St. Louis. Some God-fearing theatergoers could feel wildly superior to the characters (“Look how they live in New York!”) while more sophisticated types could enjoy living vicariously. But I can also understand why the show bombed on Broadway. Why didn’t the producer mount it Off-Broadway, you ask? Because there was barely an Off-Broadway then and what did exist was a haven for revivals. When The Nervous Set opened, only four shows had been runaway off-Broadway hits: The Threepenny Opera from the ’30s, The Iceman Cometh from the ’40s, and The Boy Friend and The Crucible from the earlier ’50s. Leave it To Jane, a charming but creaky 1917 show, was just about to begin what would be a two-year-plus run.

What’s amazing to me is that Robbie Lantz — the super agent who would later represent Mike Nichols, Elizabeth Taylor, Mia Farrow, etc. — was the producer who brought The Nervous Set to Broadway. Granted, he brought it in for only $50,000 in an era when $250,000-$300,000 was the norm for a musical, and Goddard Lieberson of Columbia loved the score so much that he put up $25,000 of that amount. But its bare bones look wasn’t right for Broadway in the sumptuous era of Oliver Smith-designed sets.

Lieberson did record the jaunty song “Let’s Just Have Fun” but drew the line at including its reprise, which was called, “Let’s Just Get High.” According to the lyrics, “Mondays are postponed / ‘Cause everyone is stoned.” Another line blithely goes — I swear this is true — “At least we try to keep our assholes clean.”

Is it any wonder that 23 performances after the opening — and after receiving what used to be called “nervous reviews” — The Nervous Set was history? At the opening of the Walter Kerr Theatre in 1990, Rocco Landesman (Jay and Fran’s nephew) said that Kerr’s only mistake as a reviewer was panning The Nervous Set, which Rocco loved as a kid. Frankly, I’m surprised that his folks let their pre-teen son see it!

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