Grand: Knowing You, Part II

So, have you spent the weekend anxiously wondering what happened to Nathan Rashumsky?

Nathan, for those who didn’t catch my last column, is The Prince of Grand Street, the title character of the 1978 musical for which Bob Merrill wrote book, music, and lyrics. The Jewish Repertory Theatre will do a concert version of the show that was to open 25 years ago at the Palace but shuttered in Boston. (Performances are at the Center for Jewish History located at 15 West 16th Street. Shows are Thursday, May 29 at 8pm; Sunday, June 1 at 3 and 7pm; and Monday, June 2 at 2pm. Tickets are $35 and can be ordered by calling 917-606-8200 or by visiting www.jrt.org.)

I have many memories of the show, given that I attended a backers’ audition at the Alvin on September 26, 1977; the gypsy-run through at the Minskoff on February 27, 1978; and one of the final Boston performances at the Shubert on April 14, 1978. Last week, I related what happens in the first act of the show. Nathan (Robert Preston) was a star of the downtown turn-of-the-century Yiddish theater but had been mired in an arranged marriage for 47 years, until his wife died. Almost immediately, he began courting Leah (Neva Small), even though she was 18 and he was 62, and even though her grandfather (Sam Levene) wasn’t crazy about her dating him. For good reason, it turned out: Nathan cheated on Leah the first weekend they went away! Still, she forgave him and they got married as the first act curtain fell, even though Nathan knew that his audience might not approve of such a union and that his popularity could greatly wane.

The other issue that was brought up during the first act constituted much of the second act, which we’ll discuss today. For Nathan constantly butted horns with Julius Pritkin (Werner Klemperer), a drama critic who didn’t cotton to the star’s changing the text and meaning of classics like Romeo and Juliet to suit his Russian-Jewish immigrant audience. More to the point, Pritkin didn’t think that Nathan, at 62, should be playing Romeo.

So onto that second act, which began with a (musical) scene of Nathan’s latest hit production, Young Avram Lincoln, about “the rail-splitter who became president and created a home for the Jews in Illinois.” (One of the melodies in this sequence owed a good deal to “Ciao, Compare,” the song that Merrill wrote for Breakfast at Tiffany’s a dozen years before.) While this was going on, Leah was off-stage realizing that she had found “My Place in the World,” a ballad that Neva Small sang big.

Pritkin hated the show and challenged Nathan on Lincoln’s being Jewish. Nathan’s response: “Well, his name was Abraham, wasn’t it?” He asked Pritkin a good question — “Don’t you ever agree with the audience?” — and then an even better one: “What do you contribute?” Pritkin gave him an excellent answer: “I want to elevate our downtown theater. To see that our immigrants are uplifted and not pandered to.” But that cut no ice with Nathan, who bragged that his next production would be an adaptation of Huckleberry Finn (a book Pritkin had mentioned to him, by the way). If Nathan couldn’t play the teenager to his audience’s satisfaction, he said, he’d quit the stage — but if he could, he’d expect Pritkin to quit the paper. Pritkin, perhaps all too aware that jobs as drama critics are extraordinarily hard to get, made no such promise upon exiting. But, once he left, Nathan started to doubt himself and asked Leah, “Do they laugh at an old man prancing on the stage like a young boy?” That resulted in Leah’s singing a very Jerry Hermanish cheer-up song, “(You’re) The Youngest Person That I Know,” which morphed into an enormous production number.

If you thought that Big River was the first musical in which Mark Twain appeared, you’re wrong: He showed up in The Prince of Grand Street, too. Nathan asked him for the rights to Huckleberry Finn and Twain was on the fence about giving them — until Nathan mentioned that he planned to play Huck. Then Twain’s answer was a firm no.

In my last column, I enumerated the Big Mistakes that the show made and totaled seven of them. Here was Big Mistake #8: Nathan didn’t care that he wasn’t given the rights and staged his own Huck Finn anyway. Once again, we were shown a guy who simply doesn’t believe that the rules of the world apply to him. That got awfully insufferable. Nevertheless, when Robert Preston came out dressed as Huckleberry Finn, there was a good deal of laughter from the audience — but all of it was affectionate. Still, this sequence contained Big Mistake #9, for it quoted Twain’s use of the “N”-word. However historically accurate that is, it had to turn some of the audience against the show.

Well, Twain sued Nathan, and Pritkin panned him. In that same column, Pritkin praised an up-and-coming actor while also making the suggestion that the new guy could learn a good deal from Nathan, who is a good performer when he doesn’t cast himself in a major part as a minor. (Has anyone noticed that the drama critic is turning out to be the nicest guy in the show? Who’d expect him to be so gracious after so many bouts with the insufferable Nathan?) Anyway, Pritkin had Nathan meet the young actor and the show ended with Nathan and the kid discussing their first collaboration — in which, Nathan told him, he himself would play the younger part. Curtain.

The “here we go again” ending is time-honored, but it was certainly theadbare by 1978 and must be considered Big Mistake #10. Merrill assumed we’d be so in love with Nathan that we’d forgive him everything, but as I’ve outlined, there were too many flaws in the guy for us to embrace him unconditionally.

For the Jewish Rep production, director Barry Kleinbort has permission from Merrill’s widow to tinker with the show. I asked him what he was going to do, and he said, “This version combines elements from the Philadelphia tryout and the two Boston versions. One song for Nathan, ‘Where Does Love Go?’ was so newly added in Boston that not only wasn’t it listed in the program, but it also didn’t have engraved music parts; the orchestra was working from pencil cheat-sheets without lyric or melody line indications. It’s one of my favorite pieces in the score, and it’s back in the show.

“In melding all these versions, I started to examine what was unfocused about the material — the Sam Levene character, for example. As Leah’s grandfather, he had some funny lines, but I couldn’t really understand what other function the character provided other than to talk to the audience ‘in-one’ to cover some costume and scene changes. He had absolutely no bearing on the plot.”

Kleinbort agreed with at least one of the Big Mistakes I detailed last week. “The show took a rather unpleasant turn when Nathan, after swearing his love for Leah in Atlantic City, had a dalliance with a chambermaid immediately afterwards and Leah walked in on them. Other than providing impetus for her to leave him, Rashumsky’s behavior seemed totally unmotivated and didn’t help us to like the character very much.” Kleinbort has eliminated that, which also caused the excision of “Stay With Me.” But he has written a new scene here instead.

Also, he says, “I added a new first scene which sets up the Rashumsky/Pritkin connection and provides a place for the title song — which, sadly, never found a comfortable home in the original production. By the Boston run, it was sandwiched into the middle of ‘The Youngest Person That I Know’ for no apparent reason. It wasn’t listed in the program, and I think they just didn’t know what to do with it. In Philadelphia, it was the first act finale. I’ve created a new one. I found a lead sheet for a number called ‘Nathan’ that was never in any version of the show; I took the verse from that and put it together with a reprise of an earlier number to create a new first act finale.”

Even though Kleinbort has been rewriting, he does have respect for the original material: “Merrill wrote wonderful scenes that are funny, touching, and flavorful,” he says. Kleinbort is hoping, of course, that we’ll feel those adjectives apply to his own work when we all attend The Prince of Grand Street this weekend.

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