Apple-y Ever After
Every musical theater enthusiast can tell you three unshakable facts: 1) Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote Oklahoma! 2) Stephen Sondheim wrote the score to Follies, and 3) the first act of The Apple Tree is the best. I centered on that one — The Diary of Adam and Eve — in my previous column, in anticipation of the staged reading that Encores! will do this week. Now I’ll go on to talk about the other two one-act musicals that composer-bookwriter Jerry Bock and
lyricist-bookwriter Sheldon Harnick wrote — and Mike Nichols directed — in 1966. Each of these two mini-musicals, The Lady or the Tiger and Passionella, may not have been as terrific as the opener, but both offered many high points.
Do you know The Lady or the Tiger? from your grammar school textbook? It’s the story by Frank Stockton in which a king’s system of justice means an accused must go into an arena where he chooses one of two doors. If a beautiful lady comes out, then you’re innocent and are rewarded with her hand in marriage. If a tiger instead comes out and devours you, well, then you must have been guilty. So you either got death or, the more cynical of us might argue, a fate worse than death.
In the musical version, Larry Blyden played the narrator-like Balladeer, who sang a song, the second note of which was as dissonant as could be (for a nice comic effect). “I’ll tell you a truth,” he sang, en route to introducing us to Princess Barbara (Barbara Harris) — pronounced Bar-BARE-a, as if citing a barbarian, which indeed she and everyone else in her primitive kingdom were. (All the names for the characters were Bock and Harnick fabrications; the original story didn’t name anyone.)
Barbara loved Sanjar (Alan Alda), whom her father, the King, admired as a soldier, but not as a prospective son-in-law. The lovers discuss eloping, perhaps to settle “In Gaul.” This song includes a joke that depends on one’s knowledge of Latin, which most every theatergoer had back then. We’ll see how well it plays this week at Encores! (It may not land, for as we often learn from Jay Leno’s interviews with people on the street, America isn’t as learned as it once was. I saw Leno ask two people, “In what state does the Kentucky Derby take place,” and both had wrongswers.) By the way, those who know “In Gaul” only from the cast album will find two extra words that were purposely left off the recording. They nicely refer back to a good joke in the first act. Listen for them.
Barbara and Sanjar are found out, so he’s arrested, and she wants to save his life. That means finding out behind which door is the lady, and which the tiger. Now in Boston, the Tiger-Keeper was bound upside down in a torturous position, as Barbara had another man whip him until he gave her the information. By the time the show reached Broadway, she much more demurely bribed him. After she got the information, Bock and Harnick provided a cleverly double-entendred song. Listen for it — and see if the authors came up with a different ending from Stockton’s.
Onto Passionella, which had a Narrator (Blyden) reading the story from a book (so when Michael Cerveris is reading from a script this weekend, he’ll be recreating the original staging). Ella (Harris) is a chimney sweep who wants to be a movie star, and lo and behold, she’s visited by a Fairy Godmother who grants her wish. But like Cinderella, her window of opportunity isn’t wide; in her case, it’s “from Huntley-Brinkley to The Late Late Show.” (For young ‘uns, that means “from Peter Jennings to Jimmy Kimmel.”) The made-over Passionella is, as she sings, gorgeous; but her main point of interest is a bosom that had to be seen to be believed — because every press photo I ever saw of it (and even the sequence Harris did on the Tonys) offered a much more scaled-down and modest version of what she had in the show. It was a veritable shelf on which you could have put every LP, cassette, CD, DVD, and script ever made of Show Boat.
Still, that fame, fortune, and body were enough to make Passionella happy only for a while. “What does it all mean, if I don’t have love?” she melodramatically asked. Enter Flip (Alda), a Brando-on-a-motorcycle type who sang a wrath-of-God Bob Dylan-ish type song, “You Are Not Real,” in which he complained about Passionella’s vapid values. But in Boston, we had an extra verse in which Flip sang that he went to Graumann’s Chinese Theater — where he saw, “hand-prints, and foot-prints, and other prints, too. Then I saw two deep holes, and I knew it was you.” I have no idea why this great joke was dropped, but jettisoning it was a mistake.
Incidentally, this was not the first song that Bock and Harnick wrote for this spot. “Talkin’ Truth” was Flip’s original song, which had a ricky-ticky melody not unlike “Movies Were Movies” from Mack & Mabel. I could be all wrong here, but somehow I envision Bock and Harnick playing “Talkin’ Truth” to Nichols, who’s slowly shaking his head from side to side before quietly saying, “Listen, let me give you a few of my Bob Dylan albums …”
Still, Passionella and Flip find their way to happiness, though the lady is a bit worried what will happen when she reverts to that dishrag Ella once The Late Late Show ends. Here’s where you also get a variation on a joke that carried from the first and second stories, too. Younger readers may also not quite get all the juice from the then-white-hot topical joke about Passionella and Flip being written up in the World-Journal-Herald-Globe-Eagle. But just as The Apple Tree was opening in Boston in September 1966, a merger of three New York newspapers took place: The Journal-American, the World-Telegram & Sun and the Herald-Tribune all forged together to become the World-Journal-Tribune. (It was affectionately — or, come to think of it, maybe not so affectionately — dubbed The Widget.) The new daily didn’t even last as long as The Apple Tree; the paper folded in May, 1967.
Meanwhile, The Apple Tree opened at the Shubert in New York on October 18, 1966, and closed on November 25, 1967, for a total of 463 performances. It’s rarely been revived since. Before Mitchell Maxwell began his arguably notorious career as a New York producer, he staged it in the basement of a Ramada Inn in a desolate part of suburban Boston. (Well, we all have to start somewhere.) There was a Canadian production of The Diary of Adam and Eve without the other two; the powers-that-be there obviously thought it was the best of the three as well. This Canadian production did it with a cast of two, for Adam and the Snake never appear together on stage at the same time, so one actor did both roles. Then there was a production in 1994 that used no men at all — by that all-female Japanese troupe, Takarazuka.
You may have heard Mike Nichols, during interviews for this season’s Monty Python’s Spamalot, say that he didn’t want to do another musical. Granted, The Apple Tree was the first directorial property to put a chink in his armor, especially when (according to William Goldman in The Season), he asked for help when things weren’t going well out-of-town. That’s when choreographer Lee Theodore was replaced by Herbert Ross (who would soon leave Broadway for Hollywood). Nevertheless, The Apple Tree got three of the six papers to rave, and suffered only one unfavorable review. But once Cabaret opened a month after The Apple Tree, it became the show to see. Harris won the show’s only Tony Award, and gave one of the most oddly confusing acceptance speeches in Tony history. No one still seems to know what happened to her. (Or, sad to say, what’s happened to her since.)
Incidentally, Stuart Ostrow decided that while Harris would be billed first, with Alda and Blyden following, he would rotate that billing on a month-to-month basis. So in November 1966, the billing went Alan Alda-Larry Blyden-Barbara Harris, and in December, Larry Blyden-Barbara Harris-Alan Alda, and so on. I think it’d be nifty if the billing for Encores! went Kristin Chenoweth-Malcolm Gets-Michael Cerveris for Thursday, Malcolm Gets-Michael Cerveris-Kristin Chenoweth for Friday, Michael Cerveris-Kristin Chenoweth-Malcolm Gets for Saturday, and so on, until the brief run is complete.
********************
[To contact Peter Filichia directly, e-mail him at pfilichia@theatermania.com]
