Petie’s Early Summer Vacation

Memorial Day weekend is the unofficial start of summer, the time when everyone gets in his car and heads to the beach. But to me, who hasn’t shown himself in a bathing suit since the days when Life With Father was Broadway’s long-run champ, the weekend represented an opportunity to see some out-of-town productions.

First, I saw Call Me Madam at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Connecticut — even though I don’t much like the show. Irving Berlin’s music is wonderful and his lyrics are almost as good, but the Lindsay and Crouse book is woefully dated. Granted, most musicals that debuted in the ’50s are dated, but this one is particularly problematic. What an irony that a musical about politics is so politically incorrect! As soon as Mrs. Sally Adams is sworn in as ambassador of the “glorious grand duchy of Lichtenburg,” she asks, “Hey, where the hell is Lichtenburg, anyway?” Soon, she tells us that the people of Lichtenburg are Dutch “because it’s a duchy.” She claims that she won’t lend the country a nickel; then she meets one of the nation’s most handsome officials, falls in love at first sight, and is willing to offer him $100 million. But the show’s worst joke is Sally’s assumption that, if a country on a map is colored with yellow ink, its countryside will be yellow, too.

Although Sally’s all-American ingenuity eventually saves the day, much of the show suggests that women are wretchedly incompetent when placed in important positions. Still, to be fair, Call Me Madam was fashioned as a harmless political spoof in 1950. The collaborators mocked the fact that the nation had reached the point where President Harry S. Truman had appointed as his new ambassador to Luxembourg one Perle Mesta, whose only qualification for the job was her fame as a terrific partygiver. Of course, Berlin was also interested in writing another show for Ethel Merman, who’d starred in his biggest hit — Annie Get Your Gun — just four years earlier.

Merman was quite a riveting Sally Adams, as is witnessed by the recent release of the film version of Call Me Madam on DVD. But, at the risk of infuriating and alienating many a musical theater enthusiast, I ultimately had a better time watching Kim Criswell in the role. Since we last saw this Broadway baby (who has been in London for the past dozen years), she has grown into a BBW (big, beautiful woman, but she’s still extraordinarily light on her feet and can lead a conga with ease. Criswell can also be as brassy as the Merm, both in song and dialogue: She barrels her way through two snarling senators, gives a quick slap on the back or belly to her cohorts, and gooses a stuffy bureaucrat in between singing the hell out of the score.

But compare Criswell with Merman in Sally’s scenes with the prissy, officious Pemberton Maxwell. (How prissy and officious? In the film, he’s played by Billy De
Wolfe. Need I say more?) Pemberton takes umbrage with Sally’s quintessentially American, cavalier attitude toward protocol. Merman is determined to eat him for breakfast, while Criswell instead projects a feeling of “Pemberton! I’m surprised that you’d get so upset over such a little thing!” This makes her nicer and makes us like her more. (Alas, tenderness was always Merman’s Achilles heel as a performer. Admit it: Whenever you brought someone home with you to woo, what you chose for seductive mood music was never a Merman ballad!)

Under F. Wade Russo’s sturdy baton, the Call Me Madam score swings and sounds great at Goodspeed. James Brennan directs broadly but well — although he seems to have taken literally Sally’s remark that Lichtenburg is Dutch, for he’s put the chorus in wooden shoes. That may be one reason why the choreography for this production is less than stellar.

Off to the Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island, where West Side Story is getting a revisionist production courtesy of director Amanda Dehnert. David Jenkins has made the theater’s thrust stage into a basketball court — literally — complete with a scoreboard that reads “Home,” “Visitors,” and “Time.” I wondered if Riff’s murder would cause a “1” to flash under “Visitors” and if
Bernardo’s death would tie the score at “1” for the home team. No, thank the Lord; the words on the scoreboard change to “Act” and “Scene” when the show starts, and “Time” represents the time of day at which each scene takes place.

When the Jets and Sharks come on, there’s no way of knowing their identity; indeed, two of the men play both Jets and Sharks. That’s quite a difference from original director-choreographer Jerome Robbins’s insistence that the actors who were cast as members of the two warring gangs not even have lunch together. Here, everyone who isn’t in a particular scene sits on bleachers at the far end of the stage. When Maria sings, “See the pretty girl in the mirror there,” each chorus member takes out a mirror and waves it around. Some of the actors play the mannequins in the bridal shop scene, and that hurts, because we watch them in their funny, frozen positions rather than concentrating on the only wedding that Maria and Tony will ever have. Oh, and Dehnert has added about a dozen words to the script. When the kids go to a certain location — say, Doc’s Drugstore — some of the cast members intone, “Doc’s Drugstore.” (This is particularly unnecessary in that some of the other cast members painstakingly paint the word “drugstore” on the floor. Either the announcement or the paint job would have served.)

Sharon Jenkins’s choreography may borrow from Robbins but it’s wonderfully effective, and the dancers are marvelous. Dehnert has done some dazzling staging, positioning a 12-inch-wide, U-shaped catwalk around the perimeter of the stage and many feet above it. As the “Quintet” rumbles on, Tony starts walking precariously from the stage right end of the “U” towards the center while Maria begins at the stage-left end. How poignant it is when they meet but can’t quite reach, extending their hands towards each other like God and Man on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

But Dehnert has Riff and Bernardo return from the dead, both dripped in blood, to appear in Maria’s dream of what the rumble must have been like. What’s more unnerving, Anita (the colorless Courtney Laine Mazza) stares at the bloody Bernardo (the adequate Wilson Mendieta) while Maria sings “I Have a Love.” No — Anita must pay attention to every one of Maria’s words in order to be convinced. Yet Dehnert does add one masterstroke in having Officer Krupke played not as a cipher but as a fascist pig who isn’t above police brutality.

Tony Yasbeck has the problem that many Tonys have: He doesn’t seem to be a kid of the streets. But he has a glorious voice, as does Nina Negri, his Maria. Riff is ably played by the African-American Tommar Wilson — but while I’m usually enthusiastic about non-traditional casting, West Side Story is best without it, given that race is its main issue. Finally, the music sounds sensational. It’s played by 16 teenagers who call themselves The West Side Story Youth Orchestra. I call them amazing.

Also at Trinity, on the company’s second stage, I saw a new play called The Ruby Sunrise. It’s about a young farm girl who, in 1927, is intent on inventing television. She’s sidetracked when her boyfriend gets her pregnant, and suddenly — as suddenly as the Ile de la Grande Jatte circa 1884 turned into a 1984 museum auditorium in Sunday in the Park With George — the set changes to a TV studio in 1952. We learn that a network secretary wants the story of her mother and father, the young people whom we met earlier, put on the small tube. The play isn’t great but is almost always interesting, and I much preferred seeing it to being seen on a beach in a bathing suit.

********************

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