Ain’t So Bad After All

“Toronto Unlimited.” That’s the new slogan that Toronto announced last month in hopes that tourists will discover — or return to — this Canadian city. Alas, tourism has been on the wane ever since that SARS scare in 2000. Then came September 11. Maybe that’s why all those theaters that housed road companies of The Lion King, Hairspray, Mamma Mia, and The Producers are dark now.

The theater community and the city are looking forward to The Lord of the Rings, the Matthew Warchus musical extravaganza based on the Tolkien classic, which is scheduled to open here in early 2006 at the Princess of Wales Theater. All around Toronto, you’ll see the show’s logo with the title’s five words fashioned from twigs and branches, set in a circle. The Lord of the Rings is budgeted at $27 million, and while that’s Canadian money, it’s still a tremendous chunk of change.

But there’s much more to the Toronto theater scene than The Lord of the Rings. Indeed, this is the third-largest city for theater in the English-speaking world. (Bet you can guess the first two.) It boasts three separate theater districts, and I’ve dropped by each of them in my three days here. I’ve also taken a tour of what will soon be the Soulpepper Theatre in the trendy Distillery District — a bunch of former breweries that have been turned into shops and restaurants. The Soulpeper troupe is only seven years old and has been playing in outdoor venues. They’ll do that this summer, too, with five productions including The Wild Duck, Fool for Love, and Hamlet. After that, they’ll be rewarded with their own 44,000-square-foot, two-theater facility. Notice the four shows I saw while I was here — a gay musical, a murder mystery set in Morocco, a Trinidadian play, and an African-American musical revue — and you’ll get a hint as to why the United Nations called Toronto “the world’s most multi-cultural city.” There really is something to that “unlimited” slogan.

Just ask Martin Bragg, the artistic producer of CanStage, who is poised for the city to rebound. He recalls the day in 2000 when he had 77 producers coming to town to take a look at one of his shows in the hope that someone would pick it up. Then SARS hit. “Seventy-three of them canceled,” he says soberly, “but the four that came did take the show.” I like Bragg; he seems to be a tell-it-like-it-is guy. I also like the looks of his 2005-2006 season, which includes such shows as The Goat, Crowns, A Number, I Am My Own Wife, and Hair.

The fact that Bragg is doing Hair is deliciously ironic. He tells me that when the landmark musical played its very first Toronto engagement at the Royal Alexandria Theatre in the late 1960s, he was in high school and arranged for a group sales trip so he and his pals could attend. The school authorities found that he was taking kids to what was then considered a salacious show, so he was suspended from school. Now he’s producing the show. Bragg doesn’t apologize for eschewing classics: “Canada has the Stratford and Shaw Festivals and, frankly, they do the classics better than we do,” he says. “But we do the new stuff better than they do.” Apparently, 17,000 subscribers agree.

To be honest, my heart sank when I found that the show I’d be seeing at Can Stage was Ain’t Misbehavin’, the well-known revue of Fats Waller songs. I consider this 1978 entertainment to be Patient Zero in the cecline of the big Broadway musical. That’s because it was the first Let’s-Celebrate-a-Songwriter Revue that scored with both critics and audiences. The show received unanimous raves, a New York Critics Circle Award, and Tonys for Best Featured Musical Actress (Nell Carter), Best Direction (Richard Maltby, Jr.), and Best Musical (which I found particularly inexplicable given that On the Twentieth Century was also nominated). Ain’t Misbehavin’ ran for four years; suddenly, the idea of getting a Tony and making a fortune from the inexpensive mounting of a show featuring a songwriter’s catalogue seemed irresistible.

In the ensuing 27 years, we’ve seen the disgrace of six such shows being nominated for “Best Musical” Tonys. None has won, thank the Lord, but it’s a genre that has lasted through the late 1970s (Eubie), the ’80s (Perfectly Frank, Jerry’s Girls, Jerome Kern Goes to Hollywood, Stardust), and the ’90s (Dream, Putting It Together, The Gershwins’ Fascinating Rhythm). I won’t even get into such multi-songwriter revues as It Ain’t Nothin’ But the Blues and Blues in the Night, but I hold Ain’t Misbehavin’ responsible for those, too.

Many people have told me that what made Ain’t Misbehavin’ special is that its singers played characters; but in the half-dozen times I’ve seen the show, I’ve found it to have singers with stock characteristics and one-dimensional attitudes. Case in point: The female singer who elbows a fellow female singer out of her way so she can get the spotlight, then gives a plastic smile to the audience to suggest that everything’s great and that she didn’t do anything wrong. I also can’t stand it when the Fats Waller stand-in sings “Two Sloppy People” instead of “Two Sleepy People” and tries to make us believe it’s a mistake that just happened at this performance.

So I was ready to hate Ain’t Misbehavin’ one mo’ time, to cite the name of another cheap revue, but something happened at CanStage that made me change my 27-year-old opinion. Bragg had brought in 300 or so teenagers to see the show. When I saw them chattering away in the lobby, I figured they’d be inattentive to this dreary effort. What hadn’t occurred to me was that these kids would be hearing these songs for the first time. I’d become familiar with many of them in my youth through TV variety shows, but such programs are long-gone; these kids usually hear music of a much different type. Suddenly, Ain’t Misbehavin’ was giving them the chance to experience quality work. “Honeysuckle Rose,” “Keepin’ out of Mischief Now,” “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie,” and the title song all delighted them. They laughed mightily at the audacity of “Your Feet’s Too Big” and “Find Out What They Like.” They were pleasantly surprised by “The Viper’s Drag,” which centers on marijuana, and they laughed in recognition when the singer was caught smoking by his mother.

Ain’t Misbehavin’ is one of those shows with a programmed moment when the performers demand applause. “C’mon,” Doug Eskew insisted deep into the second act as he extended his arms outward and clapped to show us the way — but he didn’t need to. The audience had already been applauding wildly long before then without prodding. I was impressed by their audible response to the clever twist in the lyrics of “Mean to Me,” and I’ll long remember the sad sound of their “ohhh” at “Black and Blue,” about black performers facing prejudice head on. So, after more than a quarter-century, I’m making my peace with this piece. If Toronto could do that for me, it is indeed a city with unlimited possibilities.

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

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