Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head

So here I am in Atlanta, accompanying my girlfriend, Linda, who’s speaking at a conference. Alas, we’re only here on a Tuesday and Wednesday, when the Atlanta theater scene is not at its apex; the city definitely has a weekend-centric schedule. So, while Linda’s speaking, I’m at Turner Field to watch the Atlanta Braves take on the Chicago Cubs. It’s a delightful evening as I root-root-root for the home team, which is winning 5-1 in the 6th inning. Hmmm, did I just feel a raindrop? No, it’s a lovely night. But, gee, that felt like another raindrop. And another. And another.

Oh, come on! If the rain’s got to fall, let it fall on Monday, Thursday, Friday — any day but Tuesday. But no! A few minutes later, the heavens have opened and the game is stopped. For how long? As Albin used to sing on Broadway, “Who knows? Who knows? Who knows?” Right now, there’s a big rain a-comin’. I’m talkin’ about a good Old Testament, wade-in-the-water and shoutin’ glory rain. Soon the grounds crew is pulling a blue tarp across the infield, the official indication that there’s going to be a major delay.

Well, now I can say that I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain this summer. The fire came when I felt as if I were in one while attending Merrily We Roll Along at the non-air-conditioned Gene Frankel Playhouse, which should have been renamed Mrs. Lovett’s Oven. (The show has since moved to the much-cooler 45th Street Theatre.) There are two nice things in Steve Velardi’s production. First, at the beginning of the show, we hear a good deal of street noise and we see Franklin Shepard standing as if he’s on a roof, getting ready to jump off and end his life. That’s good, for it brings the action ahead one scene from the first party scene; and it returns the action to a rooftop, where Frank once stood with the greatest optimism in his head. Second, when the chorus sings all those dates from 1979 back to 1957, they render the six-note phrases in the style of the particular period — Springsteen-like for the late ’70s, Dylan-like for the mid ’60s, and so on. And, for 1969, Velardi wittily has the actor who sings the date don a New York Mets baseball cap to commemorate the year that the team won its first World Series.

Speaking of baseball: We still aren’t getting any here in Atlanta. (Well, better that it rain at Turner Field than when I went to see As You Like It earlier this month in Central Park. I liked much of it, especially Brian Bedford as Jaques.) I’m sorry I didn’t bring with me Helen Sheehy’s biography of Eleonora Duse; I daresay that, if I had, it would have been the first time that any copy of the book had seen the inside of a baseball stadium. Before I started this tome, I didn’t know much about the turn-of-the-last-century star who was the darling of her day. “For giving us Eleonora Duse,” wrote the New York Dramatic Mirror, “we can forgive Italy for the organ grinder and the mafia.” When she played in A Doll House, ticket prices were doubled. She was so beloved that her name gave birth to an adjective we still occasionally hear today as a synonym for extraordinary: “Doozy.”

And what a diva she was! Duse didn’t want to perform if a house wasn’t completely sold out, and thus would cancel performances so that people would then have to buy tickets to a future performance with unsold seats. This meant that she sometimes performed only three times a week. (Remember that, all of you who criticized Donna Murphy last year!) But those performances were apparently magical and groundbreaking for Duse would act not in a histrionic fashion, as her predecessors had done, but in a normal and natural style. Writes Sheehy, “Boston critics were impressed with her company’s swift dialogue. Sometimes, several people spoke at once, with no waiting between cues.” (And we thought David Mamet invented that style!)

Now it’s raining harder. Shall I take my heart and go? Well, I stayed all through Suzanne Somers’ show The Blonde in the Thunderbird, though I can’t ever recall an event during which I said to myself more times, “Oh, it’s stupid to sit here, why don’t I just leave?” But I remained, very much resenting the fact that Somers’ image was projected on two TV screens. That’s for a rock concert in a stadium, not for a show presented in one of our beloved Broadway houses. We don’t need to get used to such a thing.

I was surprised that Somers’ writers, Ken and Mitzi Welch didn’t notice an easily-fixable mistake. Early on, the star began talking about her son Bruce as, flashed onto the aforementioned screens, we saw pictures of him as a newborn, a toddler, a grade-schooler, a high-schooler, a bridegroom, and beyond. Then, a half-hour later in the show, Somers spoke of the time when the kid was run over by a car. She recounted how the doctors told her, “We’ll try to save him.” Not to worry; we’d already seen pictures of the grown Bruce. If she hadn’t shown them to us, we could have gone through the agonizing journey of fear with her.

At the stadium in Atlanta, I go to buy a large ice cream to soothe my sagging spirits and sustain me in my hope that the game will begin again. The ice cream vendor, without my even asking him, says: “This one’s over tonight.” I think about telling him that impossible things are happening every day. Did we think that, at the New York City Opera, we’d ever see a cast including Eartha Kitt, Renee Taylor, Lea DeLaria, and Lypsinka? No! But that’s what happened last winter when they all appeared in Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella.

Speaking of songwriters: Did we ever think we’d see the day when John Kander and Fred Ebb, who wrote Kiss of the Spider Woman, and Pete Townshend, the rock legend who penned The Who’s Tommy, would tie for the Best Score Tony Award. But they did! I do a few more of these. Did we ever think that a musical starring Angela Lansbury, directed and choreographed by Gower Champion and with a score by the pair who wrote Funny Girl, would close out-of-town? Did we ever think that the longest-running musical in Broadway history wouldn’t contain even one human character?

Then I try passing the time by trying to make mental lists on various musical theater topics. How many show songs consist only of “A” sections? “Some of Us Belong to the Stars” from Billy, “My Cup Runneth Over” from I Do! I Do!, “Cry for Us All” from the musical of the same name — but I can’t think of any others. So I start wondering how Sondheim felt back in 1962 when he heard for the very first time the completed overture of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Did he expect that his orchestrator would make “Lovely” into a samba, which, after all, is not a type of music we immediately associate with ancient Rome?

And that’s when a funny thing happens at Turner Field: The rain abates and the grounds crew is running onto the field to remove the blue tarp. I tell you, impossible things are happening every day. (Not for the Cubs, though; they lost to the Braves 5-1.)

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

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