Big Improvements
God bless Michael Hamilton for putting Big back together again. The 1996 show had the misfortune to open between Bring in ‘da Noise and Rent, both of which made this traditional musical comedy seem like a dinosaur. Bookwriter John Weidman, composer David Shire, and lyricist Richard Maltby, Jr. took a severe beating, first in Detroit and then on Broadway. The Tony committee wouldn’t even throw their show a Best Musical nomination. Even choreographer Susan Stroman got lukewarm reviews, and how often does that happen?
Sure, Big had problems. But if it had opened now, in the post-September 11 era of feelgood musicals (The Producers, Mamma Mia, Thoroughly Modern Millie, and Hairspray), it would have had an easier time of it.
Big isn’t a kids’ show, even though plenty of parents brought their kinder. I saw Mike Ockrent’s original Broadway production twice in Detroit and four times on Broadway, and all six times I heard little kids in the audience giggling delightedly during the show’s second scene, where a suddenly big Josh Baskin awakes in his small bunk and struggles to put on jeans that a suddenly much too small for him. But, for the rest of the show, they never laughed again. That the logo showed a boy with sneakers standing on a piano keyboard didn’t automatically make it a kids’ show; Weidman, Maltby, and Shire had an adult theme on their minds.
Apparently, the collaborators believed all the bad press. So, after Big closed with only 193 performances to its credit, they decided to rewrite it for the national tour — and they made it markedly worse. They replaced the delightful “This Isn’t Me,” where Josh discovers his big hands, big feet, and big everything else, with a title song they’d already dropped in Detroit. They eliminated the plaintive and wonderful song “I Want to Go Home” that Josh sang on his first night out. Dull songs with names like “My Secretary’s in Love” and “Little Susan Lawrence” were added.
But Michael Hamilton, the artistic director for Stages — a suburban St. Louis theater devoted to musicals — has pretty much kept the best of Big and lost the worst of it. He’s reinserted “This Isn’t Me” and “I Want to Go Home,” and while he’s kept two new songs from the rewrite (“You’re a Big Boy Now” and “We’re Gonna Be Fine”), Big now resembles the show that once played the Shubert. What with its previous failure, Big has no business doing big business, yet Hamilton and his partner Jack Lane saw their production sell out; they found that the right audience for Big is a teenaged one. The Saturday night performance I saw had so many adolescents in attendance that I remarked about it. “Many of them have come back again and again during the run,” Hamilton told me with pride. “Jekyll & Hyde may have had Jekkies, but we have Biggies.”
Many of the teens — and adults — were kvelling over Big Josh. David Schmittou is charmingly handsome, with a shock of caramel-colored hair embracing his forehead and a smile that should have Colgate begging him to do commercials. As a performer, he has the perfect, guileless innocence for the part, not to mention a strong voice and a body that moves with astonishing speed and grace. Equally wonderful is Tom Treadwell as Mac, the boss. While the character has previously looked like a run-of-the-mill executive, here costume designer Lou Bird wisely dresses Mac in a sleeveless sweater vest, polka-dot tie, and granny glasses, making him appear semi-eccentric — the type of guy who would impulsively hire a guy after a chance meeting with him in a store.
And yet…and yet…while Big does play better here than in the tour (which became the officially licensed version), I couldn’t help thinking what I’d wish for the show if I met up with Zoltar — the mechanical carnival attraction that grants Josh’s wish to be big. My first request would be that Maltby and Shire make some different songwriting choices. For “Stars,” which Josh shines for Susan in his bedroom via a light-projection toy, they wrote a waltz. A 13-year-old does not think in three-quarter time. For “Coffee Black” — which Josh sings the morning after he’s lost his virginity — they came up with a song that’s decidedly ’40s boogie-woogie in tone instead of a ’90s one. And for the moment in the movie that everyone remembers — where Josh and Mac meet in a toy store and dance on an oversized piano — they wrote “Fun,” which should have been the best number in the score and a memorable show-stopper. Instead, it was one of the weakest, and Stroman could never make it build correctly.
What Maltby and Shire did get right — and wrong — was “Stop, Time,” Josh’s mother’s song on how much kids grow and change and are continually “replaced” by someone who seems like an entirely different person. Ockrent had Mrs. Baskin sing it to Josh’s pal Billy, but that’s faulty; she’d never sing such a sentiment to a 13-year-old, for it’s way beyond his ken. What’s worse, Billy had to sit there doing nothing while she sang it to him. When Eric D. Schaeffer directed the touring company, he wisely removed Billy from the scene — which Hamilton has done, too. But, frankly, “Stop, Time” belongs in a completely different Maltby-Shire musical: Baby. Arlene (the Beth Fowler character) should sing it to her two pregnant pals, telling them what she learned years ago from being a mother.
Maltby and Shire have been revising Baby these last few years and I’d like to tell Zoltar to have them put “Stop, Time” in it. The song is just too wistful for a mother who believes her son has been kidnapped. Josh’s never making an effort to explain his whereabouts to his parents was a terrible flaw of the film and wasn’t eradicated in the musical. Zoltar, could your transformation of Josh take place after he’s gone away to summer camp? Before he leaves, we can see him tell his mother she’s not to call him there and embarrass him in front of everyone else, and that he’ll send postcards. Once he’s Big Josh, he can send the cards in an envelope to fellow camper Billy, who’ll send them on so that they can have the right postmark. That way, the parents wouldn’t have to agonize over where their son is for a full month — hardly a subject for musical comedy.
Maltby and Shire did write a winner for the show while in Detroit: “Cross the Line,” the first act finale. But there was something clunky about Mac’s asking Josh for a suggestion to get an office party going, prompting the lad to say, “We can dance.” (A friend in the original cast told me that, the night Sondheim saw the show, he saw him throw his head into his hands in horror when Josh delivered this painfully obvious song cue.) So may I ask Zoltar to have the collaborators establish early on that Josh had been taking dance lessons at his mother’s insistence? Then he could indeed suggest they dance because he knows he can hold his own with every adult. That he believes he has what it takes to succeed at a party would also make him feel cocky and would make his later failures all the more devastating to him.
My final wish? The best of luck to Stages. Hamilton and his partner Jack Lane have quite an operation. They began in the summer of 1987 by presenting three musicals, added a play or two in the next two summers and, by 1991, settled into a three-musical season of 120 performances that play to 12,000 subscribers and plenty of single-ticket holders from May to October. A survey that was handed out before the curtain listed a few dozen shows on which everyone could vote to see; I checked off Destry Rides Again, for which the ever-so-charming David Schmittou would be ideal in the Andy Griffith role.
Right now, Stages occupies a theater with 384 seats. Given that they routinely sell out (even for a less-than-household-name musical like Big), Hamilton and Lane are building an 850-seat theater in nearby Chesterfield. Sachs Properties was so impressed by the theater and its fare that it has donated 7.5 acres of land (worth $4.6 million) to help out. Seems like Stages is getting big, even without the help of Zoltar.
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[To contact Peter Filichia directly, e-mail him at pfilichia@aol.com]
