Smooth as Silk
Has there ever been a musical more right for its time than Cole Porter’s Silk Stockings? The musical version of the 1939 film Ninotchka pitted the Communist way of life vs. the American, so what better show was there for 1955? We were in the Cold War and less than a year removed from the McCarthy hearings, which did their best (and worst) to ferret out “Communists.” This musical had a message that all Americans wanted to hear.
The Cold War has been won, which may be why Silk Stockings isn’t often done anymore. New York has seen it revived only once — for a weekend in 1977 at the Equity Library Theatre –since the original production played its 478th and last performance. Next month, we’ll have our first opportunity in 28 years to check out the show when Ian Marshall Fisher, producing artistic director of the British company Lost Musicals, offers a 50th anniversary semi-staged reading at the French Institute. (Fitting, for the show takes place in Paris, which is almost a character in the musical.)
You may think you know Silk Stockings from the 1957 MGM movie. Steve Canfield, an American movie producer, is in Paris making a film with Peggy Dayton (read: Esther Williams), who’s made so many pictures in pools that she’s hitting her head to get water out of her ears. Canfield has hired the Soviet Union’s greatest contemporary composer, Peter Ilyitch Boroff, to do the score, but Moscow is worried that he’ll succumb to Paris and its charms. So they send three Russian agents to tail him, but they wind up succumbing! Now Moscow takes no chances and sends over its most incorruptable agent, a woman named Ninotchka. Canfield likes the way she looks but she doesn’t care for him or his Western ways — at first. She slowly she comes to love him and Paris, not to mention capitalism and silk stockings.
“The film isn’t one you’d rank in the zenith of musical motion pictures, is it?” Fisher ask rhetorically in a delicious British accent. (He pronounces “zee-nith” as “zenn-ith.”) “It just doesn’t twinkle. Maybe it’s better than I think, but I’ve only seen it on telly. The screenplay is by Leonard Gershe, who came in after Leonard Spiegelgass, who came in after Harry Kurnitz. So it’s everybody’s script. And Ninotchka is so great.” (Every time I watch Silk Stockings, I think, “This isn’t so bad.” Then I immediately follow it with Ninotchka and I think, “Oh, yes it is.”)
But Fisher swears that the original Broadway script is substantially better than the screenplay, and that’s what he’ll put on stage at Florence Gould Hall. He’s not a revisal kind of guy, so we’ll hear exactly what George S. Kaufman wrote with his wife, Leueen McGrath. Kaufman also directed the original Broadway production — until producers Cy Feuer and Ernie Martin fired him and his wife and brought in Abe Burrows to rewrite while Feuer took over the direction. We’ll be spared the film’s “Fated to Be Mated” and “The Ritz Roll and Rock,” two of Porter’s least accomplished tunes, while “Hail, Bibinski” and “As On Through the Seasons We Sail,” both dropped for the movie, will be back in place.
Fisher says that casting was the key issue in this production: “Not just anyone can play Ninotchka. Greta Garbo was at her absolute best, and no one knew Hildegarde Neff. I’ve always felt an American shouldn’t play her; better to have someone from Mars, for there must be something unrecognizable in her flavor.” In fact, Fisher planned a June 2005 run of the show in London after he felt he’d found his lady: Hayden Gwynne. Then she was cast in Billy Elliott, and Fisher was starless. His pal Dick Vosburgh suggested an actress named Valerie Cutko. “I’d met her years earlier, and I’d never seen anybody like her,” says Fisher. “She’s something out of a 1957 Vogue magazine, with a neck that’s twice the length of Audrey Hepburn’s. So I cast her — even though the irony is that Valerie is American. It just goes to show that you should never speak too specifically about anything.”
Cutko did so splendidly that he’s cast her again this time, alongside Broadway veterans Wally Dunn, Daniel Gerroll, and Liz Larsen. “You’ll hope and push for Ninotchka to go to the other side,” says Fisher, “and when Valerie makes the transformation, you’ll say, ‘Rah on you!’ She has an unbelievable first-act ending that isn’t in the movie, a speech that will break everyone’s heart. Ninotchka, who’s had too much to drink, returns to her beautiful hotel in this beautiful city feeling joyously happy and then guilty. She knows she shouldn’t be enjoying anything, for that isn’t why she came to Paris. She falls asleep and, in her dream, she is in court, accused of not doing her job. ‘Yes!’ she cries. ‘Yes, I’m guilty of feeling as I do! But I accuse the young couples who walk down the street in love! I accuse the Tuileries! I accuse Montmartre! I accuse the smell of fresh bread baking! And, most of all, I accuse a little café where I went with this man and fell in love!’ Then she hears ‘Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!’ as the first-act curtain falls.”
Why didn’t Porter musicalize this speech? It sounds like a song to me! To be fair and frank, he was near the end of his working life, and the challenge may have been too much. Silk Stockings mostly consists of pleasant, pop-style theater songs; there’s little here that’s ambitious. But, to be fair again, Porter had written 13 songs for the show that didn’t make the cut and 13 that did. He’d also endured a torturous out-of-town tryout tour. Indeed, he was so exhausted-slash-disgusted by the whole thing that he skipped the Broadway premiere of the show, sailed for Europe, and missed seeing the mostly positive reviews. Here’s hoping that, next month, he’ll look down from above and so enjoy Fisher’s Silk Stockings that he’ll do the Heaven Hop.
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[To contact Peter Filichia directly, e-mail him at pfilichia@theatermania.com]
