The Rink
(Photo © Jered Fournier)
In its current production at the Cape Playhouse, the 1984 musical The Rink proves to be as durable as a mirror ball. All you have to do is pull it out, dust it off, and it’s ready to scintillate anew. Even if you saw the original Broadway production, which won Chita Rivera her long-overdue Tony Award and earned co-star Liza Minnelli a nomination, you’ll find this new version — revised by its original librettist, Terrence McNally, and starring Leslie Uggams and Janet Metz — to be fresh and arresting. In fact, if there’s any fairness in the world, this show will eventually find its way back to Broadway.
Putting race aside, it’s tough to imagine better casting than Uggams as Anna, a salty old Italian broad who is fed up with operating a rundown old roller rink in a decaying New England arcade and wants to turn snowbird. The musical’s structure, laced with flashbacks, calls for Anna to time-travel several decades back to her youth. Uggams, as juicy as ever and still boasting a stand-back voice, is equally convincing as both a starry-eyed newlywed (passionately paired with young Michael Minaris as her here again, gone again husband Dino) and as a tough old survivor who’s cruel and callous to her vagabond daughter Angel (Metz).
Angel staggers home after a seven-year sojourn in California, having been incommunicado for some time. At age 36, she is “tired, real tired” and ready to exorcise her ghosts. Nonetheless, she is appalled by Anna’s decision to demolish the roller rink, and she tries to throw a wrench in the works. Meanwhile, six “wreckers” look on, bemused, as the mother/daughter sparks fly. This working-class chorus provides ironic commentary (“Gee, it’s good to see you,” they warble sarcastically in “After All These Years”) when not soft-shoeing with their power tools or strapping on skates for a paean to the old-time pleasures of “The Rink.”
The show is packed with a slew of delightful Kander and Ebb songs, starting with Anna’s “Chief Cook and Bottle Washer” — during which Uggams initiates a death grip on the audience’s attention — and continuing straight through to Angel’s “All the Children in a Row,” a poignant anthem to the gradual disillusionment of the 1970s and a touching farewell to all the rosy pictures we must leave behind with childhood. Again and again, Metz masterfully builds her story songs so that you’re drawn along on the journey. And while the hippie era is hard to recapture with any degree of authenticity, both Kander’s music and Ebb’s lyrics succeed in summoning, without glitz or bitterness, the fading of the flower children.
It takes considerable legerdemain to balance a story of family dysfunction with the periodic upbeat numbers that a musical needs to stay afloat — e.g., Angela and Anna, both stoned, harmonizing like a couple of alley cats on “The Apple Doesn’t Fall,” or a trio of kibitzers, flesh-tone stockings rolled to their knees, wondering “What Happened to the Gold Old Days?” Fortunately, director Michael Unger (who’s married to Metz) never lets the pace flag or the tone go maudlin. The show’s “sour” quality reads today as refreshingly astringent, and McNally’s dialogue has lost none of its power to shock or move us. So do what you can to catch this stellar production of The Rink during its short run.
