In the wake of the tragic passing of legendary performer Carol Channing, I thought I would take a look at her most iconic role. By the time she attempted this part, she had already given one of Broadway’s greatest comedic performances in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and her performance there was arguably more nuanced, but it never quite approached the sense of sheer joy and triumphant, life-embracing inspiration she had as Dolly. As most of you probably know, virtually every major Musical Theater diva has attempted the role of Dolly Gallagher Levi at some point in their careers (Ethel Merman, Mary Martin, Barbra Streisand, Phyllis Diller, Pearl Bailey, Bette Midler, Donna Murphy, Bernadette Peters…that isn’t even a complete list, by the way). But while I will admit that Streisand probably sang the part best from a purely vocal perspective, and that Channing’s odd vocal style can be an acquired taste for some people, no other Dolly has ever approached the sheer life-affirming impact of Channing in the role, especially on the show’s title song, which is universally acknowledged as the showstopper to end all showstoppers and which has never been pulled off as magnificently by any other performance. While it goes without saying that Channing is brilliant on the show’s original cast album, it’s actually her second full recording of the score, made as late as 1994, that better captures the true dazzle and splendor she reportedly brought to the role onstage. In any case, both those recordings are definitely in the “required listening” category for anyone who cares even the slightest about Broadway Musicals or Show Tunes. No matter how many legends are drawn to the role, there will never be another Dolly Levi equal to Channing, and despite the derogatory jokes some people made about her vocal sound during her life, her recorded performances will enable her to live on forever as one of Broadway’s most one-of-a-kind long-term performing legends.
Double Feature Review: Finding Neverland/The Greatest Showman
These two shows, while released a few years apart from each other, had much in common. Both had distinctly Pop-flavored scores and beautifully stylized visuals. Both were retellings of the lives of famous historical figures that had almost nothing to do with the reality of those historical figures’ lives, and both were able to justify that on the grounds that the shows themselves were all about the importance and validity of imagination and fantasy. And both were blatantly scorned by critics and yet succeeded in not only gaining sizable commercial success, but (unlike such genuinely undeserved hits as Young Frankenstein, The Addams Family, or Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark), the genuine affection and love of mainstream audiences.
Finding Neverland , a musical based on the award-winning film about Peter Pan playwright J. M. Barrie, was initially to feature a score by the Grey Gardens songwriting team of Michael Korie and Scott Frankel, but their score was deemed unsuitable and replaced by one from Gary Barlow. I have never heard the Korie/Frankel score, which some partisans of the team have insisted was vastly superior, but given their extremely severe Post-Sondheim songwriting style, I can’t really imagine their work fitting in well with this elemental, shamelessly emotionalistic material. I was skeptical at first that Barlow, a Pop singer-songwriter and the longtime frontman of the band Take That, could summon up the necessary atmospheric richness this material requires, but damned if he didn’t pull it off; the score is absolutely lovely and for the most part perfectly suited to the needs of the story.
True, there is an occasional moment where the Pop style feels out of place, such as “Something About This Night”, which is catchy but feels more like an Eighties Pop hit than an integrated song in this particular musical. But the ballads “Neverland”, “All That Matters”, “What You Mean to Me”, and “When Your Feet Don’t Touch the Ground” are marvelously atmospheric and do full justice to the emotional power of the story. The thrilling credo of imagination “Believe”, the defiant anthem that closes Act One, “Stronger”, and the joyous ensemble number “Play”, are some of the most stirring up-tempo numbers of the decade. And the sprightly tango “We Own the Night” and the sunny guitar ballad “We’re All Made of Stars”, if perhaps a bit less substantial, are also delightful.
The visuals were also stunning, with a series of exquisite stage tableaux culminating in the leading lady’s symbolic flight off to Neverland as she died, which made for one of the most moving climaxes in recent Broadway memory. Matthew Morrison made for a luminous original leading man in the Broadway production, and Kelsey Grammer performed the dual role of Barry’s American producer and Captain Hook with his usual charisma and elan.
The show’s only real flaw lay in the book. When it stuck to the serious elements, it was actually quite moving and told its story well, but the attempts at jokes were some of the worst ever seen in a successful show, about on a par with the humor in the Broadway version of Dance of the Vampires. Still, this did not remotely justify the contemptuous reception critics gave it, and I am grateful that, unlike many other wonderful shows in recent years, this one was able to overcome that stumbling block and find the success it deserved.
As for The Greatest Showman, a film musical telling a heavily fictionalized version of the life of P.T. Barnum, it had its work cut out for it, given that there was already a perfectly wonderful musical about Barnum’s life (Cy Coleman and Michael Stewart’s Barnum). It also suffered further setbacks because, even though its score was written by the hottest songwriting team on Broadway at the time, Pasek and Paul, it came out just after the televised version of the A Christmas Story musical had severely damaged the team’s reputation. But despite a poor critical reception and a disappointing opening weekend, it still managed to ultimately regain its momentum and emerge as a smash hit.
The script is a big, manipulative, cliché-ridden and blatantly unrealistic Hollywood fantasy, but it glories in it, and that is exactly the secret of why it’s so appealing. Granted, it has even less to do with Barnum’s actual biography than the earlier musical, but given that it is, after all, a movie about the value of imagination, the fact that it focuses on Barnum’s symbolic role in American folklore rather than the actual historical personage actually seems rather justified.
The stellar cast certainly helped. Hugh Jackman had the charm to make you like and believe in Barnum even through his mistakes. Michelle Williams was enchanting as his wife and true love Charity, and Zac Efron and Zendaya, as the star-crossed secondary couple, have both come an amazingly long way since their Disney Channel days. Rebecca Ferguson is capable enough as Jenny Lind, but the performance that really matters in that role belongs to her vocal double, Loren Allred, whose stunning belt makes the character truly alluring all while conveying the true depths of her dangerous obsession.
Pasek and Paul’s previous scores, like Dogfight and Dear Evan Hansen, had generally been in the more accessible vein of the post-Sondheim style practiced by the likes of Jason Robert Brown, Andrew Lippa, and Jeanine Tesori. This score, on the other hand, drew on the sounds of contemporary Pop music, resulting in a completely different sound from the team’s earlier efforts. It was also sufficiently far away from the brassy big-band sound of Cy Coleman’s musical to significantly alleviate any accusations of redundancy. Granted, it doesn’t remotely fit the period the film is set in, but while Coleman’s music sounds more old-fashioned to a modern audience, to an actual person from that time Coleman’s Jazz-based score wouldn’t have sounded any less alien.
The two biggest hits from the score were “The Greatest Show”, a thrilling, percussive kaleidoscope of a song that serves as the show’s framing device, and “This Is Me”, an explosive statement of self-affirmation that resembles one of the Pop-music self-esteem anthems popular in the early 2000s, only pumped up on steroids. Other high points include the ecstatic paean to imagination “A Million Dreams” for Barnum and Charity’s younger selves, the ravishing ballad of obsession “Never Enough” for Jenny Lind, and the sorrowful love duet “Rewrite the Stars” for Efron and Zendaya’s characters.
This movie is clearly going for more of a surreal, kaleidoscopic, Cirque du Soleil-esque vision of a circus than the earlier musical’s more brassy, splashy traditional one, but it definitely works on those terms, and the different style helps give the film its own identity. As I said, the movie has no connection whatsoever to either history or any other kind of reality, but it has that old-fashioned Hollywood magic, and it’s an extremely enjoyable viewing experience. I’ve heard people who argue that the film’s lack of historical truth somehow makes it unworthy, but, as Roger Ebert once sarcastically retorted to such people, that “is why a stone is better than a dream”. If you want to live in a world like that, and refuse to enjoy a magical piece of pure fantasy like this movie on those grounds, then frankly I pity you.
Man of La Mancha
Given that this show happens to be not only my favorite musical, but my favorite work of art in any medium, I’m not entirely sure I’m capable of assessing its merits with any degree of objectivity, but I intend to do my best. It helps that the work really is a sublime masterpiece by any standard, so my views regarding it aren’t that biased.
The thing that most people don’t seem to understand about this piece is that it isn’t intended to be a straightforward adaptation of Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote. It uses several of the characters and concepts from the novel, but the structure, tone and message are entirely different. Don Quixote was a series of rambling adventures with a largely comedic tone and a rather depressing ultimate end. Man of La Mancha is a tight, focused drama full of serious and high-minded ideals and philosophy, and it climaxes in triumphant ecstasy despite the outwardly tragic circumstances of its ending. Moreover, the show’s focus is ultimately just as much on its fictionalized version of Cervantes as on the character of Don Quixote himself. Admittedly, many of the themes expressed in Man of La Mancha are also present to some degree in Don Quixote, particularly in the more subdued and intellectual Book Two, but they are much more subtly presented there, given that they are buried under layers of raucous comedy.
But it is exactly these changes that make Man of La Mancha succeed where most stage or film adaptations of Don Quixote have failed. Cervantes’ picaresque structure just doesn’t lend itself to being condensed into a form short enough to be suitable for visual media, so the only way to successfully adapt the material is to entirely abandon the original structure.
More straightforward musical adaptations of the novel had been attempted before, most famously a lightweight Operatic version by Jules Massenet, but none of these had ever come remotely close to equaling their illustrious subject matter. It’s worth noting that the one that came the closest, Georg Philip Telemann’s mini-Opera Don Quixote at the Wedding of Camacho, used an approach not terribly different from Man of La Mancha’s…isolating a single incident from the book as its subject, rather than trying to condense the whole story into a single Opera.
Man of La Mancha, on the other hand, has not only succeeded in becoming one of the most beloved and successful musicals in the world, but it has actually managed in some respects to eclipse its source material’s image in popular culture, to the point where most laymen seem to think ‘to dream the impossible dream’ is a quote from the novel (for those who don’t know, it’s a line originally coined by the show’s librettist and later incorporated into the famous song).
What makes Man of La Mancha unique among musicals is that it is first and foremost a play. While its music and lyrics are certainly some of the most distinguished in the Musical Theater canon, it’s worth noting that the show’s primary author is almost always regarded to be its librettist, Dale Wasserman. This is almost unheard-of for a musical, but then Wasserman originally wrote the piece as a play. It had been staged on television under the title I, Don Quixote, with famed Broadway actor Lee J. Cobb in the lead. This original draft was flawed and cluttered compared to the more focused second draft that became the Musical’s book, but the gold that would become Man of La Mancha was already there, and even then audiences were deeply affected by it. Mitch Leigh, the Musical’s eventual composer, certainly seems to have reacted that way to the play, for his first words when he met Wasserman were reportedly the words familiar to every star-struck, worshipful fanboy: “You are God!”
The score was based heavily on Flamenco sounds, which was technically anachronistic, given that Flamenco did not really exist yet in Cervantes’ lifetime, but proved to be a better choice than the Renaissance-era music of the actual period, which in Spain mostly involved bagpipes. The show’s best-known numbers are the grandiose, Classical-influenced anthems and ballads given to the legit-voiced leading characters, which are the direct predecessor of the sounds heard such later quasi-Operatic musicals as Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables. These include the thrilling title-song (which shares its melody with the bitterly caustic cry of anguish “Aldonza”), the moving ballads “Dulcinea”, “What Does He Want of Me?”, and “To Each His Dulcinea”, and, above all else, the monumentally inspiring number known as “The Quest”, better known outside the show as “The Impossible Dream”. Some of the younger and more ignorant listeners out there think of this only as a dull Easy-Listening ballad, and I will admit that the popular versions’ persistent habit of playing it at half its original tempo doesn’t help with that perception. But the profoundly inspirational power of the lyrics is evident even in the slower versions, so that does not really provide a credible excuse for such lazy and shallow listening.
The show’s four comedy numbers are not quite on the sublime level of the lyrical and dramatic passages, but they serve their purpose well within the context of the show. Sancho Panza, the character who delivers two of these numbers, was originally played by Yiddish comedian Irving Jacobson. This was partly because of another Mitch Leigh musical, the disastrous Chinese-Yiddish cultural collision Chu Chem, which was playing in the same theater at the time and shared some cast members with La Mancha, including Jacobson. But on another level, it was actually a massive stroke of inspiration. If you think about it, Sancho Panza’s folksy, ruefully optimistic, survivalist sense of humor in the original novel is a surprisingly apt match for the sensibilities the Yiddish comedy tradition was based on. Sancho’s two solos in the show, “I Really Like Him” and “A Little Gossip”, are sad-clown comedy numbers, ultimately meant to be more touching than humorous, and their Yiddish-comedy sound and feel strikes exactly the right note for the character. In any case, Jacobson, while by no means a great singer, was the sweetest and most heartbreaking Sancho of all time.
The show as a whole has a near-religious inspirational power comparable to that found in Carousel…despite its lack of overtly religious elements, it almost plays more like a kind of secular church service than a conventional musical. Given all this, it seems almost bizarre that the show has a surprisingly large number of detractors…more, in fact, than any hit Broadway show from before the Lloyd-Webber era other than The Sound of Music. This is ultimately because this is a show espousing an intensely idealistic philosophy that advocates denial of reality in favor of a noble madness. What makes this an issue is that most musicals that espouse a philosophy don’t actually require you to fully accept that philosophy in order to enjoy them (for example, one can easily appreciate Les Miserables without being a Christian despite its overt religious content). This show, however, requires you to believe in its ideals in order to be moved by it, and if someone is too cynical or rational to accept this philosophy, they will not only fail to appreciate its greatness, but in many cases seem to develop a passionate hatred for it for challenging the security of their worldview. Even so, I’d argue that this only proves what a deep chord this musical strikes even in those who reject it.
Mean Girls
This musical, based on the endlessly quotable hit movie of the same name from 2004, doesn’t seem as significant at first glance as such other musicals from the same season as The Band’s Visit and Spongebob Squarepants: The Musical, but there’s more to it than meets the eye. On the surface, it seems an obvious successor to the Legally Blonde musical, even sharing one of its songwriters (said songwriters were a husband-and-wife team, and the other member of the team would collaborate on the score to this show’s de facto sister musical, Heathers).
The show certainly can’t be faulted for craftsmanship. The book is by the movie’s original screenwriter, comedian Tina Fey, and she has retained many of the quotable lines from the movie while adding some excellent new ones. As for the score, the songs themselves are only good, not great, but they become much more impressive when seen in the context of the show, as they do a masterful job of musicalizing these characters. The only place where I’ve seen musical characterization this individualized is in Mozart Operas, and no, that is not an exaggeration.
For example, heroine Cady just came to Chicago from living in the African savannah, so she sings in songs built on Africa rhythms, a kind of Teen Pop version of the sound heard on Paul Simon’s Graceland. Regina George, the villainess, is a femme fatale, so she sings in the style of a James Bond theme. Gretchen, her lackey, is smart and insecure, so she sings in nervous, wordy music reminiscent of a Sondheim musical. Karen, the nicest of the popular girls, is a fundamentally simple (and not very bright in the conventional sense) character who is happy with herself, so she sings in what could be described as a kind of upbeat Sugar-Pop minimalism.
Damien, the gay, showtunes-loving friend of the heroine, sings in very showy, ostentatious old-school theater music in the Jerry Herman vein. And Janis, her other friend, who is brash, defiant and makes no attempt to fit in, sings in Pop-Punk: her big number (and the show’s musical highlight), “I’d Rather Be Me”, sounds like it could be an outtake from American Idiot.
But beyond this impressive handling of character music, the show is most interesting in how it relates to the original movie. Put simply, the original movie was fundamentally a satire of teen social mores, while the musical plays as a much more nuanced character comedy. And the reasons for this might be more complex than most people realize.
It’s clear from the discussion of social media Tina Fey worked into her updated script for the musical that she strongly disapproves of the modern social-media world and the attitudes that drive it. But Fey herself, in her funny but simplistic satire of familiar stereotypes, helped shape those attitudes, especially after the movie and its various famous quotes became part of the collective unconscious of an entire generation. And part of me suspects that she knows this, and that the musical is her attempt to make amends for it.
Certainly this would explain the changes the musical made in its treatment of “The Plastics”, the exclusive clique that represents the titular “mean girls”. In the movie, Gretchen Weiners is just a spoiled rich girl who deals in secrets and seems vaguely insecure. In the musical, the creators delve much more deeply into what would have to motivate a person to latch onto powerful personalities that treat them like dirt the way Gretchen habitually does, and both the authors and Cady herself show much more sympathy for her tragically low self-esteem.
Similarly, in the movie Karen is just a stereotypical ditz and purely a target for mockery. In the musical she is ultimately simple rather than stupid, and her simplicity gives her a kind of wisdom and inner peace that none of the other characters possess. Even Regina is given a glimmer of sympathy and a measure of humanity in the musical, something that is certainly never hinted at in the movie.
Of course, one could argue that the effeminate, showtunes-loving gay kid is still an outdated stereotype. But the character is so unapologetic about being “almost too gay to function”, and the show itself is so equally unapologetic about him, that it arguably comes off as more empowering than anything else (at any rate, he certainly comes across as far more dignified than he did in the movie). I think Fey knew that eliminating his entire character would be next to impossible, and realized that a totally unashamed presentation was the only way to salvage the situation.
The point of all this was to add an additional message to the story, one so important that they spelled it right out in the finale: “Even the people you don’t like at all are still people”. Caught in an age where almost everyone has forgotten that, an age that her own movie helped to create, I see this as Fey’s attempt at an atonement, and hopefully a remedy for at least some of those who attend the musical.
At any rate, the greater humanity the show adds to this story that was previously merely a mean-spirited send-up of stereotypes is certainly quite noticeable, and the whole thing feels palpably warmer and less…well, “mean”. This is certainly the most notable way in which it improves upon the film, which, for all its humor and insight, comes off as somewhat condescending and shallow in comparison. And since pretty much everyone seems like they could use a reminder of this musical’s message right now, I can definitely say I recommend it.
War Paint
This show had some of the most enviable casting in modern Broadway history…a dual star turn by two living legends of the theater, Patti Lupone and Christine Ebersole. And yet, despite that luminous level of star power, it barely lasted out the season. Granted, it was probably always destined to close the moment one of its stars left, and Lupone did leave earlier than originally scheduled due to a health problem, but even apart from its short run, the show seems to have gotten an oddly lukewarm reaction for something that sounded so special on paper. Part of this might have had to do with the sheer level of artistic competition that season, where even the flops were generally wonderful, but the show also seems to have let down its stars in terms of composition.
The show’s main problem is not that it’s a show about make-up, as its opening announcement joked during the Broadway run, but that it’s a show about corporate competition. A story about how Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden got to the top of their respective corporate pyramids might have made for a fascinating stage drama, but when the show begins, both are already firmly entrenched in their positions of power. The show largely focuses on advertising and product development, and regardless of the product in question, that isn’t really a very interesting subject for a play, much less a musical.
The score, written by Scott Frankel and Doug Wright, the same team that provided the score to Ebersole’s earlier vehicle Grey Gardens, is capable work, but it also lacks a certain spark, consisting mostly of overly earnest character numbers for the leads. Admittedly, Grey Gardens had its share of numbers like that as well, but it also featured several deeply haunting ballads and dazzling character showpieces that outshone anything on display here.
More damningly, the score never really allows the show’s two big stars to cut loose. Lupone and Ebersole get three strong duets in Act One (“My American Moment”, “If I’d Been a Man”, and “Face to Face”) and one showstopper each at the eleven-o’clock spot (Ebersole’s “Pink” and Lupone’s “Forever Beautiful”), and their final duet, “Beauty in the World”, is suitably lovely and sad. Still, for the most part, the material is too tame and staid to ever give the two a chance to really stun the audience like we’ve seen them do in their previous shows (indeed, the show’s liveliest number, the deliberately trashy showstopper “Fire and Ice”, didn’t even go to the stars, but to supporting players). As a result, the audience was ultimately paying less for a blow-you-out-of-your-seat theatrical experience and more for just the privilege of seeing Patti Lupone and Christine Ebersole on stage at the same time, even though neither of them was actually allowed to do anything especially interesting.
This show was by no means a disgrace…it remained very polished and capable throughout…but given its concept of a double star vehicle for two such gigantic and talented stars, it should have been much, much better. Frankly, the end result on stage was rather dull, which is the last thing this combination should have turned out to be.
Grey Gardens had its share of problems too, but it had genuine flashes of pure magic that make it a memorable show to have seen and well worth hearing on recording if you didn’t. No such flashes are on display here…even the two eleven-o’clock showstoppers are less interesting than the best numbers in Grey Gardens…making this a show that is likely to amount in the long run to little more than a footnote in the careers of two great stars who were capable of better if the writers had only thought to ask it of them.
Head Over Heels
This is the most gloriously insane show Broadway has seen in ages…indeed, possibly in the entire course of its history. Who would have thought anyone would even come up with the idea to combine Elizabethan poetry, Eighties Girl-Group New-Wave, and Transgender politics, let alone manage to make an artistically successful whole out of them?
Pretty much everything about the show is perfectly of-a-piece in its own strange way and fits flawlessly into its odd aesthetic, but the lynchpin of its success is its hilarious book, one of the finest Broadway librettos I have yet encountered. The benchmark for Broadway musical farces is generally considered to be Larry Gelbart and Burt Shevelove’s libretto to A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and I can attest that this show’s book is every bit the equal of that work if not more.
The show features a rich mine of potent dirty humor, but what really sends it over-the-top is the fact that said humor is delivered in exceptionally witty faux-Elizabethan language. This idiom can even make what would otherwise be ordinary statements sound hilarious (e.g. “Between mouth and ear, the wrong hole is agape”). The combination of the archaic, ultra-sophisticated wording of the dialogue and its unapologetically crude content makes for an endless string of hysterical verbal paradoxes, and there is even some genuine Shakespearian-style grandeur to the more serious moments in Act Two
The show also manages to play its upending of our culture’s preconceived ideas about gender as outrageously funny and subversive rather than preachy. Only in one short segment near the end of Act Two does the show come across as overtly didactic, when the character of Pythio’s backstory is revealed. Apart from that one scene, everything is first and foremost at the service of the comedy and general insanity, so that even those who might have reservations about the show’s particular brand of LGBT politics could still easily enjoy it as theater.
Apart from the elaborate play on gender roles and politics, the show’s plot is actually a pretty close pastiche of an Elizabethan farce, using most of the same tropes and devices and even harkening back to Greek mythology by throwing a little origin-of-the-seasons myth into the story. However, seeing the unlikely way that the cryptically-worded prophecies that form the basis of the plot are fulfilled make this otherwise fairly traditional farce plot seem deliciously unpredictable, lighting up the face with a knowing smile every time it becomes clear what one of them means.
The Go-Gos songs that make up the score are completely incompatible with the idiom in which the dialogue is written, but that’s part of the point. This show takes the jarring quality that most Jukebox musicals suffer when a pre-existing song bursts out of a scene, and enhances it until it becomes a major part of the show’s outrageous comedy.
And the songs do at least make reasonable sense for the characters, thanks partly to the fact that the score digs much deeper into the band’s catalogue than do most Jukebox musicals. The expected standards are there (“We Got the Beat”, “Our Lips Are Sealed”, the title-song), but the show delves deep into the band’s later post-reunion albums from the Nineties and 2000s for much of its score in order to find songs that actually fit in well with its situations. As a result, despite their hilarious mismatch with the style of the dialogue, the songs still manage to function as genuine expressions of the characters’ feelings.
The musical highlights are a deeply touching “Here You Are”, sung at the Eleven-O’clock spot during a funeral scene, and a deliciously sardonic handling of the biggest solo hit by the band’s lead singer Belinda Carlisle, “Heaven is a Place on Earth”. The original version of that song had been one of the most romantic hit songs of the Eighties, and the almost shocking way its romanticism is undercut by the performance and staging of this scene is perhaps the greatest of all the show’s moments of subversive triumph.
There are several moments in this production, particularly the visual sight gags (such as actors in deliberately bad sheep costumes dancing across the stage or a ridiculous pantomime sequence with an actor playing a lion) that would have seemed profoundly embarrassing in any other show. But somehow, because this show simply refuses to be embarrassed, even its silliest jokes wind up playing effectively, and things that would be pure “floppo” in any other context are transformed by sheer confidence into successful theatrical flourishes.
It doesn’t hurt that the cast is uniformly superb, either. Bonnie Milligan’s part as the elder Princess is a deliberate and surprisingly complex comic play on the nature of beauty standards, and the actress has exactly the right combination of unconventional looks and raw sex appeal to achieve the necessary balance. Alexandra Socha is touching and even rather sad as the lonely younger princess, helping to give the show an emotional center underneath its wild ribaldry. As Musidorus, the cross-dressing shepherd who loves her, Andrew Durand proves to be amazingly adept and versatile at both verbal and physical comedy, and seems like he might well have stardom in his future: in any case, he displays an enormous amount of potential and skill in the part and is definitely a performer to watch.
Still, the performers who truly wind up stealing the show are longtime theatrical veteran Rachel York and Broadway newcomer Peppermint. York gives a tremendously dignified and grandiose performance highly reminiscent of Katharine Hepburn, with the result that, in the handful of moments when she gives in to the show’s campy tone, it feels like watching Hepburn herself forsake her grand-dame dignity in such a hilarious manner.
As for Peppermint, the character she plays (Pythio, the Oracle of Delphi), is on stage for probably less than half an hour of this two-plus hour show, yet Peppermint has so much charisma that she still makes the role feel like a star part, eliciting chills from the audience each time her character makes an appearance. (I hope I’m using the right pronoun here. I know the character of Pythio is non-binary (“they”), but everything I’ve read indicates that the performer who plays them, Peppermint, is a transwoman, and would thus presumably prefer to be called “she”. If I am in error here, please forgive me).
Given that the show seems unlikely to experience much success on the road and in local theater settings due to its esoteric subject matter (to say nothing of the difficulty of finding another cast who can play these roles), it seems like it would make an ideal choice for the now increasingly common practice of filming Broadway musicals for screening in movie theaters. I have reason to believe it possible that something of this sort was actually being arranged on the night of my second attendance to the show. But even if this is not yet the case, I hope my suggestion reaches the ears of someone who could make it happen, because this show is far too much of a creatively hilarious gem to be lost to the theatrical mists of time.
Double Feature Review: Matilda/A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder
I have been planning for some time to do a series of Double Feature reviews of Broadway hits from the current decade that have themes, techniques or background elements in common. To inaugurate this series, I thought I’d look at the standout hits of the ’12-’13 and ’13-’14 seasons…Matilda and A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder. Both shows have quite a bit in common…they both are set in England and have a very British sensibility to them (even if the latter was written entirely by Americans). They both specialize in highly sophisticated humor that avoids the vulgarity prevalent in most Musical Comedies at the time (mostly due to the influence of then-recent smash hit Book of Mormon). Most of all, they both tell stories that would be far too dark for a Musical Comedy if presented realistically, and they both get away with this fact by making their stories feel entirely unreal.
Roald Dahl’s darkly comic children’s novel Matilda is an extremely difficult work to adapt into a visual medium, but the musical managed to avoid the pitfalls of the previous adaptation, the disappointing 1996 film version, and emerge as the toast of the London theater scene and a smash hit on both sides of the Atlantic.
The movie version was an extremely vivid dramatization of the events from the book, but that was the fundamental problem with it: it was entirely too real. Remember, the original Roald Dahl novel is, in effect, a comedy about child abuse, and thus is only funny if you make it so over-the-top and insane that it doesn’t feel fully real, as Dahl did. The movie makes the whole thing feel frighteningly realistic, especially given Pam Ferris’ utterly terrifying performance as the villainous Miss Trunchbull, so it’s more disturbing and nightmarish than funny.
The musical, like the book, makes everything surreal and dreamlike, with Miss Trunchbull played by a male actor in drag, the violence presented symbolically, and even some deliberate contradictions thrown in to create a sense of dream logic. There are a few genuinely terrifying moments, but even they have the feel of a surrealist horror story rather than the disturbingly authentic cruelty presented in the film.
However,while it certainly captures the spirit of Dahl’s work, the musical actually manages to improve upon the original novel, creating a work of more sophisticated wit and far greater depth. This is accomplished partly by expanding the story, making it far more dramatic and elaborately plotted, particularly regarding the tragic backstory of Matilda’s mentor figure Miss Honey, and partly by the addition of the show’s brilliantly distinctive score.
The opening number, “Miracle” takes Dahl’s introductory chapter to the book (where he philosophizes on parents’ views of their children) and turns it into an elaborate, ten-minute sequence of superb music and lyrics that establishes not only the themes of the show and the circumstances of Matilda’s upbringing, but the personalities of the children that make up the ensemble, too. Matilda’s establishing number, “Naughty”, is exceptionally clever (‘Just because you find that life’s not fair it/Doesn’t mean that you just have to grin and bear it’) and perfectly sets up her motivation and her philosophy of taking control of her own destiny.
The music is at times breathtakingly beautiful, such as on the tender “When I Grow Up”, with its winning combination of charming naivete and out-of-the-mouths-of-babes wisdom, or the wistfully contented “My House”. Each of Matilda’s awful parents gets a showstopper: her mother performs “Loud”, a dance showcase with a very cynical (but not entirely inaccurate) message about style over substance, while her father opens Act Two with one of the cleverest songs ever written about stupidity, “Telly”.
The villainous Miss Trunchbull gets a highly amusing establishing number, “The Hammer”, and a truly epic showstopper in the second act, “The Smell of Rebellion”. And then there’s one of the greatest atmosphere numbers of the decade, the exquisitely spine-tingling “Quiet”, for when Matilda’s powers first manifest, as well as “Revolting Children”, an outcry of freedom that could best be described as a child-friendly version of the uptempo numbers from Spring Awakening. The lyrics throughout are dazzling, although due to their immense complexity and heavy use of approximate rhymes, they can be hard to catch on a first listen. Still, if that’s the closest thing the show has to a flaw, you must admit it’s doing pretty well.
A Gentleman’s Guide featured an even darker story premise. This show’s overall aesthetic and style are strongly reminiscent of the works of Gilbert and Sullivan. That said, Gilbert and Sullivan probably wouldn’t have been comfortable making a serial murderer into an unambiguous hero. Fortunately, the show does an extremely good job with the balancing act of making us sympathize and even cheer for this ruthless protagonist. It does this partly by making his motives feel justified and portraying his victims as aristocratic slime who deserve what they get, and partly, like Matilda, by emphasizing the unreality of the whole story.
The stiffly formal prologue by the chorus and the functional, expository opening song “You’re a D’Ysquith” make the show seem a little dull on first entrance, but once the coquettish romantic lead Sibella enters with the irresistible charmer “What Would I Do Without You?”, the show never flags again until the final curtain, even managing to throw in one last creative in-character gag after the curtain call is over. The lyrics are Sondheim-level witty, especially the bitingly satirical “I Don’t Understand the Poor” and the risqué double-entendre duet “It’s Better with a Man”, and the sophisticated Semiclassical music is often lovely, particularly on the delicate ballad “Inside Out”, the hauntingly sensuous “Sibella”, and the dazzling counterpoint trio “I’ve Decided To Marry You”.
It also contains the most varied and virtuosic star part since Little Me for the actor who plays all eight of the aristocratic idiots, male and female, that the hero has to murder to inherit the Earldom he’s after. Like Matilda’s Miss Trunchbull, this tour-de-force role calls for a Shakespearean-level theatrical ham (in the original cast, the role was gloriously filled by breakout star Jefferson Mayes). And the fact that the show’s hero is shown to be literally killing the same person over and over, combined with the deliberately unconvincing drag used in several of these parts, helps to make the action feel unreal and thus allows us to be amused and delighted by a premise that would otherwise come across as a gruesome horror story in the vein of Sweeney Todd.
To clarify my comments above, I have no real objection to the incorporation of more vulgar humor in Broadway shows, especially since it’s by no means impossible to becrude and witty at the same time (see Avenue Q or Book of Mormon for proof of that). However, Broadway should never be allowed to rely too heavily on any one formula, and these shows’ old-style sophistication and restraint does provide some nice variety from the more shocking and explicit hilarity of shows like the two I just mentioned. Not only were these two shows the best efforts of two very good Broadway seasons, they are among the most uniquely creative shows ever seen on the musical stage, and rank among the finest items to result from the Broadway renaissance of the 2010s. There is literally no other show like either of them, and they clearly demonstrate that, whatever the‘Broadway-is-dead’ contingent may say, there are still new directions to pursue in the Musical Theater art form.
Escape to Margaritaville
I can’t exactly say I’m surprised Escape to Margaritaville is closing, and not only because the theater was three-fourths empty when I saw it. It’s been a while since we’ve had a genuine disaster on Broadway (they’re getting few and far between these days…I think the last one was Amazing Grace back in the ’15-’16 season), but these things never completely die, and this Jukebox musical based on the songs of Jimmy Buffett is a powerful reminder of that.
Unusually for a show this bad, the book itself is not terrible, having some clever dialogue in places, surprisingly likable characters, and even a few genuinely touching moments. The problem is that it makes appallingly poor use of the Jimmy Buffett music that forms its score, and given that Buffett’s songs are what the audience really came to see, that’s enough to completely destroy the show’s appeal.
First, the songs are so awkwardly forced into the book that they make the most incompetent Jukebox Musicals of past years look positively smooth by comparison. The way they managed to fit the novelty ditty “Grapefruit-Juicy Fruit” into the story was at least creative, but the enormous amount of elaborately contrived dialogue designed to shoehorn the songs into some kind of context becomes cringe-inducing after a certain point.
Second, the show tampers with the lyrics of the songs constantly to fit them into the show’s plot. This is not necessarily a bad thing in itself…Buffett himself constantly improvises on his own lyrics on the live album Feeding Frenzy, and it is considered by common consensus to be the best album of his career. But there’s a right way and a wrong way of doing that, and this show’s lyrical rewrites usually wind up sounding completely idiotic, particularly on their utterly butchered version of “A Pirate Looks at Forty”.
The third problem with the show’s score is that they often didn’t select very good Jimmy Buffett songs. Granted, most of the huge concert staples are here, but the material chosen to fill out the score simply does not represent Buffett at his best. For one thing, there’s a good bit of material from his post-1990 career, after pretty much everyone, including Buffett himself, stopped caring about his new compositions…the show even opens with one, an inane retread of earlier Buffett party songs called “License to Chill” that sounds like a 2013 Bro-Country single. Worse, the show for some reason felt the need to use “My Head Hurts, My Feet Stink and I Don’t Love Jesus”, possibly the worst album-filler track of Buffett’s career and the last thing you’d expect to see in a Jukebox musical.
To be fair to the show, though, there is one truly effective musical moment—the show’s version of “He Went to Paris”. Drawn from one of Buffett’s deepest and most heartbreaking songs, the shows gives it to a character who had up until that point been portrayed as a comic buffoon, but it somehow manages not to sabotage or diminish the song’s emotional impact. It might be the only truly effective scene in the whole musical, but it does provide the show with at least one redeeming feature.
On top of everything else, a strikingly similar but much better musical opened the same season: the vastly-better-than-anyone-expected Spongebob Squarepants musical. Both shows feature scores that make heavy use of tropical ukulele sounds, both use a volcanic eruption as a major plot device, and both even have a hallucinatory tap-dance showstopper halfway through their second acts. This is mostly just bad luck on Escape to Margaritaville’s part, and the show would have failed regardless, but the presence of a musical based on a poor-quality children’s animated series that was beating this show at its own game in the same season just adds insult to injury.
Jimmy Buffett had actually had two brushes with larger-scale musical storytelling before this. The first, Off to See the Lizard, was a Concept Album designed as a companion to Buffett’s book Tales from Margaritaville: it had some filler on it, but it did contain half-a-dozen excellent songs, and is generally the last Buffett studio album that anybody cares about. The second, Don’t Stop the Carnival, was an actual 1997 stage musical based on Herman Wouk’s 1965 book of the same name, written in collaboration with Wouk himself. It disappeared pretty quickly, although it left behind an unofficial cast album of sorts with Buffett himself singing the lead role. Its failure was not exactly undeserved (as I stated earlier, by the Nineties Buffett was long past his songwriting peak, and his work on it is frankly pretty bad), but it was still more respectable than this embarrassment.
Buffett might have made a respectable theater composer in his heyday, but by the time he started actually trying, his songwriting faculties had simply declined too much for it to work. As far as I can tell, he seems to have penned the stupid new lyrics for this thing himself (at any rate, he’s the only credited lyricist), and even contributed a few mediocre new compositions to it, so we can’t really let him off the hook for this one: his involvement seems to have gone much deeper than just giving the producers permission to use his songs. Buffett is still going strong as a live act singing the classic songs he wrote at his peak, and people tend to largely ignore the existence of his newer studio albums, but he really should stop trying to conquer Broadway: it’s simply not going to happen, and it just draws attention to how much his songwriting has gone downhill, something that his fans are otherwise capable of ignoring for the most part.
Tangled
Tangled, a loose adaptation of the Grimm’s fairy tale Rapunzel, was a significant milestone in the second Disney renaissance. Enchanted had been largely live-action and The Princess and the Frog a traditional hand-drawn animated film; this is the film that took the genre into the realm of modern computer animation. As such, its innovations were largely in the field of animation technique, figuring out a way to recapture the characteristic look of the first Disney renaissance with the new technology. As such, the overall look of the film emphasizes the 3-D quality of CGI animation much less than previous films in that style, and the characters have more realistic proportions and generally look more human than their counterparts in most of Pixar and Dreamworks’ movies.
Tangled came out at a time when Disney was still partly convinced that it needed to imitate Dreamworks to succeed, and as such there is a good bit more slapstick and influences drawn from the Shrek template than in such later films as Frozen and Moana. Still, this mostly made itself felt in the film’s often deliberately misleading marketing, and the overall feel of the film is more like a Disney Renaissance animated fantasy than a Shrek-style burlesque on fairy tales.
The thing that really stole the show, so to speak, in this movie was the voice acting, particularly Mandy Moore as Rapunzel and Donna Murphy as Mother Gothel. Moore is makes for an irresistibly spunky and spirited heroine, which does a lot to draw the audience into the action. She also sings with a wonderfully warm and characterful tone…she’s come a long way as a singer since those early albums of terrible Teen Pop that first made her famous.
Murphy gives a beautifully subtle and menacing performance that deliberately leaves much of the character’s motivation shrouded in ambiguity. She’s not the first Disney villain to operate primarily through manipulation rather than raw power, but she’s probably the first to ever seem convincing while she’s doing it, foreshadowing such later Disney villains as Prince Hans from Frozen.
Zachary Levi does a capable, if somewhat mannered, job as dashing thief Eugene, who goes by the moniker “Flynn Ryder” (we don’t find out his real name until well into the movie). The device of the bandit hero with two names representing his dual natures is straight out of Belasco’s The Girl of the Golden West, which was musicalized both as a Puccini opera and a Jeanette McDonald—Nelson Eddy film vehicle. I’m not sure why they chose to draw on this device, or even whether it was intentional (though I strongly suspect they were familiar with Belasco’s play through at least one of its musicalizations), but it works quite well here.
Alan Menken was already “back on top” by this point, having had two unqualified hits with Enchanted and the stage musical of Sister Act (even if one could debate how much that success was merited in the latter case). However, Tangled did play a major role in launching the massive career resurgence he is enjoying now. He earned it: this was one of his most melodic collections of songs in years at that point, and even his collaborator Glenn Slater, admittedly a notoriously uneven lyricist, does very fine work here. The endearing Wanting Song for Rapunzel, “When Will My Life Begin?”, Mother Gothel’s masterfully manipulative villain song “Mother Knows Best”, and “I Saw the Light” (an ecstatic love duet every bit the equal of “A Whole New World”) will no doubt be considered among the Disney auditory classics for generations to come.
The only real flaw in the movie is how simplistic the fallout between Rapunzel and Gothel is after the former finds out her “mother” was using her. Gothel may have kidnapped Rapunzel as a baby and be holding her for primarily selfish reasons, but she did raise the girl from infancy, and early in the movie the audience senses a genuine, if somewhat dysfunctional and twisted, love between them. After Rapunzel finds out the truth about her origins, all that goes out the window with startling suddenness, which seems at odds with what we saw of their relationship earlier in the film. If Tangled is ever adapted into a stage musical (which, given current trends, seems entirely possible), I hope this issue is given more examination and comes to a more satisfying resolution.
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