Revivals

One of the side effects of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s invention of the Musical Play in the Forties with such works as Carousel and South Pacific was the make the Operetta genre (which was already falling out of favor by that point) almost completely redundant. After all, Musical Plays essentially offered the same passionate music and dramatic fireworks as Operetta, but with plots that made sense and characters that resembled actual human beings.

Old-style Operetta continued to get made as late as the Sixties, but apart from one fluke hit called Song of Norway, they invariably flopped when they played the genre’s conventions straight. The only works in the genre to succeed, therefore, were the ones that tried to subvert and modernize the genre’s more dated elements. The Fifties would give us two such shows in Kismet and Candide (even if the latter would not find success until decades after its original production), but the first work in this field, and the one that proved Operetta could be modernized an audience used to the musical-theater renaissance of the Forties and Fifties, was legendary songwriter Cole Porter’s Magnum Opus for the theater, Kiss Me Kate.

This show has some unmistakable earmarks of an Operetta, with its Shakespearean source material and lush romantic music, but these elements are blended heavily with the Musical Comedy tropes of Porter’s early years, in effect creating an Operetta/Musical Comedy fusion very different from the one found in the Rodgers and Hammerstein-style Musical Play.

The show is an archetypical retelling of Shakespeare’s classic farce The Taming of the Shrew, told through a ferocious duel of passions between two ex-lovers who are in the process of performing in a musical production of the original play. This was probably a wiser idea than trying to do a straightforward adaptation, since the gender politics of Shakespeare’s play were uncomfortably dated even by 1940s standards. Unfortunately, the show’s book really has no more dramatic integrity than Porter’s Musical Comedies from the Twenties and Thirties. The song cues are often completely unmotivated, and there are several blatantly extraneous characters who exist for no other reason than to deliver songs. The show takes every opportunity it can to recite passages of Shakespeare’s dialogue word for word, probably because this gloss on the original plot isn’t really substantial enough to fill out a two-hour show on its own and the play-within-a-play scenes are a convenient source of filler.

However, despite all these flaws, the show still managed to attain the ranks of the top-level theater classics. It’s almost impossible for a Broadway Musical’s score to overpower an inadequate book, but this one manages it. Some of the music sounds virtually indistinguishable from a traditional Operetta, such as the mock-Viennese waltz of “Wunderbar” or the opulent romantic ballad “So in Love”. Much of the material for the play-within-a-play even attempts a period-appropriate Elizabethan sound, particularly Petruchio’s three big solos “I’ve Come to Wive It Wealthily in Padua”, “Were Thine That Special Face?”, and “Where Is the Life That Late I Led?”, and Katherina’s ferociously trilling credo “I Hate Men”. On the other hand, several of the songs are pure Jazz, such as “Tom, Dick or Harry”, “Too Darn Hot”, and “Always True to You, Darling (In My Fashion)”.

Most of the score sticks to Porter’s standard formulas: comedic list songs, lush, sensuous ballads, hot Jazz showstoppers, and lots of highly risqué double-entendres (“Tom, Dick or Harry” actually got away with repeatedly using the word “dick” in what is clearly meant to be its modern context). There was even a highly original number, “Brush Up Your Shakespeare”, that managed to transform deliberate awfulness into comedy gold. This may have been the first prominent use of intentional camp on Broadway, and it would prove to have immense influence on everything from the “Baby June” numbers in Gypsy to such deliberately campy musicals as The Rocky Horror Show.

But overall, Porter had done almost everything he does in this score before, and usually just as well or even better. What made the show special is how much of that quality was now concentrated in one place. Porter has a reputation for consistent genius among those who only know him from his hits, but most of his theater scores are actually quite uneven. Nearly all of his Thirties shows, as well as his last two hits, Can-Can and Silk Stockings, consist of a handful of sublime hits surrounded by a lot of pleasant-but-undistinguished musical filler. Even Anything Goes, before it was padded out with interpolations, had plenty of just-okay material in its original incarnation. The real thing that made Kiss Me, Kate different from earlier Porter was not any breakthrough in dramatic cohesion but the sheer consistency and quality control of the show’s score.

But even if Kate’s Operetta leanings were given a pass because of that score, it’s worth remembering what happened to Porter’s follow-up work in the same vein, Out of This World. Despite having a score that very nearly matched Kiss Me, Kate’s in terms of brilliance and consistency, the show flopped because of a dated book and presentation…exactly the problem that was killing Operetta in general.

Kate, on the other hand, has lasted long enough for modern gender politics to overleap even the relatively equal struggle portrayed in the outer play, resulting in the current revival doing some fairly heavy rewrites to the show’s book. Now, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do this kind of thing…after all, the version of Porter’s other enduring hit, Anything Goes, that we perform today is a revision of a revision, and is probably the better for it.

On the other hand, there was the notorious debacle of the Flower Drum Song “revisal” in the Nineties. Flower Drum Song had admittedly dated enough to require some revision in order to play acceptably to a modern audience, but all that really needed to entail was a rewrite of some of the more stereotypical dialogue in the piece. Unfortunately, it fell into the hands of some smartass Asian playwright who thought he was better than Hammerstein, and wound up with a completely new (and frankly idiotic) plot, resulting in an abject failure that is still spoken of with revulsion to this day.

The rewriting in the current revival of Kate, while not note-perfect, is far from the disaster mentioned above. The story is almost entirely intact, the songs (which, as stated before, are the show’s real raison d’etre) are virtually untouched, and the rewrites to the show’s book are arguably an improvement (remember that the parts of Kiss Me, Kate‘s libretto that are not cribbed from Shakespeare were by no means great writing to begin with).

The only really destructive change is the lyrical rewrite on “I Am Ashamed That Women Are So Simple” (or, as the revival would have it, “I Am Ashamed that People Are So Simple”). They only really change two words in the entire song, but the changes show an utter lack of comprehension on the part of the revisionist (in this case, Amanda Green, the daughter of legendary lyricist/librettist Adolph Green). The entire point of the song is that it consists of a sexist monologue from The Taming of the Shrew delivered by the actress to mean the exact opposite of what the words say. But apparently people today have to have their assurances of political correctness spelled out for them…either that, or the producers are so afraid of offending people that they don’t trust a brilliant singer-actress like Kelli O’Hara to properly convey the song’s intended meaning.

Apart from that one sour moment, the revival’s real fault is that it seems to timid to really cut loose with the comedy in the Shrew excerpts, which, while it probably stems from a similar impulse, is ultimately a performance problem rather than one of rewriting. The current revival honestly could be better, but it features strong leads and serves as a fine showcase for Porter’s glorious songs, and frankly that’s the best this show could really hope for on its best day anyway.

This show, which closed on the road before reaching Broadway in 1971, carries a certain mystique among musical theater fans as perhaps the definitive example of a bad idea well-executed. Ken Mandelbaum, the world’s greatest acknowledged authority on Broadway flops, described it as “a grand attempt at the impossible”. The reason it failed should be fairly obvious from the title: it was a musical version of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita, a book so scandalous in its subject matter that its title has become a universal byword for pedophilia in multiple cultures.

Of course, the primary basis and appeal of Nabokov’s original novel is the elaborate mind games it plays regarding the nature of fictional narrative. Most of this content is inevitably lost in a visual medium, so no musical (or film, for that matter) could ever fully adapt the novel. However, another Alan Jay Lerner show, Camelot, is also based on an ultra-complex novel that it had to heavily water down simply to fit its contents into three hours of theater, and it still succeeded, because what was left of the story was still interesting enough to justify the adaptation. And I’d argue the same holds true for the actual plot of Lolita, which is what is retained for the musical…the story of an ultra-erudite sociopathic pedophile who marries a woman in order to get at her preteen daughter, and his cross-country odyssey with the daughter in tow after her mother’s death. The problem with this story is not that it isn’t interesting enough to carry the musical…it’s that the story is so insanely audience-unfriendly, both in its outrageously shocking basic subject matter and in the sheer unpleasantness of its story details, that no matter how brilliant the writing was, no-one wanted to see it.

Most of this has to do with the central character of Humbert Humbert, and not just because of his attraction to underage girls. Humbert is so utterly self-involved and self-deluded, and his supposed “love” for Lolita so devoid of any real concern for her or anyone else, that the age difference is arguably not even the sickest thing about their “relationship”. Humbert describes, in the beautiful ballad “The Broken Promise Land of Fifteen”, his rationale for his perversion (an obsession with the memory of an adolescent crush that fled from him), but that doesn’t really explain everything that’s wrong with him: quite apart from his unlawful sexual proclivities, he is clearly a clinical sociopath, and you don’t get that from a lost love, however traumatic.

It’s a shame, because the show, unappealing as it is, is an amazing showpiece of theater writing. The book, written by the great Alan Jay Lerner, makes Humbert as vivid and complex in the nuances of his monstrousness as he was in the original novel (it’s worth noting that Nabokov’s entire reason for granting permission to produce the musical, against his better judgment, is that he was himself a huge fan of Lerner’s oeuvre).

The music, by famed film composer John Barry, is extremely accomplished and frequently gorgeous, and Lerner’s lyrics are absolutely dazzling. The numbers for Humbert and his unfortunate wife Charlotte are superb—Humbert’s haunting ballads “In the Broken Promise Land of Fifteen”, “Tell Me, Tell Me”, and “Lolita”; his dazzling dissertation on his chosen perversion “Dante, Petrarch, and Poe”; Charlotte’s irresistible showstopper “Sur le Quais”; “Farewell, Little Dream, Farewell”, perhaps the most loathsome villain song in Broadway history (all the more so because it’s being sung by the protagonist); and “How Far Is It to the Next Town?”, an extended musical scene for Humbert and Lolita designed to play like a waking nightmare. It might be a controversial statement, but I’d argue these numbers may well represent the best lyrics Lerner ever wrote for anything (and I’m including My Fair Lady in that statement).

Not that the show is perfect. The opening number for Humbert’s rival Clare Quilty, “Going, Going, Gone” is also quite fine (amazingly, it actually got a Pop recording by Shirley Bassey), but the numbers for Lolita herself and the ensemble are less interesting. And given that the show, like any Broadway-bound show that closes on the road, was never properly finished, there is some material (like Quilty’s “March Out of My Life”) that is a total waste of time and would assuredly have been cut had the show completed its journey to Broadway.

There is no official recording of the score (only a live bootleg that was apparently briefly available on the legitimate market before Lerner and co. found out about it), and the show has only seen one revival since its original production closed. And while we should probably all be grateful that it ever got revived at all in any form, the recent ‘Musicals in Mufti’ performance of the show was not entirely satisfactory. There are probably times in history since the show’s creation when a small-scale, limited engagement production of it might have been well received (after all, Sondheim’s Assassins has subject matter just as taboo, and it has managed to see some success over the years), but today’s political climate is not one of those times. As a result, the people behind this revival felt compelled to soften the material by introducing a framing device involving a female psychiatrist who consistently calls Humbert out on his bullshit accounts of what supposedly happened, and tacked on a new ending completely foreign to the spirit of Nabokov’s novel intended to give Humbert at least a small grain of potential sympathy. (They claimed to have found most of the alterations they made to the show in various unused drafts Lerner made of the libretto, but even if that’s true, there’s probably a reason most of these scenes never even made it into the tryout version.)

They also cast a twenty-something actress as Lolita, and while she worked hard at playing the part as convincingly as she could, it still kind of undermined the reality of the premise. By contrast, the original Lolita, Denise Nickerson, was only 13 years old. (You’ve probably seen Nickerson…she played Violet Beauregarde in the film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, which came out the same year as Lolita, My Love.)

None of these compromises actually made the show less shocking (the performance I saw still drew many an appalled gasp from the audience), but they did serve to water down its dramatic impact, in spite of a superb cast that could for the most part hold their own with the original leads. Robert Sella, the revival’s Humbert, sounds remarkably like John Neville on the original cast bootleg in both singing and acting, and The Band’s Visit alumnus George Abud was a show-stealing delight as Quilty. And while Jessica Tyler Wright offered a much more sympathetic interpretation of Charlotte than Dorothy Loudon’s raucously vulgar portrayal in the original, she nonetheless gave a powerful performance in the role. And as disappointing as that revival was, it doesn’t seem especially likely there will be another anytime soon, so this show will have to live on as a widely-coveted bootleg recording and a vivid theatrical legend.