Theater Review: “Take Me Along”

As I mentioned in a prior post, I have almost never been disappointed by any production of New York’s Irish Repertory Theatre. Such was the case again when I attended a Sunday matinee in late March of their revival of the 1959 musical Take Me Along. (That particular production was taped for a Japanese documentary by someone associated with the show.)

This piece of Americana has never seemed at home on Broadway. The year it premiered, the show—starring Walter Pidgeon, Una Merkel, Jackie Gleason, and a very young Robert Morse—ran up against two other musical comedies that quickly turned into powerhouses: The Sound of Music and Gypsy. At the time, critics also carped that the cast member with true marquee value, Gleason, had had an essentially subsidiary role swollen to match his box-office appeal. Despite several Tony nominations, the show ran for only 448 performances. Twenty-six years later, the Broadway environment was still not propitious for the musical, which closed after only seven previews and one performance at the Martin Beck Theater.

The intimate nature of the The Irish Repertory Theatre lends itself far more to the show than a cavernous Broadway theater. I imagine that the musical required an entire orchestra when it premiered nearly a half century ago, but it got by very nicely this time with just three musicians, playing bass, banjo, guitar, and woodwinds. Perhaps Charlotte Moore and Ciaran O’Reilly, the longtime creative forces behind the Irish Repertory, reduced the cast size somewhat, but it’s impossible to tell here.

Why was this show, with music and lyrics by Bob Merrill and book by Joseph Stein and Robert Russell, playing at the Irish Repertory? The answer lies in its original source material: Ah, Wilderness!, the only comedy ever written by Eugene O’Neill.

Great tragedians, it appears, continually feel the need to take a break from their morose treatment of their obsessions. Tennessee Williams did so with Period of Adjustment; so did Ingmar Bergman, with his film Smiles of a Summer Night (the inspiration, of course, for Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music). Both titles could just as easily apply to O’Neill’s coming-of-age story.

An, Wilderness! (1933) represents O’Neill on a holiday—and as if to underscore the point, the play itself is set on the Fourth of July, in a place called “Centerville, Connecticut” (perhaps better thought of as Anytown, USA). From Long Day’s Journey Into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten, we know all too much about his own troubled family not to notice the shadows hanging over this play—notably, the specters of substance abuse and guilt over illicit sex. For just this once, however, the playwright preferred to look back not in anger or sorrow but in wry amusement at the ways of youth and appreciation for the wisdom of the middle-aged.

The Miller family, the unit at the center of Ah, Wilderness! and Take Me Along, came to O’Neill “in a dream,” he remembered. Theirs is a sunny house, presided over by wise paterfamilias Nat, the editor of the town newspaper, and his sweetly understanding wife Essie. Richard, the middle brother of three sons, is a comic stand-in for the adolescent O’Neill, whose real-life initiation into sex and Nietzsche was far more tortured than the misadventures pictured here. This is, of course, O’Neill’s exercise in wish fulfillment, and given his myriad tragedies and miseries, who can deny him a laugh or two?

Set in 1906, Ah, Wilderness! corresponded with O’Neill’s adolescence. For Take Me Along, the date was moved back 14 years, for no discernible reason. Post-World War I America was a far more turbulent place than what was depicted here. (It is also glaringly incongruous for a play in which alcohol is featured so prominently to take place in a year when Prohibition was enforced more stringently than it ever would be again.) Probably like most of those in attendance, I simply ignored the implications of the musical’s dating and soaked up the sunny atmosphere.

And bright pastels set the tone of the otherwise comparatively minimally decorated set. The musical began with Centerville gathering for the dedication of a fire engine, and before long it celebrated the joys of a more innocent time, when people strolled around on a summer’s day with parasols, straw hats and white shoes. You half expected a barbershop quartet to appear at any time

O’Neill also has some sly fun with the mores of this pre-Freudian age, when sexual secrets, more likely than not, were mistakenly communicated. (Oscar Wilde was “guilty of bigamy,” Richard Miller is told by his older brother Art, who has reliably heard this at Yale.) It might be hard for jaded people such as ourselves to credit this, but despite the hormones of adolescence (raging as hotly then as now), begging for a kiss was about as far as a teenaged boy could get with the average girl then.

The comic style of O’Neill didn’t employ the snappy one-liners perfected by Neil Simon, nor does the Stein-Russell book here. Don’t expect the slapstick of a Feydeau bedroom farce, or a sophisticated drawing-room comedy. Rather, it’s, as O’Neill subtitled it, “a comedy of recollection” of an adult looking back on the way he was, marveling how he could have been so idealistic—or so naïve.

The major conflict Richard Miller faces is between the world of his books—Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam—and the reality of love. He thinks he’s all wised-up from reading his literary rebels, but doesn’t begin to understand what depravity really is until, after setbacks with the 15-year-old object of his eye, Emily, he ends up in “Pleasant Beach House,” a nearby whorehouse. But in this pre-Cabaret musical, even this isn’t as louche as it sounds—young Richard is not in any condition to do much of anything, and he’s not even particularly interested in the house of ill repute.

The darkest elements of the play relate to something O’Neill knew only too well—alcoholism. Essie’s brother Sid has breezed into the Millers’ home from Waterbury, where he’s lost his job on a local paper because of his drinking. Everybody’s hail-fellow-well-met, a softened version of traveling salesman Hickey in The Iceman Cometh, he announces that he’s been sober “for three weeks—or almost three weeks.”

In the role of Sid, it’s doubtful that Don Stephenson consumed anywhere near the amount of oxygen that Jackie Gleason appears to have done in the original show. But, with his rangy frame, he makes it very easy to see why people considered the character “a card” and smiled at his antics, even though it’s almost impossible for anyone to imagine that at this point this chronic ne’er-do-well can turn his life around.

Teddy Eck was amusing and William Parry endearing as the intellectual Richard and his father (so wise and kind that he would make Jim Anderson, Ward Cleaver and Cliff Huxtable look like ogres).

But Beth Fowler was probably the most compelling cast member with her poignant turn as Lily, the middle-aged woman who broke off her romance with Sid years ago because of his drinking. Her voice was lovely and haunting, hovering on the thin love between disillusion and the desperate hope that maybe this time, things would be better between her and her old love. (Showing how much the passage of time can change people’s perception, a fellow audience member told me after the show, “I wanted to yell at her, ‘Run away—run away from him as fast as you can, and keep going!”)

For just this once, O’Neill allowed one of those “pipe dreams” his plays continually depicted as impossible as they were inevitable. Coming at the end of mid-century America, before Pax Americana fractured at home and abroad, the Stein-Russell-Merrill musical adaptation– and this Irish Repertory Theatre revival of it—captured all the charm of his sweet nostalgic dream.