Film Reviews: New Musical Biopics, ‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’ and ‘Blue Moon’

Don’t expect either Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere or Blue Moon to resemble past musical biopics. Leave aside the issue of fidelity to fact. (Virtually all movies in this genre diverge from historical accuracy at least to some degree.)

What unites these glimpses into the careers and psyches of The Boss and American Songbook lyricist Lorenz Hart is a preference for a different kind of life story: not broad, years-spanning overviews of their subject, but ones focusing intently on narrow time frames.

You don’t have to look any further than Jamie Foxx in Ray or Rami Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody to know that such films can be Oscar bait, and the two films I’ll examine—with performances by Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen and Ethan Hawke as Hart—promise to be contenders at awards time, too.

Although Hawke effects more of a physical transformation than White, both actors ultimately aim to capture their subjects at turning points, when it’s a real question whether they will succumb to depression.

Based on Warren Zanes’ nonfiction account of the making of Nebraska, an instrumentally spare LP recorded on a 4-track recorder in Springsteen's New Jersey home, the title of Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere strongly hints at the heavy psychic baggage he was carrying following the January 1981 conclusion of the tour to promote The River.

With the hurly-burly of the road over, Springsteen experienced a nervous breakdown, sparked by memories of a childhood shadowed by a father afflicted with then-undiagnosed bipolar disorder. At the same time, the rock ‘n’ roller was restless about Columbia Records’ demands for a blockbuster that would take his career to undreamed heights.

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere does not dispense completely with all conventions of the biopic: there is a composite character, Springsteen’s waitress girlfriend (played movingly by Australian actress Odessa Young). 

But its sense of authenticity seems earned, not just in New Jersey towns like Freehold where Springsteen lived but also in considerable fidelity to the facts of his life in the period leading up to the September 1982 release of Nebraska.

Some conservative commentators on social media have chortled that the movie hasn’t enjoyed commercial success. (“Born To Flop” was one inevitably unimaginative encapsulation of this mindset.) 

Others, more charitably disposed to Springsteen, have wondered why the film couldn’t have picked a more upbeat period in his career, such as the epic recording sessions for his Born To Run breakthrough or the blockbuster Born in the USA.

I doubt if this was how screenwriter-director Scott Cooper viewed it, however. The period he depicts marked a point when, despite Columbia’s pressure—and even the puzzled acquiescence of manager and friend Jon Landau (an especially good Jeremy Strong)—Springsteen stayed true to his artistic vision with Nebraska, a spare LP that plumbed the depths of recession-battered Middle America.

Moreover, his decision to seek counseling for his longstanding depression—and his resulting closeness with his troubled father (played by Stephen Graham)—meant that he would step away from his private abyss and not become a rock ‘n’ roll casualty like Elvis Presley.

In contrast, we know from its opening scene that Blue Moon will be a show-business post-mortem, as a drunken Lorenz Hart stumbles on a street alone on a rainy night, and, we’re informed, dies of pneumonia. 

The film then flashes back eight months to March 1943, on the opening night of Oklahoma!—a project inaugurating a 17-year collaboration between Hart’s partner, composer Richard Rodgers, and a simpler, more dependable lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein II.

Blue Moon (named, of course, for one of Rodgers and Hart’s most memorable hits) is, unlike Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, a talk-fest, taking place in the famed Manhattan restaurant Sardi’s on the post-premiere party for Oklahoma! The lyricist, conveying his congratulations to the new songwriting team, can’t help but snipe at their subject matter, so removed from the contemporary urban sensibility he cultivated.

Director Richard Linklater and screenwriter Robert Kaplow had a low bar to surmount in terms of cinematic treatments of Hart. With Words and Music (1948), MGM trotted out some of their more glittering stars of the time (Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Janet Leigh, and June Allyson), but by necessity remained silent on whether Hart was gay (a common assumption among his associates).

That kind of sanitization is not a problem in Blue Moon, which is far more forthright about Hart’s sexual orientation, alcoholism, friction with Rodgers (and the latter’s extramarital dalliances), and the songwriting team’s Jewish roots.

Linklater has had prior experience with narrowly framing the career of a show-business legend with his 2008 adaptation of Kaplow’s novel Me and Orson Welles. 

But the task that the two collaborators set for themselves this time is considerably more difficult, as the camera is almost exclusively confined to a single room, without resorting to the unusual camera angles and other visual tricks employed by Alfred Hitchcock, for instance, in Dial M for Murder.

Implicitly, they trust that their potential audience—the kind that snaps up every bit of movie and Broadway musical lore (there are briefly, possibly apocryphal, appearances by E.B. White, "The Sting" director George Roy Hill, and a predictably precocious "Stevie" Sondheim)—will be as intoxicated by the quips of Hart ("a little touch of Larry in the night") as the lyricist was with alcohol. 

In this, they are helped enormously by the presence of Hawke, in a performance unlike any he has given before in his 40-year career.

Viewers will latch onto the radical physical changes (e.g., shaving his head and using what he calls “stagecraft” to appear shorter) that transformed him into the balding, gnomish Hart. But they’re likely to overlook how he virtually inhabited the witty but self-loathing character in virtually every frame of the movie.

Hawke conveys a whole range of emotions that often belie Hart’s surface bravado: self-consciousness, defensiveness, sensitivity, generosity, irresponsibility. This is a genius as unpredictable with his words as his work habits, leading to fissions in his relationship with the more organized Rodgers.

It's not a surprise that, in their ninth collaboration, Linklater has elicited such a strong performance by Hawke. 

But he has also found strong supporting players in Andrew Scott as Rodgers, Bobby Cannavale as the sympathetic bartender Eddie, and, donning a blond wig, Margaret Qualley as Elizabeth Weiland, Hart's "protegee," a Yale student and aspiring production designer.

 (Kaplow bought from a bookseller carbon copies of her letters to the lyricist, inspiring much of the movie's dialogue.)

Neither Blue Moon nor Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere has been a box-office success. Neither is what might be called a crowd-pleasing feature. But with time, both will find wider audiences on streaming platforms for their piercing looks at the loneliness lurking behind so many of the famous.

This Day in Theater History (‘Pal Joey’ Introduces the Musical Heel)

December 25, 1940— When it premiered at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, Pal Joey opened Broadway to more mature subject matter as the first American musical about an anti-hero. Without it, I would argue, you would never have the monstrous stage mother in Gypsy, the emcee in Cabaret, or the all-too-human leads in Stephen Sondheim’s landmark musicals like Follies.

When people think of names associated with Pal Joey, the ones that come to mind are its composer and lyricist, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. But the person often overlooked on the production team is the person who came up with the idea, the creator of the libretto and the original source on which it was based: John O’Hara.

In a way, that’s symbolic of what has happened to his place in American culture since his death 45 years ago: Once a bestselling novelist and short-story writer, he’s now hardly remembered in comparison with his good friends Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Some readers of this blog may know of a song from Pal Joey called “I Could Write a Book.” Well, O’Hara could—and did—write lots of them—novels, short stories, essay collections—and that’s not even counting plays, unproduced screenplays, or letters.

Pal Joey may have had the most unusual genesis of any of his works, as a series of about a dozen sketches in The New Yorker written in the form of letters to a friend from his “Pal Joey” Evans, a two-bit nightclub entertainer.

The sketches themselves were slight, but like Damon Runyon and Ring Lardner, O’Hara took a virtuosic delight in slang such as “take a powder” (get out), “making with the throat” (singing), “joint,” “crib,” and “angle.” Oh, yes—and the most delicious malapropisms until Archie Bunker came along, including my favorite, Joey’s account of his annoyance: “I lost my composer.”

When he was well along in this series, O’Hara wrote to Rodgers to see if he and partner Hart would want to adapt it into a musical. Rodgers recalled years later that he quickly said yes, because it would not only be different from anything they’d ever done but also different from anything anyone had ever done in a musical. Now, what did Rodgers mean?

Much of it stems from the slang word that Joey may use most frequently, and certainly, most enthusiastically: “mouse,” or young woman who’s caught his eye. Nowadays, we would call Vera Simpson, the rich, older society woman who pays for his clothes and his Chicago nightclub where he is emcee while making him her kept man, a “cougar.” These terms suggest predators and prey.

Virtually everybody in this animal kingdom uses everyone else, except for one sweet young woman, Linda, who still carries the torch for Joey. It’s a mark of the musical’s cynicism that Linda is as dumb as a rock.

Surprisingly, O’Hara’s interest in the musical faded after he first came up with the idea. George Abbott, a veteran director and script doctor, liked to have playwrights at out-of-town tryouts to make last-minute changes, but O’Hara went AWOL. So Abbott was left to make most of these changes, and he was also the one who helped create the plot: the affair between Joey and Vera. 

Pal Joey was not a great success in its first run, because of its risqué subject matter, its lack of a sympathetic lead or happy ending, and its premiere during a musicians’ strike that limited the radio exposure that songs in new musicals needed at that time. The critical quote that most succinctly summarized the state of opinion at that time came from Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times, who queried, "Although it is expertly done, can you draw sweet water from a foul well?"

Over time several songs, especially “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” and “I Could Write a Book,” became standards, and a cast album and revival in 1952 (which featured a young but already brassy Elaine Stritch) really thrust the show and its music into the popular consciousness. (Less successful were the 1957 film adaptation starring Frank Sinatra, and a 2008 “revisal”—i.e., a rewritten book—produced by the Roundabout Theater and starring Stockard Channing. See my review at the time of the latter here.)

The original 1940 production was also notable for launching young talents. Three of them ended up at MGM Studios: the actor Van Johnson; a chorus-line dancer who became a noted director-choreographer, Stanley Donen; and the show’s lead, who impressed just about everyone with his dancing: Gene Kelly (with a dancer in the image accompanying this post). (Kelly can also be found, in all-too-brief form, in this YouTube clip--taken from a patron who surreptitiously taped the show at the time.

This production, as well as its 1952 revival, which he also worked on, gave O’Hara a yen for the theater that he never really got over. One of the hardest-to-find O’Hara books is one that came out in 1964, Five Plays. They were unproduced, and they remain so, partly because he didn’t take well to director’s suggestions. But he was still working on another play at the time of his death in 1970.

As for the songwriting team that created it: “It was the most satisfying and mature work that I was associated with during all my years with Larry Hart,” recalled Rodgers in his autobiography. It would also be their last. The notoriously unreliable, alcoholic Hart was in no condition to work on the next project Rodgers had in mind, and its setting—rural life in the late 19^th century—was far removed from the contemporary urban milieu in which the lyricist excelled. Oklahoma launched a new partnership between Rodgers and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II that would be even more wildly successful than either of them--than anybody, really, certainly including the fictional Joey Evans--had ever known before.

This Day in Theater History (‘Oklahoma!’ Starts Rodgers on Partnership With Hammerstein)

March 31, 1943—With Oklahoma premiering at the St. James Theatre, composer Richard Rodgers did more than gain the greatest success of his career to date. He also gained a partner, Oscar Hammerstein II, whose lyrics might not have exuded the wit and sophistication of his prior collaborator, but whose reliability and adaptability enabled the pair to rewrite the rules of American musical theater.

On the night of his greatest triumph, Rodgers met a specter of his recent past, his gnomish, tortured, now former, partner. Instead of seething with jealousy, however, Lorenz Hart demonstrated the generosity of spirit that enabled so many people to put up with him for so long, despite his often maddening irresponsibility. “This show of yours will run forever,” he congratulated Rodgers at Sardi's restaurant.

He was not far off: the musical comedy ended up running for 2,212-performances, the longest-running musical in Broadway history by the time it closed. It ended up being revived another four times on Broadway, as well as being played in regional theaters and high schools all across the nation, and even the world. (For an example of the latter, see my prior post--my real-life "Glee" or "High School Musical," if you will on my own experience as a cast member of the show.)

It could have all been Hart’s, but he had demurred on adapting Lynn Riggs’ 1931 play Green Grow the Lilacs when Rodgers had brought it up. The alcoholic Hart refused to go into a sanitarium to become clean and sober; he was on his way to Mexico. At this point, Rodgers brought up his ace in the hole. If Hart couldn’t do it, he had someone else in mind for the job. Who? Hart asked. Oscar Hammerstein, said Rodgers.

“There’s no better man for the job,” Hart said. “I don’t know how you put up with me all these years. The best thing would be for you to forget about me.”

I was reminded of this turning point in the lives and careers of both men in Robert Gottlieb's article in the April 2013 issue of The Atlantic Monthly on their "Dysfunctional Partnership." It resembles Stefan Kanfer's equally fine assessment of Rodgers in City Journal several years ago in that it doesn't disclose many new biographical details, but it does a good job in analyzing what is already known about them.

Rodgers was saddened that his quarter-century association with Hart, another alum of Columbia University, was coming to an end, but also more than a bit relieved. For all the worldly brilliance he brought to his lyrics, Hart also brought endless aggravation, requiring constant rescue from binges when  he needed to work on a show. Two decades later, speaking to the star of a musical he worked on alone, No Strings, Rodgers told its star, Diahann Carroll: “You can't imagine how wonderful it feels to have written this score and not have to search all over the globe for that drunken little fag.''

If the nastiness in that comment was immense, so was the frustration. Rodgers would display little of that in his relationship with Hammerstein. The latter, the lyricist behind the landmark musical Show Boat (1927), was in an immense dry spell—no major hit in over a decade—and he could be slow at times, but he could be found and he was dependable.

Hart’s lyrics sprang from his own mordantly funny personality; he was, in a sense, best fitted for the Roaring Twenties. Hammerstein, though from a wealthier background than Hart’s, also came from one considerably less raffish, making him ideally suited to take on all manner of characters, including for "cowboy musical' subject matter that Hart couldn't abide. (See my prior post on the death--and, more important, the life--of Hammerstein.) He is often declared to be the best librettist in the history of Broadway musicals: he wrote the “book” for the musicals himself, and knew which dialogue cues could be turned into song. And, as demonstrated in Show Boat, with its unprecedented integration of music and plot, he was unafraid to break with convention.

And so it proved in this case, too. Most obviously, Rodgers and Hammerstein integrated a ballet by Agnes de Mille into the action. But even from the beginning of the show, they signaled that they were after something quite different from anything seen before: “Oh What a Beautiful Mornin’” dispensed with the usual opening chorus line to feature a lone cowboy, the hero Curly McLane.

The creation of the song illustrated Hammerstein’s method. The lyricist had originally written, “The corn is as high as a cow pony’s eye,” until a walk in a cornfield showed him that the stalks were far higher. Quickly, he turned it into “as high as an elephant’s eye.” 

Finally, Hammerstein was passionately liberal, a man who celebrated Americana even as he reminded the nation of its unfinished business with prejudice (e.g., "Carefully Taught," from South Pacific). The musicals he created with Rodgers over the next 16 years would prove an ideal cultural export from a country whose liberal humanitarian virtues were about to triumph in one major war and would be trumpeted against another totalitarian adversary in another, "cold" one.

This Day in Theater History (“Oklahoma” Lyricist Hammerstein Dies)

August 23, 1960—Oscar Hammerstein II, who wrote the libretto and lyrics for Show Boat, then refined the so-called “integrated musical” with composer Richard Rodgers in the most successful musical-theater collaboration of the last century, died of stomach cancer at age 65 at his home in Doylestown, Pa.

Rodgers and Hammerstein’s astounding run from 1943 to 1959 resulted in shows that have been continually mounted somewhere in the world ever since: Oklahoma, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music. And unlike their later rivals, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, they don't appear to have wanted to kill each other.

Over the years, however, critical opinion has come to favor Rodgers’ earlier collaboration with Lorenz Hart. Boiled down to its simplest terms, Hart has achieved this superiority through: a) the biting wit and sophistication of his lyrics, and b) the greater room for creative latitude afforded jazz musicians by the Rodgers and Hart songs.

Rodgers, having tired of the depressive, alcoholic Hart’s exasperating work habits, would have harrumphed at the comparison, but that would be expected, given Rodgers’ reputation as a theatrical martinet. “Who cares what the critics say?” he might have scoffed. “Oscar and I matter to the only ones who really count—the public.”

The person who might have done more to raise Hammerstein’s critical standing is, oddly enough, the man who has repeatedly acknowledged him not only as a mentor, but even, throughout his troubled youth, as a kind of surrogate father: Stephen Sondheim.

Several years after their own dismal collaboration, Do I Hear a Waltz?, Sondheim raised Rodgers’ hackles by declaring that Hammerstein was “a man of infinite soul and limited talent; Dick is a man of infinite talent and limited soul.” Yet the first half of that famous quote might not have been as sharp-edged as the second, it contained, for all its surface affection, just as much ambivalence. Sondheim sounds characteristically sorry-grateful for Hammerstein's gifts.

Sondheim elaborated on his feelings toward the man who, following the divorce of his parents, treated him as something close to a member of his own family in a lengthy interview with The New York Times’ Frank Rich a decade ago:

“Oscar's lyrics are often flat-out sentimental, lacking in irony, which is the favorite mode of expression of the latter part of the 20th century. And I happen to love irony. He had a limited range of imagery -- too many birds in his lyrics -- stuff that is metaphorically what we all feel, but because they've been overused so much, and often by him, they lack force.”

The creative force behind Sweeney Todd went on to hail Hammerstein as one who made his “big contribution to theater…as a theoretician, as a Peter Brook, as an innovator.” And what impressed Sondheim the most in this regard? Perhaps the greatest flop among all the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical comedies, Allegro.

Talking about irony...

Theater Review: “Pal Joey,” from the Roundabout Theatre Co.

Billy Wilder once told underemployed Hollywood director Erich von Stroheim that as a filmmaker he was 10 years ahead of his time. "Twenty years, Mr. Wilder,” von Stroheim replied. “Twenty.”

Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart could have related to the dilemma of “The Man You Love to Hate.” When Pal Joey premiered on Broadway on Christmas Day 1940, audiences didn’t know how to take this sardonic gift from the songwriting pair. Hart died three years later, believing a show whose seedy milieu he knew intimately had failed.

Rodgers, at least, had the dubious comfort of seeing later entertainment artists succeed with the same risky subject matter he and his troubled partner had pioneered. An older woman keeping a gigolo in high style (Wilder’s film Sunset Boulevard, with von Stroheim in a flashy supporting role)? Rodgers and Hart’s show predated it by 10 years. An emcee of subpar talent, in a louche big-city nightclub during the economically desperate 1930s (Kander and Ebb’s 1966 musical Cabaret)? Again, check for Rodgers and Hart—a quarter century before.

Since its premiere, the success of Pal Joey has been hit or miss. The show demands far more of both audience and cast than Rodger’s subsequent successes with later lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II. All the way to the end, it doesn’t compromise in the slightest in its jaundiced view of the love triangle at its heart, giving theatergoers little to root for. (When New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson analyzed the original show, he asked: ''Can you draw sweet water from a foul well?'' As you might have guessed by now, his answer was no.)

Consequently, so much—everything, really—depends on how the show is cast. It needs performers that will make listener sit up, pay attention, marvel, and salute, despite revulsion against actions onstage that are at best stupid and self-defeating and that at worst are deceitful or abusive. In an ordinary theater environment marked by high ticket prices, this can be a dicey proposition.

In the current one, when theatergoers look askance at any production that doesn’t reach superiority in every way—well, if you want someone willing to overlook and even forgive the usual human imperfections, seek out those guys in white collars who head up certain houses of worship.

I can’t tell you how much I wanted the current revival—or, as it happens, “revisal”—of Pal Joey at the Roundabout Theatre Co.’s Studio 54 to succeed. Countless pop and jazz renditions of several of its better-known numbers over the years left me curious as to how they worked in their original theatrical context.

As a fan of John O’Hara, the author of the musical’s original source (an epistolary novel in the manner of Ring Lardner’s You Know Me, Al) as well as its unusually hard-hitting book, I’d also like the show to help revive interest in a novelist and short-story writer who, partly through his own fault (he was a class-conscious, often misanthropic SOB), has never received the critical acclaim he deserves.

You may wonder why I called this production a “revisal” of the musical. The reason lies in the Roundabout’s decision to commission Richard Greenberg to rewrite O’Hara’s book.

Revising the “books” of old musicals has become the fashion in recent years on Broadway. You can imagine the thinking behind this: “Everybody is coming for the glorious old songs, anyway. Why not just cut to the chase and eliminate the between-songs patter that now sounds hopelessly sentimental or politically incorrect?”

But we’re not talking about something like the early, pre-Of Thee I Sing Gershwin musicals, for instance, in which plots were unapologetic pieces of fluff. We’re not even talking about something like Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song, which undoubtedly would raise hackles with its then-current stereotypes about Asian-Americans.

No, O’Hara’s plot was and is crucial in providing a springboard for the character-driven songs here. The novelist’s view of human nature is shorn of illusion (Joey on his parents: “They were real close—his fist and her face”), as likely now as in 1940 to put off theatergoers craving escapism. Furthermore, much of Joey’s rough-around-the-edges lingo remains intact from O’Hara’s original script, including “mouse” (Joey’s term for Linda English, the innocent new girl in the city who first catches his eye before he tosses her aside in favor of rich Vera), “nose candy,” and even “crib” (a place to sleep)

At the post-show “talk-back” I attended, I learned Greenberg’s contribution consisted of ginning up elements already inherent in O’Hara’s book, including hints of a major character’s homosexuality. As far as I can tell, Greenberg did no real violence to the original. It’s just hard to see why the Roundabout felt the need to tinker with something that didn’t require fixing.

A Tough Break in Previews
While still in previews, the show was dealt a sharp, if not crippling, blow: Christian Hoff, a Tony Award-winner for Jersey Boys and the actor chosen to play Rodgers and Hart’s heel protagonist, Joey Evans, severely injured his ankle. Given that the role requires considerable fancy footwork, Hoff would have risked a far more severe and lasting injury if he came back too soon (though the scuttlebutt in the blogosphere is that the injury made for a nice cover story for sidelining a performer who wasn’t working out as envisioned).

With his decision to withdraw, the Roundabout decided to replace him permanently with understudy Matthew Risch, and pushed back the official press opening night one week, to December 18.

The problems of replacing a lead just before an opening—especially adjusting to an actor with a different take on a character—are considerable. Those difficulties are multiplied in this case, since Hoff brought with him a devoted and growing audience from his Jersey Boys stint and his indefatigable humanitarian work.

Let’s be charitable: given the terrible break the show (and, of course, Hoff) experienced, the company—very much including Risch—has acquitted itself as well as can be expected.

No, I’m afraid that this production of Pal Joey limps along not because of Mr. Hoff’s injury, but because of a fundamental flaw that would have remained in place even had he been unhurt: If you’re going to cast a musical, make sure all your principals can sing and dance. Don’t count on a musical director or choreographer performing miracles with a performer with years of inexperience (not to mention ingrained habits and the all-but-inevitable fears).

Assessing Blame Where It Belongs
I didn’t have a problem with Scott Pask’s set design (the nightclub of Joey’s dreams, “Chez Joey,” is particularly snazzy), nor with Graciela Daniele’s choreography.

If you want to cast blame for the failings of this show, look no further than director Joe Mantello, who was also responsible for two of my least-favorite Roundabout productions during my nearly dozen years as a subscriber: The Mineola Twins and Design for Living. (Memo to Roundabout artistic director Todd Haines: Ever hear of three strikes and you’re out? Mantello offers excellent justification for applying the old adage in your company.)

In a recent interview with The New York Times, Stockard Channing admitted to occasional concern that her character, socialite-of-a-certain-age Vera Simpson, could “be arrested for robbing the cradle” by taking up with Joey. That maturity gap now appears even wider with the title-role recasting of Risch, who is even younger than Hoff.

Most theatergoers at the preview I attended would, I think, agree with me, however, that Ms. Channing should have worried far more about her ability to carry a tune than her character’s romp with a youngster (who, for the record, appears to be in his twenties). It’s been a long time since the marvelous actress played Rizzo in the film version of Grease, and the layoff shows.

When she finished her post-coital musing on the lover who has unexpectedly gotten under her skin, “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” Ms. Channing received only tepid applause for her talk-singing (more like uncertain warbling) of this standard.

Look, I don’t blame Ms. Channing in the slightest for wanting to tackle a new theatrical challenge late in her career.

But I’m afraid that The Roundabout has erred on the side of comfort, choosing someone with whom it worked successfully before (Ms. Channing aced the role of Eleanor of Aquitaine in the company’s 1999 production of The Lion in Winter) instead of someone far more up to the vocal demands of the role, such as Patti Lupone (who earned considerable acclaim in the role of Vera in the 1995 Encores! Production) or Donna Murphy.

The company acted similarly several years ago, when it cast the almost-always-reliable Blythe Danner more for her straight-line readings as the willowy, witchy former chorus girl in Follies than for her singing. This does nobody a service, however.

Somewhat more successful is Martha Plimpton as the felicitously named ecdysiast Gladys Bumps. As longtime readers of this blog might remember from my review of Cymbeline last year, I yield to nobody in admiring her ability to transform herself into almost anything. I bet she could even wring untold pathos and comedy out of reading George W. Bush’s two inaugural addresses!

At times, though, this production made me seriously reevaluate that opinion. Ms. Plimpton is at a particularly serious disadvantage in Act I, when she pales considerably next to Mr. Risch and the chorus line in “You Mustn’t Kick It Around.” She does somewhat better with the Follies parody “The Flower Garden of My Heart,” and performs creditably indeed with Hart’s send-up of Gypsy Rose Lee’s intellectual pretensions, “Zip.” (I can’t imagine her topping Elaine Stritch’s show-stopping version of the song in the 1952 revival, but then again, who could?)

As for Mr. Risch: he does quite well with his dance numbers (a fairly demanding load, actually, compared with the decreasing norm for non-Fosse musicals these days). Neither is his singing or acting bad. It’s just that he doesn’t have the kind of electricity that can make you sympathize, in spite of yourself, with the raw, unremitting hunger that animates his character.

Saving Graces
No matter how misconceived a show might be, it will still likely possess at least some saving grace that, several years down the road, a theatergoer will remember fondly. In 2003, the Roundabout’s revue of Burt Bacharach-Hal David songs, The Look of Love—as misbegotten a production as can be concocted by a troupe of Broadway veterans—still contained a marvelous tap dance version of “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” featuring Eugene Fleming and Desmond Richardson.

And so it proved with Pal Joey. Watching the Irish Repertory Theater’s fine version of George Bernard Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple a year ago, I wondered about the actress playing the flighty young minister’s wife, Jenny Fellner. Was my annoyance with her really dictated by her thankless role instead of by her acting ability.

I’m now prepared to think it was. As Linda English, the “mouse” Joe discards, Ms. Fellner displays the strongest, truest voice of any of the lead actors here. More important, she rescues a character that even one of the show’s creators, Rodgers, had written off as an idiot.

In her final number, “I Still Believe in You,” Ms. Fellner brings to the fore the dignity of a woman who sees every one of the faults of the man she loves but also notices what others (including himself) can’t glimpse in him. That’s not the perception of a Pollyanna, but of someone who bravely dares to hope. Fellner’s interpretation goes a long way toward making Joe’s play-ending dilemma much more suspenseful than it should be—and helps re-orient, if only momentarily, a production that veered off course.

A final word about another saving grace: I recommend to my readers that if they ever watch a Roundabout show, they bought tickets for one of the Saturday afternoon post-show lecture series.

This time, Peter Filichia, theater critic for Theatermania, held forth on the show’s origins. It was amusing to hear him hold forth on top-selling songs from the 1940s vs. today, as well as the origin of “I Could Write a Book” (it was Hart’s inside joke directed against O’Hara, who, having dashed off the book, didn’t attend the rehearsals—leaving rewrites in the hands of Hart, who joked, thinking of O’Hara, “If I wanted, I could write a book…”