Quote of the Day (Bob Dylan, on a Village Bohemian of the Early Sixties)

“Chloe had red gold hair, hazel eyes, an illegible smile, face like a doll and an even better figure, fingernails painted black. She worked as a hat-check girl at the Egyptian Gardens, a belly-dancing dinner place on 8th Avenue; also posed as a model for Cavalier magazine. ‘I’ve always worked,’ she said….Chloe had her own primitive way of looking at things, always would say mad stuff that clicked in a cryptic way, told me once that I should wear eyeshadow because it keeps away the evil eye. I asked her whose evil eye and she said ‘Joe Blow’s or Joe Schmoe’s.’ According to her, Dracula ruled the world and he’s the son of Gutenberg, the guy who invented the printing press. Being an heir of the ’40s and ’50s cultures, this kind of talk was fine with me. Gutenberg could have been some guy who stepped out of a folk song, too.”—American singer-songwriter and Nobel Literature laureate Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One (2004)

Theater Review: Teresa Deevy’s ‘The Suitcase Under the Bed,’ From the Mint Theater

Although its mandate to rediscover long-neglected works has primarily covered the U.S. and Great Britain, the Mint Theater has also brought welcomed renewed attention to notable past Irish playwrights, such as Lennox Robinson (Is Life Worth Living?, reviewed here), Hazel Ellis (Women Without Men), and today’s case in point, Teresa Deevy (1894-1963). 

It is one of the anomalies of the theater world that Deevy, a playwright with such an acute ear for characters’ speech, struggled for virtually her entire adult life with the burden of deafness.

Remarkably, Deevy succeeded in getting six of her plays produced in the 1930s by Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. But by the middle of that decade, with the company leaving the orbit of founders Lady Gregory and William Butler Yeats, she ran afoul of the literary politics of the time and could no longer get her work performed there.  For most of the rest of her productive working life, then, she turned to the radio, producing a dozen original works for the B.B.C. and Radio Éireann, in addition to adapting some of her other works for broadcasting.

After being elected to the Irish Academy of Letters, Ireland’s highest literary honor, Deevy went pretty much from here to obscurity. Then, seven years ago, the Mint Theater made her an object of serious re-evaluation with its production of Wife to James Whelan, the play rejected by the Abbey in 1936.

The title The Suitcase Under the Bed refers to where all of Teresa Deevy’s writing was stored for decades. Deevy’s grandniece showed them to the Mint Theater’s Artistic Director, Jonathan Bank, who ended up staging the world premiere of three of them—Strange Birth, Holiday House, and In the Cellar of My Friend—along with her best-known one-act, The King of Spain’s Daughter, staged by the Abbey in 1935.

Not all the plays work effectively, but collectively they testify to Deevy’s willingness to try new forms—and to the Mint acting company’s versatility in playing different characters in the same evening.

The most impressive of the discoveries, Holiday House, is the kind of light-as-air comedy that Noel Coward might have tried if he had ever spent substantial time in Ireland. A family gathers at their mother’s seaside home for a late summer holiday. Derek, married for a few years, finds his carefully cultivated savoir-faire sorely tested as he copes with unsettled business involving ex-fiancee Doris (Ellen Adair); her haughty, jealous husband, Derek’s brother (Aidan Redmond); and Derek’s rattled wife Jil (Gina Costigan). Witty repartee flies back and forth, as the quartet try to remain civilized even as they veer inevitably toward verbal sniping.

Redmond had other opportunities to shine, too. In The King of Spain’s Daughter, he masterfully depicted an authoritarian patriarchal figure who gave his daughter Annie a choice: wed his younger coworker, Jim (A.J. Shively), or work in a factory. (The play evoked a time when women—particularly high-spirited rebels like Annie (played with willful, headlong romanticism by Sarah Nicole Denver) —had few choices in life.) And, in Strange Birth, Redmond played a thoughtful middle-aged postman proposing marriage to a skittish maid (the estimable Ellen Adair).

Holiday House and The King of Spain’s Daughter were more memorable than Strange Birth and the remaining one-act play, In the Cellar of My Friend. But the Mint troupe managed to spin multiple subtle variations on the theme of marriage, and the distinctive voice of Deevy was heard once again—and now, one hopes, it will continue to reverberate in rediscovery mode.

The Suitcase Under the Bed closed at the end of September. But I couldn’t let the opportunity go to review it before The Mint Theater starts another season.

Theater Review: Noel Coward’s ‘Hoi Polloi,’ Presented by Musicals Tonight

The most-performed and fondly remembered plays by Sir Noel Coward leave audiences with the kind of giddy feeling they get from champagne. Hoi Polloi, a never-performed musical of his, is smoother and sweeter. Musicals Tonight, chosen by Coward’s estate for its world premiere, didn’t decontaminate viewers jaded from this year’s elections with this production, which closed a week ago Off-Broadway on Theater Row after a short run. But it did make them smile.

When Coward wrote this musical in 1949, he was trying to appeal much more to the man on the street than to the man in the penthouse of his more celebrated plays. The upper-class couple here, Julian and Linda Curtis, throw a costume ball to which they kindly invite lower-class Pinky and Harry. But Julian and Linda are a colorless pair, without the bourbon or bon mots that always circulated around Coward's characters in Private Lives, Design for Living and Present Laughter.

Hoi Polloi is, at heart, then, a tribute to the common people of London, a city that had suffered grievously in WWII. It was, in fact, continuing to suffer the aftereffects of the war when Coward wrote this, with rationing of some items still in effect. The general austerity of the city made increasingly problematic the economics of the kind of musical that Coward had made his own in the pre-war period.

Before the show could be fairly launched, then, Coward decided to scrap it. He recycled some of its songs later musicals, such as Ace of Clubs and Sail Away. (He never again had a major new success with new musicals, though, or, in fact, with comedies. He kept the fire of his celebrity burning in his last two decades by reinventing himself as a debonair, martinet-dry cabaret performer.)

By presenting this musical, then, Musicals Tonight deviated slightly from its mission since 1988: In this case, it didn’t so much revive a musical by masters of the form (as it did with two productions I blogged about previously, Lerner and Loewe’s Paint Your Wagon and Jule Styne’s Hazel Flagg), but in fact unearthed one. I wish I could say that it has unearthed a classic, but, even with a game, talented cast, it has only produced a mildly diverting, secondary work by a theater craftsman who undoubtedly wished he could have more time and resources to solve his problems.

The plot is reminiscent of On the Town and My Fair Lady: a slight boy-meets-girl tale in which a young sailor, Harry, meets and falls in love with an ordinary London manicurist, Pinkie, and the complications that ensue when, disregarding social convention, she accepts the Curtises' invitation to  their costume party. 

With a plot so tissue-thin, success depends on one or more of the following; tunes you can’t dislodge from your head, clever lyrics, incredible stagecraft, or scintillating choreography. Coward couldn’t consistently provide the first two; Musicals Tonight simply can’t afford the third; and the fourth, for whatever reason, never materializes on stage.

And so, director Mindy Cooper made do with her cast of 10. The ones who appeared to best advantage here were Katrina Michaels as the winsome Cockney Pinkie; Johnny Wilson, capturing Harry in all his exuberance about falling in love and misery about possibly losing it; and Marci Reid as the philosophical flower seller Barmey Flo, who made the most of the affecting “Sail Away.”

Hoi Polloi never really took flight, but it was hardly a bad way to while away two hours, and I’m sure that Musicals Tonight's guiding force, Mel Miller, who has revived 90 musicals over nearly two decades, will soon find another show worthy of his evident affection for this theatrical form.

Theater Review: ‘Women Without Men,’ From the Mint Theater, NYC

Imagine the viperish ladies of Clare Booth Luce’s The Women confined to the school in Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour and you might get an idea of the frustrations and cattiness unleashed in Women Without Men, which concluded its two-month run at New York’s Mint Theater last weekend.

This 1938 dramedy of fierce wit and refusal to settle for easy characterizations came from Hazel Ellis, who, having made her name as an actress with the Gate Theatre in Dublin, turned to writing two critically acclaimed plays of her own in the 1930s. All the more regrettable, then, that this second one would be her last, the result of her decision to forsake writing for matrimony and motherhood. 

All the more power, too, to the Mint Theater for giving the play—and its juicy parts for an all-female cast of 11—its New York premiere, as part of its mission to spotlight unjustly neglected vintage works.

Unlike most Irish schools, which after separation from Britain were largely run by the Roman Catholic Church, Malyn Park in the play, like the one Ellis attended growing up, is a privately operated Protestant boarding school for girls. It is, then, doubly insular—not just gender-based but operated by a religious minority in a country making its way gingerly out of the enormous British shadow, narrowing all the more the career and personal options of its faculty.

That atmosphere of toxic frustration explodes with new faculty arrival Jean Wade (played by Emily Walton). While her youth, enthusiasm and idealism establish instant rapport with her young charges, they also bring to the surface tensions among her colleagues. Though ranging in age from very young to late middle-aged, they have all grown scarred and cynical about their profession, their environment and their limited emotional involvements (none are married or with children). The storm outside their seemingly cozy faculty room also symbolizes what takes place as they interact with each other

We quickly understand why female students nickname this “The Tyrants’ Den” when the manuscript of one teacher—whose literary ambition is indirectly proportional to her talent—is defaced. Lies and destroyed reputations become the fruit of jealousy and petty quarrels over trifles. Or, in the words of one faculty veteran teacher, Miss Strong (played by Mary Bacon), who has maintained a smidgen of sanity by remaining coolly aloof and neutral: “What else would you expect? A small group of women all cooped up together with no release from each other save in the privacy of our bedrooms. Women brought together not by choice, not by liking, but by the necessity of earning our living.”

It was Ms. Ellis’ considerable skill that gave each of these lives fading into the Celtic twilight their own individuality, and Jenn Thompson’s adeptness that allowed each member of this very fine ensemble to shine. Kellie Overbey was appropriately bitter and brittle as Miss Wade’s principal faculty adversary, Miss Connor. Dee Pelletier gave pungency to the most conspicuous fish out of water among the faculty, the lone foreigner, Mademoiselle Vernier. Kate Middleton and Aedin Moloney brought comic gusto to the roles of the young, flighty Ruby Ridgeway and her older, more staid roommate, Miss Willoughby.

Especially good are Miss Walton and Miss Bacon, depicting a subtle relationship filled with strong undercurrents—two women that, in the end, may be less friends than allies linked by mutual disdain for this breeding ground of insecurity, false accusation, self-sacrifice and gratitude that deteriorates into buried resentment.

Women Without Men is only the latest example of how, whether by conscious design or merely inclination, the Mint Theater has carved out an alternative path from much of New York theater. While the last half-dozen years have brought bitter complaints about female underrepresentation in the New York theater world, the Mint has made it a point to unearth fine plays by Ellis, fellow Irishwoman Teresa Deavy, Susan Glaspell, Martha Gellhorn and Rachel Crothers. In opening a window into the past, it has shown how to carve a new path into the future.

This production also marked the Mint’s transfer from its longtime West 43^rd Street home to a new venue, at City Center 12 blocks up in Manhattan. The move was the product of necessity: Midtown’s real estate boom, which resulted in the sale of the 43^rd Street building twice in three years. Time will tell whether or not the Mint has truly found a home congenial to its staging and administrative needs. (After leaving its longtime St. Mark’s Place home, another Off-Broadway company, the Pearl Theatre Company, stayed in City Center for only three years before decamping to another space on West 42^nd Street.) Nevertheless, the increased leg room in the aisles and unobstructed sight lines already spell an improvement for the Mint’s small but devoted tribe of fans in City Center.

Theater Review: Jule Styne’s ‘Hazel Flagg,’ From Musicals Tonight!

Five years ago, in a review of Paint Your Wagon, I promised to see another production soon from the company that staged it, Musicals Tonight! It just goes to show that you should never believe promises: I didn't make it back for half a decade.

All this time, however, the company was never really off my radar. I still hunted for opportunities to see one of its shows from the Golden Age of the Broadway musical at affordable prices.

This past weekend, following one last winter blast, I spotted an opening. It was not only convenient because of time, but also because of location. Mel Miller’s company had moved from its home the last time I saw it-- McGinn/Cazale Theatre, at Broadway and 76^th Street—down to Theater Row, at the Lion Theatre, on West 42nd St. between 9th and 10th Avenues. That meant I could take the A train without switching, get off at the Port Authority terminal, and walk just a couple of blocks west.

Prices are lower for Musicals Tonight because expenses are lower. I don’t mean just star salaries, scenery (evoked here by a change in paintings hung on a wall between scenes) or costumes, but also advertising costs. Not only have I not seen productions promoted in The New York Times, but even Time Out New York. (I heard of the company first through a direct-mail brochure. Presumably, my name was on the mailing list of one of the New York City theater companies whose shows I’ve attended over the years.)

There are the warhorses of musical theater—notably, the entire corpus of Rodgers and Hammerstein, My Fair Lady, Fiddler on the Roof, Company—and all too many others that have ended up in a shadowland, little noticed or remembered. Companies such as Musicals Tonight and the far better capitalized Goodspeed Opera House and Encores, then, serve an excellent purpose in reminding theatergoers—and theater professionals—of the unknown riches lurking in this latter group.

Like On the Twentieth Century, the much-acclaimed Cy Coleman musical just mounted by the Roundabout Theatre Company, Hazel Flagg is based on a classic 1930s screwball comedy scripted by Ben Hecht (in this case, the 1937 film Nothing Sacred). 

But, while On the Twentieth Century made few concessions to popular taste, Hazel Flagg, despite the fact that Hecht adapted his own screenplay, has watered down the cynicism of its source material. The movie’s male lead, reporter Wally Cook (played by Fredric March), is so in the doghouse with his male editor that he’s on the obituary desk; the musical’s Wally is merely a little-read political reporter. While the Dr. Enoch Downer of the stage is clearly incompetent, his counterpart on film is also an inveterate drunk.

Symbolic of all of this is one scene. In the movie, Wally has barely set foot in Hazel’s Vermont small town before a young boy bites him on the ankle. The deletion of this scene in the musical seems emblematic of the material’s transition from screen to stage: it has lost some of its satiric, if not literal, bite.

What the musical gained in the process is a mildly amused tone that sees something sunny even in those characters (nearly all of them) out for the main chance. It’s typified by Laura Carew, publisher of Everywhere Magazine, who urges on her staff a change in editorial direction involving “A Little More Heart”—and a little less brains.

Some songs feel as if they could stand independently apart from this show:  “How Do You Speak to an Angel?”, “The World is Beautiful Today,” and “Money Burns a Hole in My Pocket.” It is possible that some tunes might have originated with other projects, given composer Jule Styne’s penchant for recycling songs (e.g., Gypsy’s “You’ll Never Get Away from Me” was originally written for the 1957 TV musical Ruggles of Red Gap and “Everything’s Coming up Roses” was  conceived as “I’m Betwixt, I’m Between” earlier for High-Button Shoes).

The songs here work best in the hands of the two major female performers. Hazel, we find out early on, is a liar—a woman who, after being told of her misdiagnosed terminal condition, does not disclose this fact to Everywhere, which is fulfilling her wish to "have fun" by sponsoring an all-expenses tour of New York, because she is so desperate to see a wider world than Stoneyhead. 

But Savannah Frazier, with a lovely voice and a wide-eyed-in-Babylon look, makes it impossible to dislike her. And, matching the skill set of her movie predecessor in the role, Carole Lombard, she displays a flair for comedy, whether going on a drunken spree shortly after arriving in New York or imagining herself as a Parisian temptress in “Laura de Maupassant.”

As Laura, Annie Edgerton takes over a role played onscreen by the great, growly male character actor Walter Connolly, endowing it less with ferocity than with sharp, cool authority. Possessed of one of the most interesting musical backgrounds among the cast (singer of “The Star Spangled Banner” for 20 major league baseball teams!), she is ideally suited to put over the likes of “Make the People Cry” (Laura’s advice to her staff) and “Everybody Loves to Take a Bow.”

Among the males, Rob Lorey imparts a Jimmy Walker-style panache to his character, The Mayor, and to his big number, “Every Street’s a Boulevard in Old New York.” As Wally, Jason Mills easily handles the vocal requirements of his leading-man role, but you sense that, like his character, he longs for so much more. Bradlee Laight brings a nifty soft-shoe act to Willie’s dance number with Hazel.

The casting of Jody Cook requires suspended disbelief: How can a man described by Wally as a “New England quack” speak with such a pronounced Southern accent? Accept that and you’ll thoroughly enjoy Cook's portrayal of a querulous small-town medic continually sputtering over the mess that his young female patient (and, of course, his own misdiagnosis) has gotten him.

Hazel Flagg, running through March 29, will never take pride of place in Styne’s work over Gypsy or Funny Girl, but it remains a pleasant diversion for a couple of hours.