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.

Song Lyric of the Day (Jackie DeShannon, on the Magic ‘When You Walk in the Room’)

“I see a summer's night with a magic moon

Every time that you walk in the room.”—Jackie DeShannon, “When You Walk in the Room” (1964), from her The Best of Jackie DeShannon CD (1991)

There’s some question about a birthdate surrounding this post. Most reference sources that I’ve seen on the Web indicate that singer-songwriter Jackie DeShannon was born on this date 70 years ago in Hazel, Kentucky. Other sources push the date back to 1941.

I’m not in any position to clarify the question with Ms. DeShannon. In any case, I have it on good authority—any one of a number of women!—that a gentleman never asks a lady her age. So, let’s accept the younger age, shall we? After all, the best of her songs make us feel young and filled with the joy of hearing a bit of music in a new way.

Some of her best-known songs were actually written by others (Bacharach and David’s “What the World Needs Now Is Love,” Jack Nitzsche and Sonny Bono’s “Needles and Pins”). On the other hand, she wrote a monster hit for someone else (Kim Carnes’ “Bette Davis Eyes”), so it all works out in the end.

One of the most charming accounts of her early career came in this 2010 interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, recorded at the time of DeShannon’s induction into the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame. There’s a great deal here about the politics and personalities of the music industry back in the Sixties (including the Beatles, for whom she opened on their first American tour). But I also got a kick out of her explanation for the story behind my favorite song of hers, “When You Walk in the Room”:

“I was waiting for a date to pick me up — who shall remain nameless and has for these many, many years. He doesn't even know that he's the one that I wrote it about. And he was late. And the guitar was sitting there, and I was very excited about the dinner date, and that's how it happened. And I just wrote it pretty fast, actually."

(Check out this YouTube video of her live performance of this classic two years ago. Nearly a half century after she first sang it, her voice remains in remarkably good form.)

Her own songs have been covered by countless artists, and as one of the first, most successful pop female singer-songwriters, she became a true pioneer in the entertainment industry. But one of the artists she influenced is rather unexpected: Bruce Springsteen.

Forty years ago, when he was starting out in the business, The Boss made a pilgrimage with buddy "Miami Steve" Van Zandt to the home of Ms. DeShannon, who played them tapes of unreleased songs she had composed with Van Morrison. A few years later, at his crucial Bottom Line gigs in August 1975, Springsteen performed a version of “When You Walk in the Room” that was every bit the equal of DeShannon’s original (not to mention the one that became a hit for the British group, The Searchers).

The Boss, obviously, knew a great song when he heard one. So does Ms. DeShannon: In her own 2001 Bottom Line appearance, she returned the favor to her long-ago admirer by playing a cover of Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart” as the final song of her well-received set.

This Day in TV History (“One Day at a Time” Debuts)

December 16, 1975--Critics and fans were quick to note that the sitcom One Day at a Time, which premiered on this date on CBS, was produced by Norman Lear, already known for such boundary-pushing series as All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Good Times, Maude and Sanford and Son. But few viewers of the series starring Bonnie Franklin, Mackenzie Phillips and Valerie Bertinelli took notice of the opening credits, which revealed that the series had been created by writer Allan Manings and actress Whitney Blake.

It’s hardly surprising that Manings’ contribution was overlooked. As Joe Gillis, William Holden’s cynical screenwriter in Sunset Boulevard, notes, “Audiences don't know somebody sits down and writes a picture. They think the actors make it up as they go along.” But the lack of notice for Blake was another matter entirely. Amazingly enough, in a reunion 30 of the show’s stars on The Today Show 30 years later, Phillips, Bertinelli and co-star Pat Harrington still had no idea about the nature of her contribution.

Only a decade before the show's debut, Blake had concluded a five-year run in a sitcom herself: Hazel, starring the Oscar-winning character actress Shirley Booth as a maid. Maybe because she played second banana to Booth, Blake did not make the same kind of impression that other actresses of the time, such as Barbara Billingsley, Donna Reed or Jane Wyatt, did as TV moms.

If viewers were to recall Blake at all by 1975, it might have been because her blond good looks had been inherited by daughter Meredith Baxter, then not far into a long TV career of her own. By this time in her late 40s--an age that, at that point (and even, to a somewhat lesser extent, now) was regarded as a danger zone for leading ladies--Blake was running the danger of disappearing into the rabbit hole of TV memory.

But if Blake had barely registered as a TV mom herself, she made sure that she’d create a truly memorable one secondhand. It was Blake’s memories of raising Baxter and her siblings as a single mom that Manings, her third husband, channeled into the creation of Franklin’s character, Ann Romano.

Ann Romano might, in a way, be regarded as the missing link between The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Gilmore Girls. Allow me to explain.

Think of the situation common to MTM and ODAAT: A young woman, fresh from a busted-up relationship, relocates to a Midwestern city, where she hopes to start over and wash that man right out of her hair.

Actually, if Ms. Moore and her husband of the time, producer Grant Tinker, had had their way, there would have been an even larger similarity: Mary Richards would have been a divorcee, too.

But the Tiffany Network would have none of it. Not only were such characters practically invisible at the time (these didn’t get past the programming censors), but the network had a more prosaic concern: they were so afraid that Ms. Moore would be so associated with her previous great role as Laura Petrie that audiences would think she had run out on Dick Van Dyke!

Five years later, due in no small part to Lear, all the old taboos were gone--and Bonnie Franklin, better known for roles on the stage (notably Applause, the musical version of All About Eve), was far more of a blank slate than Moore. The top brass at CBS, then, were far more ready for an idea about a divorced mom struggling to make ends meet in Indianapolis with her teenage daughters. Blake and Manings brought the idea to Lear, who developed it further.

One Day at a Time went on to run for nine years and 209 episodes. Some of its DNA ended up encoded in the likes of Kate and Allie, The New Adventures of Old Christine, and The Gilmore Girls. (The latter show also featured an actress, Lauren Graham, who, like Franklin, was only in her early 30s when the show premiered--not much older than the actress(es) who played her daughter(s).)

The Gilmore Girls had one less daughter than One Day at a Time, but somehow the estrogen level seemed more amped up. True, Lorelai Gilmore had her diner love interest, Luke, but there’s a Sensitive New Age Guy lurking beneath his blue baseball hat (tipped off by the fact that he cooks but Lorelai doesn’t, which allows him to criticize her unhealthy eating habits).

“Sensitive” is not the word that comes to mind about Dwayne Schneider, the building superintendent played to perfection by Pat Harrington. With his moustache constantly twitching expectantly in the hope that Ann Romano would respond to his flirtatious hints, his cigarette dangling from his lip and his tool-belt hanging from his waist like a gun holster, the character became “the Burt Reynolds of the Boiler Room.”

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)

This Day in Literary History (O’Connor Puts Editor in His Place)

February 18, 1949—Flannery O’Connor might have been only a few weeks short of 24, but she would not be condescended to be an editor twice her age as “a slightly dim-witted Camp Fire Girl.” One day after writing her agent that she wouldn’t respond to John Selby until hearing back from her first, she fired off a letter to the Rinehart editor in chief anyway, telling him that, while perfectly amenable to criticism, it would only be “within the sphere of what I am trying to do.” In fact, contrary to the “conventional novel” that he was trying to steer her toward, the finished book, though “less angular,” would still be “just as odd if not odder than the nine chapters you have now.”

Anyone who has read any of the work of the Georgia writer can guess that O’Connor and Selby did not work together—certainly to the relief of both parties, but not to the ultimate benefit of Selby and his reputation. A short-story writer and author of 10 novels himself, he might have been expected to have been sympathetic to the likes of O’Connor, and his firm had, only the year before, made a splash with a first novel by another twentysomething author, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead.

But O’Connor, while finishing up her stay at the Yaddo artists’ colony near Saratoga Springs, NY, was annoyed that it took Selby so long to get back to her about his opinion of her manuscript—and that the criticism he did send was “very vague and totally missed the point of what kind of novel I am writing.” This only increased the misgivings created by her friend, poet Robert Lowell, who believed that the very inadequacies seen by Selby were, in fact, part of the manuscript’s strength.

Three years and who knows how many revisions later, Wise Blood would go on to establish O’Connor as perhaps the leading voice of Southern gothic fiction.  Its humor was so dark, its descriptions so stark (“He had a nose like a shrike’s bill and a long vertical crease on either side of his mouth”) that initial reviews were mixed. 

In time, it would come to be recognized as a distinctly powerful vision of a spiritually blind male pilgrim (the first and last name of its protagonist, Hazel Motes, doubly reinforces the notion of diminished sight) in a barren, lost contemporary landscape seemingly aching for his “Church Without Christ.” It would be regarded as stark as a Hieronymus Bosch painting in the way it used the outlandish to underscore religious concerns, an allegory that would be adapted for film in 1979 by John Huston.

It is easy to regard Selby as benighted in his dealings with someone now regarded as a midcentury master of American fiction, and he didn’t help his case for posterity when, upon giving her release to take her manuscript elsewhere, he noted that O’Connor was “stiff-necked, uncooperative and unethical.” But his kind has not disappeared from the modern publishing landscape. An author I know was told by at least one editor that a major problem with his long novel was the multiple-character perspective he used on the plot. He disregarded the advice, took the novel to another house and was rewarded with an American Book Award.

Moreover, Selby was almost certainly in something of a state of shock, because the 108 pages he read were far, far different from what he had originally seen. O’Connor began her work while a graduate student at the University of Iowa. That material had helped her win the school’s Rinehart-Iowa Fiction Award, which gave the publisher the first shot at publishing the novel.

But midway through, O’Connor developed a far different narrative voice—one less sympathetic and more “strident and detached,” according to The Art and Vision of Flannery O'Connor, by Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr. If you want to see another example of how a mid-revision change can alter a book’s dynamic, the closest counterpart would be Moby-Dick, transformed, after Herman Melville met Nathaniel Hawthorne and delved deeply into William Shakespeare, from a conventional sea account of a voyage into a symbol-laden examination of an obsessive quest to destroy evil.

The editor who became the lucky beneficiary of Selby’s befuddlement was Robert Giroux, then at Harcourt, Brace and Company. The two had a common faith—Roman Catholicism—which helped him understand her unique worldview. Moreover, he felt her “tremendous strength, creative and moral,” and came to admire not only the very self-confidence that had put Selby off but also another quality: that “She not only knew exactly what she wanted to write but was prepared to sacrifice everything to achieve it,” according to an interview he gave George Plimpton a half-century later for The Paris Review.

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.