Theater Review: ‘On the 20th Century,’ From the Roundabout Theatre Co.

When Cabaret, a veritable cash cow since 1998, came to an end with its latest Alan Cumming star turn in late March, the Roundabout Theatre Company faced the challenge of finding a suitable replacement. The problem was not unlike the difficulty the New York Yankees have had in filling the shoes of Derek Jeter this year: You can’t hope for another once-in-a-generation bonanza, just a serviceable surrogate.

In the case of a Roundabout musical, you hope for a credible success, financially and critically (110 in the Shade, starring Audra McDonald) rather than an all-around embarrassment (Bye, Bye Birdie, starring John Stamos and Gina Gershon).

Two musicals mounted by the company so far in 2015—Into the Woods and On the Twentieth Century—could hardly have differed more in their tone or production values. Yet each managed to be hugely enjoyable.

Roundabout might not have a long-running musical hit on its hands, but the run for each show was extended, providing much-needed box-office relief to the nonprofit theater troupe.

I did not get a chance to review the marvelous stripped-down version of Into the Woods. I don’t want the same unfortunate thing to happen with On the Twentieth Century, so I am writing about it now on the heels of its final performance on Sunday.

The unfortunate thing might be that more people may have seen the 1934 film comedy Twentieth Century instead of the 1978 musical. I say that with no disrespect for the Howard Hawks movie, which not only represented one of  John Barrymore’s screen performances but launched the short but lustrous career of Carole Lombard as one of the queens of the screwball comedy genre. 

It’s just that the 1978 musical, featuring an incredible array of talent—director Harold Prince, composer Cy Coleman, lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and stars John Cullum, Madeline Kahn, and Kevin Kline—was, by common agreement, one of the zestiest entries in musical theater history—yet had not been revived on the Great White Way since its original production. (Contrast that with Gypsy and Fiddler on the Roof, which have been recycled several times already.)

Maybe the problem all along was simply the outsized nature of the material: egomaniacal Broadway producer Oscar Jaffee, having made Lily Garland a star and his lover, has parted ways with her, personally and professionally. But now, after she has become an even bigger star in Hollywood while he has endured four straight flops, he desperately needs her again for his next show. 

For her part, Lily has unfinished business with him, too: Her rage at him is just another indication of how much he had made her love him to begin with.

Oscar, then, is on a mission: to convince Lily, by hook or by crook (this being Oscar, it’ll be mostly crook), while the two are on the Chicago-to-New York supertrain Twentieth Century, to star in this make-or-break play for him.

The musical has some wonderfully accomplished supporting actors, including Mark Linn-Baker as Oscar’s business manager, Michael McGrath as his press agent, Mary Louise Wilson as the religious fanatic who seems ready to bankroll his comeback, and Andy Karl as Lily’s Hollywood boy toy. But this particular production rises and falls on its two leads. I can definitively state that, at least in Kristin Chenoweth’s case, the show stood sturdily on her narrow shoulders.

I first saw Ms. Chenoweth in the Roundabout revival of the 1969 Burt Bacharach-Hal David musical, Promises, Promises. (See my review here.) Despite my astonishment that such a powerful voice could come from such a tiny body, as well as my general admiration for the actress’ talent, it seemed clear that her character in that show, exploited office girl Fran Kubelik, was too small for her.

In her first scene in On the Twentieth Century, Ms. Chenoweth disposed of that character type handily and hilariously. As mousy Mildred Plotka, frustrated by the substandard performance of the actress she’s accompanying on piano, she bursts into glorious song to show how the song should really be done. Instead of firing her, as the irate star wants, producer Oscar Jaffee puts her in the coveted role, glams her up, and transforms her into name-above-the-title Lily Garland.

That delightful comic timing came in a package that included what Ms. Chenoweth has always been known for: a vocal instrument that can rise to any challenges. Those demands wore down the original Lily Garland of the 1978 musical, Madeleine Kahn, who left that production still early in its run because of too many absences occasioned by vocal stress.  

The show, I attended, a preview, was not, in certain ways, what most theatergoers saw in subsequent performances. For one thing, Peter Gallagher—signed as Jaffee—had to miss several performances because of a nasty sinus infection—but his understudy, James Moye, filled in capably, including when I saw him. 

For another, not all the kinks of this enormously high-tech show had been worked out. At a key point in the second act, the show had to stop for several minutes because the computer system that synchronized set changes had unaccountably frozen. (When the musical resumed, it picked up about a minute before it had unceremoniously stopped—leading Ms. Chenoweth to yell coyly to the audience, “I feel like I’ve been through this before!”)

The director responsible for this fast, funny show, Scott Ellis, can now list this among his long streak of triumphs for the Roundabout (The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Harvey, Twelve Angry Men, The Rainmaker, and Company).  Here’s hoping that he’ll bring his magic touch to another unjustly neglected gem soon.

Theater Review: “Promises, Promises,” Starring Sean Hayes and Kristin Chenoweth

I have meant to review this show for nearly three months, but one thing after another got in the way. Now, I have no excuse: What better time to talk about a show, after all, with a musical number called “Turkey-Lurkey Time,” than on Thanksgiving?

You could argue, I suppose, that, given its decidedly tepid opening notices, the continued survival of Promises, Promises has more to do with star power than anything else. But this would be a myopic misreading—just the type of thing that Gotham theater critics provide, without thinking twice.

I almost didn’t see the revival of the 1969 Burt Bacharach-Hal David musical adaptation of Billy Wilder’s classic 1960 corporate satire, The Apartment. Critical carping was so overwhelming that early on, I figured that, more likely than not, their negative judgment had to be more right than wrong.

But eventually I recalled that as a teenager, during a phase of reading plays as opposed to seeing them performed (the type of thing you do without money of your own), I had been struck, in an anthology of comedies by Neil Simon, by how funny the book he created for the show was. And by early September, given the circumstances of my life, I decided that I could really, really, really use a good laugh or two. So I went to the Times Square TKTS booth and, to my astonishment, not only found that I didn’t have to stand in line long, but that the show wasn’t sold out—and that it turned out to be quite good, in the bargain.

You could practically hear the condescension dripping from New York Times critic Ben Brantley’s review of the show back in April. The gist of it was—you’ll never guess!—that the show was “dated.” Its view of sexual harassment was retrograde, he sniffed. He also couldn’t resist a dig at the Times’ critic from the late Sixties, Clive Barnes, who hailed the show for bringing to the stage “the music of today.”

Just one problem with the review: damn near everything. To start with: maybe the show hadn’t been mounted on Broadway in more than 40 years, but what of it? Neither, before its recently closed production at Lincoln Center, had Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific, which, by nearly every measure, is one of the half-dozen greatest American musicals.

The current production, now at New York’s Broadway Theatre, under the direction and choreography of Rob Ashford, is hardly perfect. It is, however, perfectly enjoyable, with much less to be ashamed of than Brantley.

We theater fans, according to the critical naysayers, are supposed to feel that we’re not really receiving an authentic version of the original show, since two Bacharach-David hits have been added to boost Kristin Chenoweth’s role as Fran Kubelik: “A House Is Not a Home” and “I Say a Little Prayer.”

But when have musicals—or their creators, for that matter—ever been so purist? None other than Stephen Sondheim (known, to a considerable portion of theater cognescenti, as “God”) has been known to take the chisel to a number of his shows, most prominently Merrily We Roll Along and Bounce. Moreover, a virtual cottage industry—the “revisal”—has sprouted up that has heavily changed the books of musicals. Why are texts considered objects for theater scalpels but not lyrics and music?

As it happens, the two added songs work unexpectedly well in their new context. Very casual Bacharach fans would be astonished to hear that “I Say a Little Prayer” was originally written as an antiwar song, during the Vietnam War era. The lyrics only hint at this in the most indirect way. As an expression of deep, ineradicable romantic longing in Promises, Promises, on the other hand, it works far better in this musical.

A secondary, sillier controversy broke out about the show after a Newsweek critic wondered how openly gay Sean Hayes could play the romantic heterosexual lead, C.C. (Chuck) Baxter. The short answer is: Easy! But let’s indulge the Newsweek fellow for a tad longer:

1) Theater and film require more willful suspension of disbelief than any of the other performing arts except, perhaps, for operas (and even that appears to be changing, as divas become far more aware of how they look on high-definition screens in cinemas). Does anyone familiar with Susan Sarandon’s romantic history find fully credible the idea of her playing a Roman Catholic nun in Dead Man Walking? And who on earth can accept, without considerable laughter, the concept of Denise Richardson--outfitted in tank top and shorts--as a nuclear physicist named Dr. Christmas Jones in the James Bond feature, The World Is Not Enough? Talk about straining credulity! Given all that, is Sean Hayes as a heterosexual really that outlandish?

2) The only way that Hayes might be regarded as unbelievable would be if he played Chuck in the same campy manner as he did Jack McFarland on Will and Grace. Such was not the case here, however.

3) Hayes is a marvel of comic timing and slapstick. Watch the several minutes of comic gold he spins with one prop--one of those Sixties office chairs meant more to be admired for their unusual shape than to be sat in--during Baxter’s scene with his lousy boss, Jeff Sheldrake. Hayes grins nervously, twists, slides, sinks, and finally collapses. He’s a worthy successor to two other comic masters who preceded him in the role of Chuck: Jack Lemmon, who originated the role of Chuck in The Apartment, and Martin Short, who performed in a 1990s revival of the show at Encores!

4) Hayes’ voice is overshadowed by his comic talent, but it shouldn’t be. It’s not just strong and certain, but able to meet the demands that Bacharach’s acrobatic score makes on it. Take the title song. In a memorable appraisal of Bacharach more than a dozen years ago in The Atlantic Monthly, critic Francis Davis noted how devilishly difficult the song “Promises, Promises” was: it “starts off in a 3/4 time too fast and [is] diabolically syncopated to be called a waltz and then changes meter twenty times, often after just one bar.” Yet Hayes handles it all with aplomb.

If there’s any actor miscast here, it’s Chenoweth. Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment played the role of Fran, the office worker who captures Chuck’s heart, in the most appropriate way: as a perky woman still too young and naïve to know when someone is breaking her heart. Given her age (early 40s) and a glamorous hairdo reminiscent of Bacharach’s ex-wife, Angie Dickinson, it’s difficult to view her Chenoweth's Fran as anything but wised-up in matters of the heart.

And yet, most people--and I would count myself among them--wouldn’t care a bit, anyway, that Chenoweth is not exactly suited for this role. By the end of her first song, I could only marvel how such a large sound could issue from such a remarkably petite woman. I suspect that I wasn’t the only member of the audience who felt this way. Hers is the type of voice any composer would clamor to have perform his or her songs.

One other cast member should be mentioned: Katie Finneran, in one of her last performances before she left the cast to have a baby. Her performance as a barfly of easy virtue is hilarious. The role, very funny in the Wilder film, becomes a sheer, giddy delight here.

Promises, Promises, the only musical comedy from the Bacharach-David team, spawned two Dionne Warwicke hits: "Promises, Promises" and "I'll Never Fall in Love Again." The comic talents of Hayes and Finneran--and the magnificent voice of Chenoweth--were given ample room by the two composers, and it makes one sorry--Ben Brantley to the contrary--that they didn't try more stage productions before their collaboration came to an end after the disastrous musical film adaptation of Lost Horizon.