Theater Review: ‘Mean Girls’ (The Musical), From the Pittsburgh CLO

It’s hard to believe that the film comedy Mean Girls is two decades old now. Somehow, it had escaped my attention that screenwriter Tina Fey had also written the “book” for a musical adaptation that premiered on Broadway in 2018.

Maybe because it came out in January 2024, when audience attention traditionally turns to Oscar hopefuls, but not many people paid much mind when the musical itself became a big-screen vehicle. It did decent but not great business. 

Critics noted sourly that Fey’s original tart observations were now more likely to become lost in the musical collaborators’ heavy-handed moralizing about wicked high-school cliques.

I wasn’t really prepared, then, when earlier this month, I saw the high-energy production mounted by the Pittsburgh CLO as part of its summer season. (The other Broadway imports were Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, and Snuffs.)

It’s not necessarily remarkable that, Mean Girls, like the other two shows, was put together in only about a week. But it is astounding that a production with roughly 20 speaking parts and vigorous choreography was produced with none of the seams showing. So much credit goes to director Mara Newbery Greer.

The main character, Cady (adeptly played by Abigail Isom), is a home-schooled transfer from Kenya, but nothing she has seen in Africa with her parents prepares her for the jungle that is American high-school life. (One of the show’s tongue-in-cheek props is a lion’s head, a stand-in for the school’s athletic nickname.)

A fish out of water, Cady is initially courted by a pair of school misfits, Damian (Jack Haroutunian) and Janis (Lyda Jade Harlan), but at their urging begins spying on a clique of popular girls, the Plastics—until she becomes every bit as bad as this trio of “shiny, fake, and hard” teen tormenters.

As Regina, the “Apex Predator” of the Plastics, Landry Champlin was a formidable presence, lording it over her hangers-on and seething with resentment—at the parent who desperately styles herself a “cool mom,” at a boyfriend whose affection she squandered, and at the clique kingdom from which she finds herself exiled through an embarrassing incident aired on social media. She turned her big solo, “World Burn,” into a sizzling revenge tale.

Sydni Moon endowed Regina acolyte Gretchen with an aching desire to belong and matter in her number, “What’s Wrong With Me?” Rounding out the original Plastics trio, Kaley Bender took Karen from mere shallowness to an avatar of the Blonde Bimbo.

Harlan and Haroutunian may have played characters who didn’t fit into the school’s fabric, but this show certainly provided the actors with multiple opportunities to shine, with the show’s intro number, “Mean,” and Janis’ defiant assertion of self-respect, “I’d Rather Be Me”—and Haroutunian, under the guidance of choreographer Dana Solimando, displaying quite a talent for tap.

The show I attended featured a post-show “talk-back” with cast members and other creative talent. One highlight was cast member Jennifer Lybarger, who, though she took on three adult adult roles in the show—Mrs. George, Mrs. Herron, and Ms. Norbury—could have been forgiven for identifying the most with the last of these figures, the teacher who serves in effect as Ms. Fey’s mouthpiece.

Ms. Lybarger, it turns out, spent the last several years directing at the Pittsburgh CLO Academy—and was justifiably proud that five of her former students found spots on this expertly executed production.

Theater Review: The Musical ‘Ragtime,’ at Lincoln Center

The musical Ragtime has been playing at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater since October (with its engagement there extended through August 2), but I finally got around to seeing it last week. 

Now in its third Broadway run since it premiered in 1997, it is not a musical comedy (the humor relieves the overall tone of tragedy) so much as something quite different: a musical protest epic.

When the E. L. Doctorow novel was published in 1975, its unusual premise—real-life characters interacting with each other and with fictional ones, in ways they were never recorded to have done—brought acclaim as well as debate about its fidelity to history.

These days, whatever stir it creates comes from our current moment: a national atmosphere that takes its cues from a President spewing inflammatory anti-minority rhetoric and policies.

In moving from its prior acclaimed "Encores" concert, the production, under director Lear deBessonet and set designer David Korins, has taken full advantage of its greater resources. A sprawling, multicultural group of characters, whose fates are spelled out over nearly three hours, is matched by startling stage effects, including:

*A trap door that yields the entire cast rising for the opening number, “Prologue: Ragtime”;

*Harry Houdini dropping down to the stage from a fly space;

*A steamship carrying a New Rochelle patriarch on one of Robert Peary’s polar expeditions, while simultaneously the Jewish immigrant Tateh arrives in a “rag ship”; and,

*Other Jewish immigrants walking in a circle around the stage turntable.

Surprisingly, the score by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens includes without concentrating on the musical genre of the title, while also mixing elements of Harlem jazz, gospel, Jewish klezmer/folk music, Sousa-style marches, even impassioned operatic ballads.

All of this, along with the early 20^th-century costuming, might encourage the unwary to think they will be seeing a piece of nostalgic Americana—except that, as we find in following the fortunes of the three families in pursuit of the American Dream in this pageant, the good ol’ days were marked by media sensationalism, racial divisions, and violence.

Arriving penniless on the Lower East Side, desperate to keep his young daughter from want, Tateh uses a moving picture book he creates as a foothold into the fledgling silent film era, restyling himself as Baron Ashkenazy. In New Rochelle, an African-American baby boy left on their doorstep rocks the once stable relationship between Father and Mother. The child’s biological father, aspiring African-American musician Coalhouse Walker Jr., is maddened into domestic terrorism when his attempt to seek redress for the destruction of his new car is repeatedly frustrated by a white establishment that is at best indifferent and at worst hostile.

The soundtrack to the musical traces these characters’ transformation and, sometimes, dislocation: 

*Ben Levi Ross expertly voices the pivot by Mother’s Younger Brother from purposelessness to committed radicalism in "The Night That [Emma] Goldman Spoke at Union Square." 

*Tateh (played by Brandon Uranowitz) segues from protective father in “Gliding” to early motion-picture impresario in “Buffalo Nickel Photoplay, Inc.” 

*The exquisite mezzo-soprano Caissie Levy delineates Mother’s progression from dutiful wife (“Goodbye My Love”) to outright questioning of her society and marriage (“Back to Before”), while 

*Colin Donnell makes plain Father’s rigidity and unease with changing times and marginalized people with “New Music.”

But the greatest alteration of any character—and the steepest vocal demands made on any of the talented cast—comes in the form of Coalhouse.

Joshua Henry, previously Tony-nominated for Carousel, makes him first a powerhouse of optimism and pride in his work as a pianist (“Wheels of a Dream”) that dramatically turns into all-consuming rage (“Coalhouse's Soliloquy”) at a Progressive Era America oblivious to the grinding daily humiliations inflicted on African-Americans. And his baritone rings with righteous power in the musical’s finale, the protest song “Make Them Hear You.”

I came to the musical partly because my curiosity had been aroused by watching the 1981 film adaptation directed by Milos Forman.

I was surprised, then, by the greater presence onstage of anarchist agitator Emma Goldman and the total disappearance of police commissioner Rhinelander Waldo (played onscreen by James Cagney), whose function in the plot is assigned to DA Charles Whitman.

But Terrence McNally, author of the musical’s “book” (non-musical elements), was in both cases sticking closer to the novel.

Too bad that he and the other creators of the musical didn’t add nuance to another element of the book that they carried over: its stereotypical treatment of Irish-Americans. 

Unlike the musical’s white Protestants, Jewish immigrants, and African-American families, they are depicted as holders of service jobs—and almost singularly ignorant, resentful, and bigoted in a country where such personality traits crossed ethnic, sectional, and sectarian lines.

Mother upbraids her servant Kathleen for not moving faster to help the baby left outside, like Scarlett O’Hara bossing around Prissy in Gone With the Wind. And, lest we be in any doubt about the ethnicity of the cretins who destroy Coalhouse’s beautiful car, not only is their leader named Willie Conklin but they operate out of the “Emerald Isle Firehouse.”

In the last decade, New York’s theater community has made a laudable effort to foster inclusiveness and avoid offending particular groups. With a couple of short text edits, the Vivian Beaumont could have done so again in this case. The fact that it didn’t doesn’t speak well of their judgment.

The practice of “revisal” has arisen in recent years to clean up older, worthy musicals by removing outdated or stereotypical elements. Future companies that mount Ragtime should consider doing so to burnish an already fine musical.

This Day in Musical History (Stephen Sondheim’s ‘Pacific Overtures’ Opens)

Jan. 11, 1976—After a Boston preview and a one-month run at the Kennedy Center, Pacific Overtures premiered at Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre. It was another success d’estime, but hardly a blockbuster, by Stephen Sondheim, closing after 193 performances.

Starting in the 1960s, twentysomething John Weidman worked on the story, about how the "black ship" of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry's East India Squadron ended more than two centuries of isolation from non-Dutch Westerners imposed by Japan's shogunate.

But after toiling on this straight drama for years, producer Harold Prince told Weidman he saw wider possibilities for opening it up, particularly as a musical in collaboration with Sondheim.

Though the show’s title came from a letter sent by Commodore Perry, it appealed to Sondheim’s interest in wordplay and ambiguity. The U.S. naval leader meant the phrase to signal peaceful gestures toward diplomacy (absurd on its face, considering that Perry trained guns on the populace during “negotiations”). But for Sondheim, it also meant an opening through music (“overtures”) of two nations separated by an ocean (the Pacific).

If not quite a 21^st-century “clash of civilizations,” the encounter certainly changed both races. And it startled both the creators of the show and its American viewers in that bicentennial year—who, if they heard of Commodore Perry at all, would have associated him with the kind of triumphalism displayed by Samuel Eliot Morison in his 1967 biography, Ol’ Bruin.

(For a more modern and objective perspective on these events, you might want to turn to Peter Booth Wiley’s 1990 history, Yankees in the Land of the Gods.)

In the Seventies, each show that Sondheim and Prince, had already mounted (Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, The Frogs) stretched the boundaries of the American musical. But this topped it all.

The all-male cast (an issue that Sondheim and Prince eventually revisited) was the least of it. The plot would be seen entirely through non-Western eyes: two Japanese friends caught (and made the scapegoats for) the ensuring epic national transition, through the conventions of Kabuki (a form of Japanese theater).

And Sondheim had set himself the task of writing the score within quasi-Japanese style of parallel 4ths, without any leading-tone or pentatonic scale. The whole thing proved unexpectedly, devilishly difficult.

(Nearly 30 years later, at the Roundabout Theater Company’s 2004 revival at Studio 54, Prince and Sondheim would live to witness the logical conclusion of their wish that the action be viewed through foreign eyes, as the musical was directed this time by Amon Miyamoto.)

As with most of those pre-workshop days of musical theater, changes were made on the fly, with deadlines bearing down on everyone. In getting ready the Kennedy Center production, Sondheim told one actor that his big number would be replaced with “Chrysanthemum Tea,” a song with four verses that needed to be memorized in three days!

In addition, “Welcome to Kanagawa,” Sondheim wrote in Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981), was “the most annoyingly problematic song I’ve ever written. With each revival of Pacific Overtures I rewrite it and with each revival it fails to be funny.”

The wonder is that everything turned out as well as it did. Sondheim himself claimed to the end of his life that “Someone in a Tree” was the favorite of all his songs: “I like the swing and relentlessness of the music and the poetic Orientalism of the lyrics, but what I love is its ambition, its attempt to collapse past, present and future into one packaged song form.”

For more than 40 years, this was the Sondheim musical with which I was least familiar. I never heard the whole thing with lyrics, and had to make do with an orchestral suite arranging its seven “dances” or songs through a 1985 Book-of-the-Month Club collection of his work.

Then this week, in preparing this post, I came across this YouTube clip of the 1976 production, which ended up being shown then on Japanese television.

The Kennedy Center staged Pacific Overtures again as part of its 2001-2002 Sondheim Festival. But I think that producing it at this time would be the last thing that current management would consider.

A show about—let’s face it—imperialism, would not sit well with a chauvinistic, saber-rattling administration that effectively dictates policy and governance to a cultural institution once largely insulated from it.

Theater Review: ‘Bull Durham’ the Musical, at the Paper Mill Playhouse

Bull Durham, released 37 years ago, is not only one of my favorite baseball movies but one of my favorite rom-coms.

The screenplay, originating from Ron Shelton’s experience as a minor-leaguer, is filled from first to last with quirky characters and consistently hilarious dialogue that have made it a classic beyond the confines of "the summer game."

Yet, when I heard the news that the Paper Mill Playhouse had turned it into a musical comedy, I wasn’t only curious about how well it had been adapted to the stage.

I also wanted to see if Susan Werner, a singer-songwriter who has adeptly explored multiple musical genres and is a delightfully spontaneous concert performer, could work similar magic with this most difficult of theatrical forms.

And I wanted to see another show, after an interval of a couple of decades, at the Paper Mill Playhouse, New Jersey’s primary performing space for musical comedy.

I managed to catch the musical just before it closed last weekend—poetic justice, as the baseball season concluded at the same time with the Los Angeles Dodgers’ epic Game 7 victory in the World Series.

Except for minor tinkering, the plot of the musical remains the same as the movie. Baseball groupie Annie Savoy, who each season takes one minor leaguer from the Durham Bulls under her wing, as it were, forms the apex of a romantic triangle with Ebie Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh, a wild young pitcher with “a million-dollar arm and a five-cent head,” and Crash Davis, a cerebral catcher on the downslope of his career, hoping for a last chance to make it back to the major leagues (“The Show”) where he had once spent 24 days.

Shelton has written the “book” (the non-musical portions) of the show, and it scores laughs almost as often as the film. The subplot, though—the romance between devout Christian Jimmy and the more uninhibited Millie—remains largely tangential to the main Annie-Crash-Nuke complications, and a song featuring Annie and the other female characters (“Every Woman Deserves to Wear White”) does little to help.

One of the pleasures of the movie is the way it punctures cliches of the baseball film and the rom-com. The musical, particularly near the end, settles for conventionality rather than the shaggy, sexy charm that sustained the movie. It should have heeded Crash’s advice to LaLoosh: don’t always serve up what is expected.

Werner’s songs begin with the appropriately gospel-tinged “Church of Baseball,” before seguing into more country textures--all in her wheelhouse as a composer who has dabbled in multiple musical genres.

Songs are, with good reason, considered the toughest element to manage in musicals. Although the best are memorable (for instance, “Whatever Lola Wants” and “You Gotta Have Heart” from the one great baseball musical, Damn Yankees), all should be character-based. Considering the decade in which the show has been gestating, with earlier versions premiering in Atlanta and Raleigh, N.C., the lulls in Bull Durham (notably, “A Little Time to Myself”) should have been eliminated.

Luckily, other songs fare better. Although “Pensacola”—with reflections by Bulls manager Skip, coach Larry, and announcer Uncle Roy on their brief road flings—does nothing to advance the plot, for instance, it injects a terrific jolt of comic energy into the show.

In Carmen Cusack, this production has an ideal Annie. She not only has the requisite comic seductiveness and underlying wistfulness of this superfan down pat, but a voice that can convey all kinds of emotions (not surprising, considering her stellar resume featuring roles in musicals like Call Me Madam and South Pacific).

Will Savarese brings an electric comic spirit to Nuke that exceeds even what Tim Ribbons brought to the role onscreen. In his big number, “She’s Mine,” he hilariously suggests nothing so much as a hyper-caffeinated Elvis.

As Crash Davis, Nik Walker doesn’t have the kind of showy roles that Cusack and Savarese possess. But he is every bit the strong, solid presence required in this catcher acquired by the Bulls because he’s smart enough to tutor Nuke but too self-conscious to survive for long in the major leagues—or, as Annie says in the film, implicitly contrasting him with Nuke, “The world is made for people who aren’t cursed with self-awareness.” Annie and Crash are two souls who find in each other a refuge amid the midlife perplexity of facing an uncertain future.

As a musical, Bull Durham is not what it could be. But, while no grand slam, neither is it a strikeout. Call it a solid double.

This Day in Theater History (‘Ernest in Love,’ Musical Adaptation of Wilde, Opens Off-Broadway)

May 4, 1960—They’ve made musicals from the grimmest possible subject matter, so what’s wrong with adapting a great English comedy as light as a souffle? That, evidently, was the thinking behind Ernest in Love, which transformed The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde into a clever musical that premiered in New York at the off-Broadway Gramercy Arts Theatre.

Sixteen years ago, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Eugene O’Neill’s only comedy, Ah! Wilderness, had, a half century before, been turned into a musical: Take Me Along. The company that mounted the revival, New York’s Irish Repertory Theatre, was also responsible for unearthing another musical that had faded out of popular consciousness over the years: Ernest in Love.

In the mid-to-late 1950s, it was possible to envision musicals taken from almost any source, mounted in almost any medium. Lerner and Loewe had struck it rich on Broadway by turning George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion into My Fair Lady, and Rodgers and Hart had crafted a musical especially for TV with Cinderella.

It was only a matter of time before someone had the bright idea of adapting another play by a witty Anglo-American playwright into a TV hour of song, Who’s Earnest?, that was shown on The United States Steel Hour in 1957. Someone then had the idea of expanding the show and taking it to the stage, which it did three years later.

The show’s creators, while accomplished songwriters, didn’t have the exalted pedigree of other musical creators of the time. 

Anne Croswell, responsible for the book and lyrics, had been a copywriter for the J. Walter Thompson and Leo Burnett advertising agencies, a television production assistant, and creator of the 1956 Democratic campaign song "Believe in Stevenson" for penning Who’s Earnest? and Huck Finn for The United States Steel Hour. 

Composer Lee Pockriss, a frequent collaborator with Croswell, had received a Grammy nomination for the Perry Como hit, "Catch a Falling Star.”

Critics applauded the show for its droll lyrics and for retaining Wilde’s whimsical plot and dialogue, but few people left the theater humming the songs.

Ernest in Love was quickly overshadowed by another Off-Broadway musical that premiered the day before its debut, The Fantasticks, which in its original run went on for another 42 years. Even after moving to the Cherry Lane Theatre, Ernest totaled 111 performances.

Luckily, an original-cast recording was released a month and half later. That has helped to ensure that the musical would not go completely unnoticed since then, with productions by professional, college, and community theaters. But there’s always been a sense of it being dusted off, even unearthed, whenever someone gets around to it.

Croswell and Pockriss, then in their thirties, lived into the new millennium, but never had a major success on the Broadway stage. Their closest shot, Tovarich, a 1963 star vehicle for Vivien Leigh, could not sustain its run past six months once the talented but troubled actress suffered a nervous breakdown at a matinee.

Though Croswell continued to write shows produced in smaller venues like Connecticut’s Goodspeed Opera House for another few decades, she was not seen again on the Great White Way once her 1968 musical, I’m Solomon, closed after seven performances—a legendary flop that, playwright and screenwriter William Goldman estimated, lost between $700,000 and $800,000.

As for Pockriss, he went on to have his share of hits (e.g., Shelley Fabares’ “Johnny Angel”), much-heard children’s songs in the 1980s for Sesame Street, and a 1970 musical adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby that never made it to production. But another novelty song of his continues to reverberate in my mind: “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini.”

Whenever the latter tune pops up on oldies stations, it’s always too soon for my taste. Someone who felt similarly was director Billy Wilder, who featured it in his 1961 Cold War satire One, Two, Three as the music that the East German police used to torture a suspected spy.

Just think: Within a year, falling from Oscar Wilde to “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini.” It’s even worse than going from writing Frasier or The Gilmore Girls to Married With Children. It may have provided royalties for the rest of Pockriss’ life, but all the same…

Movie Quote of the Day (‘An American in Paris,’ on Looking Beyond a Man’s Exterior)

“It's not a pretty face, I grant you, but underneath its flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character.”— Adam Cook [played by pianist, actor, author, and wit Oscar Levant], in An American in Paris (1951), screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner, directed by Vincente Minnelli

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Annie,’ As Miss Hannigan Laments Her Missed Show-Biz Chances)

“I haven’t told you how I was almost one of Hootie’s Blowfish.”— Miss Hannigan (played by Cameron Diaz), in the remake of Annie (2014), screenplay by Will Gluck and Aline Brosh McKenna, directed by Will Gluck

Song Lyric of the Day (Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘Cinderella,’ Eyed Jealously by Stepsisters)

“She’s a frothy little bubble
With a frilly sort of air,
And with very little trouble
I could pull out all her hair!”—The ironically named “Joy” (right, in the photo) with a “Stepsisters’ Lament,” in Cinderella, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, music by Richard Rodgers (1957)

Quote of the Day (Pete Townshend, on the Ultimate Optimism of ‘Tommy’)

“I don’t want it to feel as though I think ‘Tommy’ needs to be treated only seriously. It has lightheartedness and joy. It has the idea that whether you’re an abused child or a healthy child, we prevail ultimately, by turning toward the light. That’s simplistic but it’s also powerful, particularly when set to music.”—Rock ‘n’ roll songwriter and The Who guitarist Pete Townshend, on the upcoming revival of his “rock opera” “Tommy,” quoted by Rob Tannenbaum, “Talking to a New Generation,” The New York Times, Mar. 24, 2024

It will be interesting to see the reviews following “Tommy”’s opening tonight at the Nederlander Theatre. But, however it’s received, the music’s place in rock ‘n’ roll history is secure.

The original LP’s release in 1969 climaxed a decade of increasing ambition and sophistication for rock ‘n’ roll, and pointed the way forward to how the concept album could become, as a November 2020 Spin Magazine article put it, “the first album to successfully blend exceptional storytelling with advanced production.”

Moreover, it was prescient in examining the cult of celebrity, and spiritual striving in an age of cultural fracture.

This Day in Musical History (Adaptation of O’Casey’s ‘Juno’ Opens, Then Flops)

Mar. 9, 1959—Juno might not have been a “can’t miss” musical, but it came loaded with expectations because of its constellation of talents when it opened at Broadway’s Winter Garden Theater.

Its music and lyrics were by the creator of a legendary Depression musical, with a book by a playwright who would eventually write Fiddler on the Roof; a male lead with Hollywood credentials for comedy; an innovative choreographer who changed how dance worked in musicals; an Oscar-winning actor equally at home with directing for the stage; a beloved actress returning to Broadway; and an Irish playwright whose tragicomedy formed the foundation of the show.

But Juno the musical, like its titular heroine, was plagued by misfortune—more specifically, critics who couldn’t hide their disappointment with the result of this all-star team. It closed after 16 performances, and, despite defenders who have attempted revivals, it remains seldom performed.

The musical was based on a 1924 landmark of the Irish Literary Renaissance, Juno and the Paycock, generally regarded as the best entry in Sean O’Casey’s “Dublin Trilogy” set in the period surrounding the Irish War of Independence and Civil War. (See my blog post from a decade ago that reviewed a production at New York’s Irish Repertory Theatre.)

The first adaptation of the play was for the screen rather than the musical stage, in a 1929 movie by Alfred Hitchcock—what biographer Peter Ackroyd called the director’s “first thoroughly conceived and consistent talkie.”

Uncharacteristically, that film included few of Hitchcock’s visual flourishes, but at least it stayed largely faithful to the source. It turned out to be more successful than Hitchcock’s last couple of releases, as he transitioned from silents to talkies.

But Hitchcock, possessed of a vigorous if often twisted sense of humor, may have felt little need to tinker with O’Casey’s dialogue.

In contrast, it was O’Casey’s socialism, not his comic sense, that appealed to songwriter Marc Blitzstein, who had achieved notoriety two decades before with his agitprop musical The Cradle Will Rock.

More recently, his translation of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera had turned that tale of Weimar corruption into what was then the longest-running musical in Off Broadway history—and giving him as much clout with investors as he would ever receive.

Book writer Joseph Stein, though no longer a Marxist, retained enough progressive sympathies as an Adlai Stevenson Democrat to work well with the more leftist Blitzstein.

All of that may have helped secure early on O’Casey’s approval of their project (called, at this initial stage, Daarlin’ Man). 

The playwright never left his home in England to view rehearsals or performances of this musical, and he could be caustic toward anyone who looked askance at his work (as the Abbey Theatre, which rejected some of his more expressionist plays after the “Dublin Trilogy,” could attest). 

But a discussion with Blitzstein and tapes of the songs contemplated for the show led O'Casey to green-light the project.

One fact, had it been considered more thoroughly, might have forestalled this blessing: though Stein and Blitzstein may have shared O’Casey’s leftist sympathies, they did not exhibit the sharp sense of humor that had leavened Juno and the Paycock. 

The tone of the musical, according to future Juno star Victoria Clark, more closely resembled another Weill piece of musical theater, the tragic Street Scene.

Two out-of-town tryouts, in Washington and Boston, proved increasingly troubled. In the spring and early summer of 1958, Blitzstein barely survived an appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, in which he admitted to Communist Party membership till 1949 but refused to name names.

Just when the production appeared to be coming together, Tony Richardson, a rising British theater talent who soon became famous for the film version of Look Back in Anger and the Oscar-winning Best Picture Tom Jones, backed out as director because of scheduling conflicts. His replacement, Vincent J. Donehue, had limited experience to that point with musicals.

Neither did movie and theater star Melvyn Douglas, called in to take over the role of “Captain” Boyle when the choice of the creative team, James Cagney, would only participate if the property were adapted for the screen.

Although the actress who played Boyle’s long-suffering wife and family mainstay, Shirley Booth, had somewhat more experience than Donehue and Douglas with musicals, she was nervous about executing Irish stepdances and playing a “heroic” figure that demanded “an Irish Judith Anderson.”

The production's only Irish actor, Jack MacGowran (suggested by O’Casey), after being provoked repeatedly by Donehue, unleashed a profanity-laced rehearsal diatribe indicating that nobody in the show knew anything about O’Casey or what they were trying to do.

This represented “a fusillade of abuse for director, company and producing organization such as I have rarely heard in many decades of performance work,” Douglas recalled, stunning all concerned because, the leading man conceded, “there was a great deal of truth to what he said.”

Though Blitzstein tried to stay even-tempered, even he was prone to snapping, as when he unloaded on choreographer Agnes de Mille (whose work in this instance, some would later say, was among the best of her career).

Reviews of the January 1959 performances in Washington, while observing that O’Casey’s play presented unique challenges in adapting, still pointed out the musical’s deficiencies in tone and tightness.

A month later, Boston critics—aware of word of mouth already spreading, as well as interviews in which Booth and especially Douglas confessed to their insecurities about the demands required by their roles— noted the same problems.

That proved the undoing of Donehue, who was sacked the morning after the Boston opening.

The history of Broadway includes occasional shows that are rescued from near-certain disaster. But it’s more often the case that the problems apparent before an opening are not fixed in time.

And so, despite the replacement of Donehue with Jose Ferrer, who brought considerable stage credibility and film renown (including an Oscar for Cyrano de Bergerac), and new, better songs from Blitzstein (“It’s Not Irish” and “For Love”), the creative team behind Juno could not improve matters enough in the month before opening on Broadway.

Years later, theater professionals and fans alike would wonder how a show with so much talent behind the scenes and onstage (not just Booth and Douglas, but also, in early stages of their careers, Jean Stapleton and Sada Thompson), could have misfired.

One of the less charitable detractors was Broadway composer Richard Rodgers. In the taxi ride home from the show, he and his wife ridiculed the show's “prosaic lyrics and unmelodiousness,” remembered their daughter Mary Rodgers in her posthumous memoir Shy. 

“Maybe the driver could sing ‘We Have Reached Our Destination’ to similar effect,’” Richard said acidly.

If Broadway musical history is filled with disasters, it also includes shows that, years after their underwhelming openings, find far longer lives, either through audiences who could better appreciate what its creators were attempting (Pal Joey, Chicago) or a combination of more appropriate stagecraft and casting (the current Stephen Sondheim revival, Merrily We Roll Along, starring Daniel Radcliffe).

Blitzstein had an example closer at hand: his Threepenny Opera translation that thrust the Weill-Brecht work into the elite circle of most-performed musicals. Undoubtedly inspired by that example, Juno revivals have been mounted over the years at New York’s Vineyard Theater and City Center, and Chicago’s TimeLine Theatre.

The outcome has been the same: a good try (especially in these productions’ unbending refusal to provide a happy ending), but still a failure. It’s not likely that this verdict will change soon--unless, perhaps, it's staged as an opera rather than a musical (as has been the case over the past four decades with Street Scene and Sondheim's Sweeney Todd--and how Blitzstein's Regina was fashioned from its 1949 creation)

The best way to understand why that situation is so sad is to listen to YouTube performances of some of the musical’s songs, including Rebecca Luker’s rendition of “I Wish It So” or the Celia Keenan-Bolger-Clarke Thorell duet of “My True Heart.”

Appreciations: Barbra Streisand’s ‘Yentl,’ 40 Years On

Forty years ago this holiday season, moviegoers—and, especially, the all-important Oscar voters—watched with more than the usual amount of interest one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars bring to the screen what many thought was, at best, a niche product.

But Barbra Streisand had the drive, the clout, and the money to put her vision before a mass audience.

Though not a blockbuster, Yentl, an adaptation of the Isaac Bashevis Singer short story “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” performed well enough ($40 million on a $16 million budget) that the singer-actress would be able to get behind the cameras again a few more times in the next dozen years.

I had never viewed the film until I watched a DVD in preparation for writing this blog. My reaction may well have been different had I seen it when it premiered. 

For all its imperfections, I still can’t help but respect the zeal and craftsmanship with which the singer-actress made this labor of love.

You will notice that my headline for this post has the phrase, “Barbra Streisand’s ‘Yentl.’” I don’t think a truer three words were ever put on this blog.

It wasn’t “Isaac Bashevis Singer’s ‘Yentl.’” Great storyteller that the Nobel Literature laureate was, his tale left enormous gaps in the narrative that he felt no need to fill. The way that fiction such as his describes thought and time diverges from the methods of film. And what he felt the story was “about” differed quite a bit from Streisand’s.

This is one instance in which Hollywood’s annoying habit of saying “A Film By [director's name],” without acknowledging collaborators, makes sense. Streisand played multiple roles throughout the production: star, singer, co-screenwriter, producer, and director.

The last actress who had performed this actor-hyphenate role was Ida Lupino in the late Forties to mid-Fifties. But the pictures Lupino made were low-budget. Streisand's was far more high-profile. 

For all her admitted large ego (which, she believed, gave her "strength" to achieve), she was also acutely aware, in a sexist industry, that Yentl's failure could set back progress not just for her but also for other women who hoped to helm a project. 

To her credit, Streisand saw the movie through, from beginning to end—doubly extraordinary since it took 15 years to get it made.

The seeds of the project took root in Streisand’s mind even before 1968 acting screen debut, Funny Girl, when she came upon the opening phrase of the story: “After her father's death.”

The inscription on the tombstone of her own father, who died when she was only 15 months old, reminded her more than a little of Yentl’s deceased parent: “Beloved Teacher and Scholar.” (The film ended up “dedicated to my father...and to all our fathers.”)

Among the difficulties Streisand faced in bringing the story to the screen:

*The disbelief of movie industry associates, even her intimates, about commercial prospects for such subject matter. Streisand’s agent in 1968, David Begelman, strongly advised her that taking on a character so identified as Jewish right after Funny Girl risked stereotyped her, and would not fly with moviegoers anyway. The star broke with a later agent, the legendary Sue Mengers, in part for expressing similar doubts. Her commitment to the project also severely strained her relationship with then-lover Jon Peters. By my count, at least three studios—Orion, Columbia, and Polygram Pictures—passed on the proposal until United Artists agreed, on the basis of several concessions by Streisand.

*Skepticism from some of the same sources about whether Streisand was the right person for the role. Singer did not specifically state Yentl’s age, but most people who’ve read the story (myself included) believe she’s no more than 20. By the time Streisand came across the tale, she was already in her mid-20s. The longer the project took, the older she looked for a yeshiva student. Streisand herself thought her character was about 28. By taking care of herself (and with the right lighting and hairstyle), Streisand may have felt that, even at age 40 (when she was finally able to go before the cameras), she could pass for someone in her late 20s. That was surely wishful thinking, but the history of Hollywood is filled with actors who try to pass themselves off for younger.

*The gender-bending plot was one that neither Hollywood nor audiences was accustomed to. Yentl loves the Torah so much that she is willing to dress as a male to be in the one environment where she can study it to her heart's content: a yeshiva, a traditional Jewish school centering on the teaching of Rabbinic literature. The film's script explored the complications of cross-dressing, including how both a male and female come to care for her in different ways. Even Streisand admitted to concentrating more on the feminist aspects of the story rather than its gender-bending ones. But the subtext was hard to miss, and the movie is now regarded as something of a landmark in LBGT depictions.

*Streisand had to direct this because her initial choices passed on it. One, Ivan Passer, told the actress in 1971 that she was too old and famous to play the role. Another, Milos Forman, upon hearing her pitch, gave her the same advice as Passer: Given her strong feelings on how the movie should be made, she should direct it herself.

*Much of the film was shot on location in Czechoslovakia—which, while it placed her far away from interfering Hollywood “suits,” also meant she was cut off from the many resources and personnel available for domestic shooting. (Filming at a British studio went more smoothly.)

*Amy Irving initially resisted being cast as Hadass Vishkower, the unwitting center of an unwitting love triangle. She might have felt better when all was said and done, as she was nominated for an Academy Award—the only one she ever received.

*Her leading man made a clumsy pass at her. In her new memoir, My Name Is Barbra, the star recalled her astonishment when, in pressing Mandy Patinkin for why he had acted so oddly in a recent scene, he blurted out, “I thought we were going to have a more personal relationship”—i.e., an affair. After she threatened to replace him if he didn’t act more professionally, he complied, but he still unnerved her enough that she scrapped a planned love scene with him. (That last decision may have been for the best, because there was nothing like this in Singer's story.)

*An actor cast as the rabbi died right after his run-through. Harold Goldblatt made an excellent impression, but Streisand (who had cradled his head until the ambulance arrived) was flabbergasted to learn that he’d understated his years by 20 years to get his role.

*Rumors circulated that Streisand was flubbing her shot at directing. The actress’ penchant for asking for advice led some to wonder if she knew what she was doing, according to Gregg Kilday's December 2015 profile of her for The Hollywood Reporter. Conversely, her reputation for being difficult sparked rumors that she was driving the crew crazy. (Streisand was so sensitive to such talk that, for the 25^th anniversary of the film’s release, the accompanying DVD included the studio crew’s typed letter to a London paper denying any discord—the first time I’ve ever seen anything like this in a product meant to celebrate, rather than defend, work from long ago. Streisand might have been a force of nature, but that didn’t lessen her sensitivity to charges that she was a perfectionist diva.)

*The insurance company was ready to yank control away from her just as she began shooting. In a prior post on Tyrone Power’s fatal 1958 heart attack on location for Solomon and Sheba, I demonstrated one of the lesser-known aspects of moviemaking: how insurance affects production in ways that a layman can’t imagine. Streisand experienced her own moments of stress at the hands of an insurance company when, just before shooting, she was told she’d have to sign a completion bond, or a written contract guaranteeing a movie will be finished and delivered on schedule and within budget. At one point, when she was $1 million over the budget, the company working with United Artists, Completion Bond Co., told her they’d take control of the movie away from her if she didn’t complete dubbing within six weeks rather than the 10 she believed she needed, according to Streisand’s February 1984 interview with Dale Pollack for Playgirl Magazine. (Completion Bond was not making an idle threat: In 1992, Spike Lee required financial assistance from prominent African-Americans like Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, Earvin (Magic) Johnson, Janet Jackson, and Prince to retain control of Malcolm X from the company after he went $5 million over budget.)

*Staying on budget entailed other financial sacrifices and even risks for Streisand. As she told Pollack, she didn't get paid for co-writing the script, was compensated only scale for directing, and had to agree to give back half her salary if she went over budget.

A compromised, but still impressive, product

Although as a woman, Streisand was operating under greater constraints than any studio would allow a man, it's also true that she was now working in an environment in which directors of both sexes were being scrutinized more heavily than they had been in years. Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate fiasco had curtailed director-driven cinema and given carte-blanche to studio execs and their bean-counters.

That swing in power not only meant that Yentl would be a musical, but dictated what kind of musical it would be.

Adding songs to the screenplay was suggested to Streisand by United Artists, as a means of bolstering its box-office appeal. The soundtrack would, in effect, cross-promote the film as well. 

Lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman, whom Streisand had used, to Oscar-winning impact, on The Way We Were, had the idea of creating the songs as interior monologues by Yentl. It was a fascinating, unusual, even distinctive form of a musical. 

Both Mandy Patinkin and Amy Irving were accomplished singers (he, on Broadway in Evita; she, onscreen, as a country-and-western singer, in Honeysuckle Rose), but the soundtrack for Yentl made no use of their talents. In fact, nobody else but Streisand sings in the film.

Onscreen, then, there is no interaction between the characters in these minutes. Additionally, with only nine days for rehearsing actors for musical numbers, Streisand kept dancing to a minimum, retaining highly respected Cats choreographer Gillian Lynne basically for a wedding scene. Although director of photography David Watkin provided Streisand with beautifully lit scenes, her preference for a long lens kept variety to a minimum.  

The upshot was not merely that the camera was largely stationary for this "motion picture," but also that the focus would be squarely on Streisand, opening her to the familiar charge that she was egocentric.

 And, with the director persuading United Artists to allow her to go beyond their two-hour limit by 12 minutes (and with an additional four minutes inserted for the DVD "director's cut"), the overall pace can be languid.

After the film's release, Singer wrote an article for The New York Times that criticized the movie on three points: 

1) Streisand did not understand the character as well as Tovah Feldshuh, who had played Yentl on Broadway in 1976 (and who, at 27, was admittedly more age-appropriate than Streisand); 

2) as a director, Streisand allowed herself to "monopolize" the action at the expense of other cast members; and 

3) the "kitsch ending" (which is reminiscent of Streisand's "Don't Rain on My Parade" in the film Funny Girl) "was done without any kinship to Yentl's character, her ideals, her sacrifice, her great passion for spiritual achievement."

Predictably, Streisand (who had rejected Singer's script in 1969) dismissed him as a misogynist. My own feeling is that, though the author's points are well-taken, he might not have grasped that a work of creation can have a very different meaning among those who encounter and embrace it than he might have originally intended.

I agree, then, with Pauline Kael's assessment in The New Yorker, that Yentl “has a distinctive and surprising spirit. It's funny, delicate, and intense—all at the same time.”

More specifically, the movie was well-cast, with Streisand eliciting excellent performances all around (including, in the end, the troublesome Patinkin); she sings the Bergman-Michel Legrand tunes with unrivaled psychological insight and purity of tone; and, from its first shot, it pays full tribute to Judaism as a culture with a deep reverence bordering on passion for the book.

Though winning a Golden Globe for her direction, Streisand remains peeved that she was not nominated for either this movie nor her follow-up behind the director's chair, The Prince of Tides. 

But she can take comfort in the fact that her success with Yentl made it possible for women to advance from outside the mainstream (where Lupino and Italian director Lina Wertmuller had been confined) to studio fare previously reserved entirely for men. I hope that, if Greta Gerwig wins an Oscar in 2024 for Barbie, she makes sure to thank Streisand for paving the way years before.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Veep,’ With Jonah on Alexander Hamilton, ‘Our First Puerto Rican President’)

Jonah Ryan [played by Timothy C. Simons]: “You know what we really need? A cool name.”

Guy #1: “Libertonians. It says what we're about.”

Jonah: “No, it sounds like a gay a cappella group.”

Bill Jaeger [played by Seth Morris]: “I got it: ‘The Beltway Boys’!”

Jonah: “Jesus Christ, are you tag teaming this? Those are awful. I got it! How about ‘The Jeffersons’?”

Jeager: “That's pretty good but it also—you know this—happens to be the name of a—"

Jonah: “President, yeah, that's exactly why I like it, Jaeger. Tommy J, he's not all played out like George Washington or Hamilton."

Woman #1: “Hamilton wasn't a president.”

Jonah: “Then why the f--- did they write a musical about him? No, he was our first Puerto Rican president.”

Jaeger: “ 'The Washingtones.’”

Jonah: “No, I am the white Hamilton of the Jeffersons and that's our name. To The Jeffersons!”

Everyone else: “To the Jeffersons!”

Jonah: “That's right. No one's going to keep us down because we are moving on up!”—Veep, Season 6, Episode 6, “Qatar,” original air date May 21, 2017, teleplay by Steve Hely and Armando Iannucci, directed by Becky Martin

Song Lyric of the Day (Lerner and Loewe’s ‘Camelot,’ on ‘The Lusty Month of May’)

“Those dreary vows that ev'ryone takes,
Ev'ryone breaks.
Ev'ryone makes divine mistakes
The lusty month of May!”—“The Lusty Month of May,” from the musical Camelot, lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, music by Frederick Loewe (1960)
 
“Vows” are usually made in June, but if this witty Lerner and Loewe song—not to mention a couple of current events—is to be believed, certain privileged people have trouble living up to them for a full 12 months. Or, in the most recent case, two septuagenarian males who were lusty indeed in their younger and middle years.
 
In London this weekend, the place went mad over the coronation of King Charles III. The oath he took featured three major vows: that he would “govern the Peoples of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland… according to their respective laws and customs”; that he would “cause Law and Justice, in Mercy, to be executed in all your judgements”; and, most concretely if problematically, that he would “maintain and preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of England, and the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government thereof, as by law established in England.”
 
His Highness, you might recall, had a bit of a problem back when he was still Prince of Wales, when he broke his marriage vows to Princess Diana by engaging in an affair with the woman who now gets to be known as Queen Camilla.
 
Here in the United States, another figure who would like similar deference (and gets it, but only from his own Republican Party) had his own problems with vows. 

In a deposition made public at a civil suit now entering what may be its final phase, this fellow (let’s call him the one bestowed on him by talk-show host Stephen Colbert a year and a half ago, “Tangerine Palpatine”--or, in a pinch, the "Florida Fondler") had trouble recalling that he took up with his second wife before he was done with his first.
 
More seriously, he consistently violated—though never so flagrantly as on Jan. 6, 2021—his solemn oath before the American people to “preserve, protest and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
 
We’d better hope that, unlike Camelot—indelibly associated with America’s youngest-elected President—“Tangerine Palpatine” doesn’t get revived, now or by a new generation at some point in the future.
 
(The image accompanying this post shows Vanessa Redgrave performing “The Lusty Month of May” in the 1967 film adaptation of Camelot.)