8. Regression Therapy: Review of “Merrily We Roll Along” by Louise Ebersdorf
Sometimes, boys and girls, life does indeed imitate art. On the very day I accepted this assignment to review the Roundabout’s new production of Merrily We Roll Along (Laura Pels Theater), I happened to survey my Cat Farm on the 35th floor of Ebersdorf Tower, only to find Design In The Raw! Louise, I said to myself, something’s afoot! All of my twenty-two gorgeous felines had parked themselves around the lab walls, stock still as Egyptian statuary and intent on the action in the middle of the rec room where my Albertine was gently placing a wreath on her Paco’s curly head. (I was watching the couple through a one-way mirror.) Of course, the tribute was only constructed of feathers and string (the former from a recent avian sacrifice to the obsidian Cat Idol the pair have enshrined in a spare storage room), but what fascinated my prize winners and yours truly was the startling change that has come over both of my researchers after years of married life au naturel. Paco has acquired a goatish length to his body (and what look like two little Mosaic horn-bumps on his forehead). And Albertine! She’s got to be in her late thirties, but I swear she now looks a glowing twenty-one and not a day older. Of course, they’ve both been sleeping long hours (sometimes sixteen at a stretch by my atomic clock) and pursuing their research projects between naptimes. Could uber-relaxation be some kind of therapy that releases untapped potential and super-American vitality in two godless émigrés? Goodness knows the couple maintain the lab temperatures ultra-high day and night – some kind of incubation effect?
Anyhow, Albertine has gone back to ballet! I mean real ballet: she had strapped on some old pointe shoes and found a torn leotard our sharp-clawed pets had shredded. She looked great! (Paco insists on his own nudity. I don’t complain.) Something unprecedented is up, people. Some kind of fountain of rebirth? Some youthening technique they’ve stumbled upon in their urban island of deep-dish performance-art studies? One hears that the great Balanchine would tell his favorite ballerinas to adopt a kitten and study it daily to improve their dancing. But this: some sort of emerging atavism from regression therapy through daily immersion among my fabulously cultured beasts? Here I am, consigned in my twilight years to a wheelchair, while two time-serving avatars on my maximum security floor are vibrating freely to something in the air?
I knew I had to have a meeting to clarify things, so I decided on Albertine, woman-to-woman. (Paco is way too theoretical in his idiosyncratic, limited English. But he is the best at dawn-choir meowing sessions.) I allowed a window visit, and Albertine instructed me through the bars to check out a video that the pair had posted on Vimeo. I consulted my iPhone. The clip shows the partners dancing the classic Puss in Boots number from The Sleeping Beauty. Paco in a dance belt was almost adequate as Puss, but Albertine in her leotard is a resplendent White Cat! I somehow kept my cool. Albertine informed me she wants to work with a choreographer she’s found on YouTube, a young woman named Cheryl S. (very lefty name), an example of whose work has gone viral. My Albertine wants to return to the stage and dreams of a reopened Louise Theater for her career reboot. I told her this would take some thought (as well as expense – people never think of expense). And now I’m really confused. It’s always eerie when life throws déjà vu smack in your face. Revive the Ebersdorf Ballet Company? Of course, if there’s a star ballerina on offer . . . . I would love to be known as a star-maker! I need to talk to my spiritual counselor and obtain a reading pronto.
In the meantime, I’ve just seen the new revival of Merrily We Roll Along (talk about déjà vu) and can report that justice has at last been done here in New York to Steve Sondheim’s great work. How could my old buddy Hal Prince have perpetrated that original 1981 production? T-shirt logos to identify the characters? Please! (I heartily recommend Lonny Price’s 2016 documentary on the debacle, Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened, one of the most trenchant films ever on life in the theater.) How could Jim Lapine have delivered a flat, abrasive version in his 2012 Encores semi-staging? Lin-Manuel Miranda as Charley? Too eager-beaver by half. It’s an Off-Broadway production this time with a reduced cast (only six performers), but it achieves some of the concentrated effect of the wonderful Donmar Warehouse version I caught in London in 2000, staged by Michael Grandage. (Every 19 years. What is it about the number 19? Like in Yeats.) As you probably know, the Merrily narrative is told in reverse chronology (as in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal), and its three main characters arrive eventually at the point where their youthful friendship and entertainment careers began, blithely unaware of the ethical compromises and personal failures that fate has in store for them and that we have just seen in retro. The setting is New York and Hollywood, and Art here imitates Life in its If-Only aspects. For this ironic spectacle Sondheim wrote what I have always maintained is his best score and lyrics – a back-engineered tribute to musical comedy as seen from an insider’s sometimes compromised perspective.
I totally agree with the old adage that there have been three great ages in world theater: the Greeks, Shakespeare, and AMC, the American Musical Comedy! (If as a child you never heard Ethel sing “What say, let’s be buddies” as Cole Porter’s Panama Hattie, you can’t imagine what you’ve missed.) Clearly the Fiasco Theater’s director Noah Brody concurs with that historical assessment because here he’s produced a fleet one-act version of Merrily (no intermission) that moves with the drive of a Howard Hawks film comedy. (Think Bringing Up Baby.) The book by George Furth has been streamlined (and slightly augmented), but in addition Brody has directed for maximum paradox and throat-catch pathos. Never before have the forking paths of the characters’ lives been so clearly incised – the moments when decisions are made that change things implacably thereafter. It’s all in Brody’s exquisite sense of precise pacing and ironic framing of such choices. And Sondheim’s contribution is all the more powerful thanks to a foregrounded narrative profile. You now hear the way Sondheim opens with full elaboration on musical themes and then steadily works back to originary statements across the full length of his score, eventual musical motives revealed as germinal back-to-front, compositional design and emotion run to raw.
The music especially benefits from the new orchestrations by Alexander Gemignani, which replace those Broadway brassy Jonathan Tunick originals (and subsequent revisions). There’s an impressionist touch to Gemignani’s work that matches what Brody is after: a sense of the evanescence of a theater life’s hurly-burly. Perhaps that’s what Sondheim uniquely caught in his score: the glory and trauma of the impermanent stage. (For fans of the show: there’s no “Hills of Tomorrow” and “That Frank” has been replaced by “Rich and Famous”.) Sondheim’s music has never been so rhythmically alive because this whole production has that Brody rhythm. The choreography by Lorin Latarro contributes some wonderful Robert Alton moments, especially the stage-dummy props in “The Blob”.
Merrily’s view of existence as a riotous jumble sale has been inherited from the original 1934 play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, which in turn derived its reverse-cavalcade traction from the great school of Yiddish theater here in New York, a tradition to be found everywhere in the American Musical Comedy and in much of our popular entertainment to this day. When Franklin introduces Charley as his collaborator to a prospective producer and Charley says, “Yeah, he collabers me and I collaber him!” you hear perdurable Jewish-American shtick sponsored into a new millennium thanks to this comically calibrated, slap-happy production. Sell-out moralisms never have time to curdle here. The story moves briskly on as it moves back, so you gasp at the concision of narrative points. We watch from an objective temporal vantage that Brody and the material grant: a show-biz Olympian view.
My own theory is that Merrily is best when the concept guys (Hal Prince, James Lapine) have nothing to do with its revival. They are insensitive to its roots or embarrassed by them. Brody is obviously a believer in roots. (He was born across the river in New Jersey.) London has its own tradition of Yiddish theater (Paul Muni was one of its products), and perhaps this accounted for some of the vividness and grip of the Grandage production. I’d like to think some things persist even when they go underground.
The three main characters of Merrily are classic types: Franklin, the ambitious sell-out; Charley, the talented friend and sometime schnook; and Gussie, the bright woman who loses her man. You have to have strong leads to anchor the time-shifting story. Ben Steinfeld makes an energetic Frank, a bantam bundle of cross-purposes. Manu Narayan comes up with surprises in Charley’s skill-set and handles “Franklin Shepard, Inc.” with ease. Emily Young is funny and touching as Gussie, with one great on-stage costume change. Jessie Austrian as Mary makes sense out of the right-angle turns of her character: this is the most challenging female role in the show, and Austrian is impressive in connecting its faux-dottiness to a sly operator’s manipulative careerism. And Brittany Bradford is strong as Franklin’s first wife Beth, with an excellent “Not a Day Goes By”. Brody gets full commitment from the cast, especially from the women.
I am usually suspicious of revivalism in lyric theater. Look at what director Jack O’Brien did to Carousel recently on Broadway: was it really necessary to cut Rodgers’ score? And look at what American Ballet Theatre did to its new The Sleeping Beauty and Harlequinade – deliberately stripping them of supportive performance tradition. It is therefore heartening to be able to recommend Merrily We Roll Along, where Noah Brody builds a solid base for present and future stagings of this show. Somewhat delayed, perhaps, but better late than never.
It is so wrong that we do not have an American theater in operation that regularly mounts full productions of AMC, especially from the great 1915-1941 (pre-Oklahoma) period. If Balanchine’s New York City Ballet is our foremost national dance enterprise, where is the equivalent for our musical theater treasures? Encores is not enough, kids. Berlin, Kern, Porter, Gershwin and Rodgers and Hart await full theatrical revival.
Back to my present: I have spoken with my assistants Pippa and Master Raro about the situation in the lab. They were both brilliant as usual. Pippa suggested I have a private detective look into A&P’s background in French Bayonne. I will follow up on this. And M.R. has a medical theory. He thinks that life with my felines may have altered the deep brain centers in my two researchers. He says there is an area of the human cerebrum called the nucleus accumbens that is highly sensitive to stimulation, and God knows my pair have been surrounded by aural vibes from massed felines for many months. Paco himself has always claimed powerful effects from the choral purrings of my animals. Perhaps this is the result: a reversal of the aging process and the release of super-vital energies. (Could Paco be right for once?) I will contact Sesostris and get her on my case. In the meantime, see Merrily. It purrs.
L.E.
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