Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II changed the course of the American musical in 1943 when they wrote Oklahoma!. It was centered in a strong story line with all the musical elements organically related to developing the story and/or characters. From that point to Hammerstein’s death in 1960, they wrote eight additional musicals for Broadway: Carousel(1945), Allegro (1947), South Pacific(1949), The King and I (1951), Me and Juliet (1953), Pipe Dream (1955), Flower Drum Song (1958), The Sound of Music(1959); one film: State Fair (1945) and one television show: Cinderella (1957). While the songs were firmly tied to the context of the musical, many of them passed into frequently performed works within the popular music of the American Songbook. There, removed from the original musical context, they took on a life of their own as interpreted by the performer. The original gender of the song might be changed to fit with the gender of the performer. The lyrics might take on different meanings and shadings from the original context. The tempo and beat might be changed. Unlike many performers, Mabel Mercer, the great cabaret singer who died in 1984, said she never changed a single word of the original lyrics, “I sing the song.” She was famous for her unerring feeling for tempo in lyrics and finding new shadings and meanings.

In 1993 Walter Bobbie, actor and director, conceived A Grand Night for Singing to explore the lesser-known songs in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals.  In additional to lesser-heard songs, he gave them different contexts from the original one. While in The Sound of Music, the nuns pose a question, “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” about one of the young novices whom they all love but who won’t behave as a novice should; in Grand Night it becomes a lament of a young man about his girlfriend:

Oh, how do you solve a problem like Maria?
How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?
When I’m with her I’m confused,  
Out of focus and bemused, 
And I never know exactly where I am.
Unpredictable as weather,
She’s flighty as a feather--
She’s a darling!
She’s a demon!
She’s a lamb!
She’ll outpester any pest,
Drive a hornet from his nest,
She could throw a whirling dervish out of whirl.
She is gentle,
She is wild,
She’s a riddle,
She’s a child.
She’s a headache!
She’s an angel--
She’s a girl.

One of the characteristics of Hammerstein’s songs is that by the conclusion of the song the story and/or character will have moved and developed from where they were at the opening. In “The Gentleman Is a Dope,” (Allegro) the lyrics of the refrain start on what might be a humorous tone:

The gentleman is a dope,
A man of many faults,
A clumsy Joe
Who wouldn’t know
A rhumba from a waltz.
Rodgers’s music, however, hints at something else, and by the end of the refrain we have arrived at,
The gentleman is a dope,
He isn’t very smart,
He’s just a lug 
You’d like to hug
And hold against your heart.
The gentleman doesn’t know
How happy he could be,
Look at me crying my eyes out
As if he belonged to me--
He’ll never belong to me.

The musical arrangements in Grand Night often turn a song into something quite different from the original context: “Honeybun” (South Pacific) becomes a full out raucous swinging jazz turn with vocal scatting instruments. “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out Of My Hair” (South  Pacific) is a swinging sultry Andrew Sisters-esque takeoff. 

You will listen to the songs in a different way, hear the lyrics in a new light, swing and sway to different tempos. It is indeed a grand night of singing.
​
It’s grand night singing,
The moon is flying high,
And somewhere a bird who is bound he’ll be heard,
Is throwing his heart to the sky.
It’s a grand night for singing,
The stars are bright above.
The earth is aglow, and, to add to the show,
I think I am falling in love,
Falling, falling in love!
 
See The Contemporary Scene, March 6, 2018, for related material. 
 
A Grand Night for Singing. Music, Richard Rodgers; lyrics, Oscar Hammerstein II; musical arrangements by Fred Wells; orchestrations by Michael Gibson, Jonathan Tunick; conceived by Walter Bobbie.

Rose O’Neill, if the name carries any recognition for the public in the 21stcentury, is associated with the Kewpie doll, first created in 1909 as a drawing, then as an actual doll and eventually a ubiquitous image that made her a millionaire. In the early 20thcentury to the thirties she was one of the most famous women in America. She lived a resplendent life among the patrons and artists of the time. She and her sister Calista had the two apartments on the top floor of a building on Washington Square in New York City. She acquired Carabis in Connecticut that she maintained as an open house for artists of all the genres. Her family home was Bonniebrook, about 10 miles north of Branson, Missouri, that they had begun building at the end of the 19thcentury. It was the first “mansion” built in the Missouri Ozarks and a scene of wonderment to the local residents.  In the 1920s she had also acquired a villa in Capri. By the end of the 1930s, she had retired to Bonniebrook, broke and verging on bankruptcy. She had given everything away to family, friends, and needy artists.

While the fame and millions came from the Kewpie Doll, she was a cartoonist famed for her wit—the first female cartoonist for a major American magazine. She was an illustrator for stories in major American magazines, in those days before photographs were used. She was a portraitist. She created dark and brooding paintings, the Mistress/Master monsters that were exhibited at the Salon des Beaux Arts in Paris. She was a feminist and suffragette. She was a novelist, four novels published, and a poet with one volume published. 
The Kewpie image passed into the national consciousness. In The New York Times this week in a review of a biography of the photographer Berenice Abbot, the author quotes Impresario Lincoln Kirstein’s description of Abbot as having “enormous Kewpie eyes.” Just this past month the headline in New York Stage Review of Steven Suskin’s review of Bernadette Peters: “HELLO DOLLY!: BERNADETTE  IS THE PLUPERFECT  KEWPIE DOLLY.” In the article he wrote, “…Peters is indeed a musical comedy doll. Not in a sexist manner, mind you; something of a Kewpie doll (which was a cupid-derived cherub, initially devised as a cartoon character in 1909 and memorialized as a popular toy).”

The Springfield Art Museum has brought together a national exhibition of O’Neill’s art that opens on April 13 and runs through August 5, 2018. Works have been secured from local private collectors, the O’Neill family, Bonniebrook Historical Society and museums across the country. The Bonniebrook house burned in 1947 and was rebuilt by the Historical Society starting in 1990. It and the grounds (Rose and other family members are buried on the property) are open to the public April through October and well worth the short drive south on Highway 65. Sarah Buhr, the curator for the exhibition, has published a lavish and informative catalog. 
For more than 25 years Marcia Haseltine has loved and been interested in the works and life of Rose O’Neill. For 10 years she labored on writing a one-woman show on O’Neill that was first produced by Springfield Contemporary Theatre in January 2016. In conjunction with the opening of the exhibition, tt will be repeated at the Springfield Art Museum, Friday-Sunday, April 13-15, 2018. 

Marcia Haseltine is well known to Springfield theatre goers. She has given many memorable performances for Little Theatre and more recently for Contemporary Theatre. Particular favorites have been Miss Hannigan in Annie and Emily Dickinson in The Belle of Amherst for SLT; then Maria Callas in Master Class and Stevie in Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia for SCT. She also has acted for Maple’s Repertory Theatre, Macon, Missouri, MSU’s Tent Theatre, and most recently as Maxine in Maxine’s Christmas Carol, at the Andy Williams Performing Arts Center, Branson. 

Three worthy and interesting activities for this spring: attend Saving Rose O’Neill April 13-15; see Springfield Art Museum’s extensive national exhibition Frolic of the Mind; make the short drive south on Highway 65 to Bonniebrook. You will enjoy them all. 

Three landmark American musicals appeared in Springfield during January, February and early March 2018.
 
The Sound of Music. Music, Richard Rodgers, Lyrics, Oscar Hammerstein II; Book, Howard Lindsay, Russel Crouse. Based on the memoir of Maria von Trapp, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers

A national touring company production appeared at the Juanita K. Hammons Hall for Performing Arts in early January.

The original Broadway production opened in November 1959. It was the last collaboration between Rodgers and Hammerstein who died in August 1960. It may be the most popular musical in the world. Between countless live productions, both professional and non-professional, and the 1965 film with Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer, it may have been seen by more people than any other musical. While the popularity continues unabated, the critical reception usually calls it lower-drawer R&H. In I’ll Eat You Last, produced by the Springfield Contemporary Theatre in its Solo Festival in January, the Hollywood super agent Sue Mengers in her description of her family’s escape from Nazi Germany says, “It was all pretty much like the Von Trapps in The Sound of Music, only without dreamy Christopher Plummer and all those not-up-to-their usual standard Rodgers and Hammerstein songs.”

Rodgers and Hammerstein had revolutionized the American musical in 1943 with the production of their Oklahoma!. Earlier with separate creative partners each man had been working toward a more integrated musical: a strong story with well defined characters that were developed through dialogue and music. Dialogue and song moved smoothly one into the other. Story and character moved from Point A at the beginning of the song to Point B by the end. The dramatic action was continuous and not stalled by songs and production numbers. Oklahoma! is a piece of Americana, the territorial controversy between the cowman and farmer in the territory of Oklahoma. By the end of the musical Oklahoma has become a state.

Rouben Mamoulian, the director, was a given a contract like no other, that gave him the entire control over the production in all its details. A single vision would guide the production. The choreographer Agnes de Mille lifted dance into a dramatic partnership equal with the words and music. Oklahoma! became the most successful and, for its time, the longest running musical in Broadway history. Nothing succeeds like success. Everyone wanted to be like Oklahoma! The American musical had been changed.

Eight more Broadway musicals by R&H were to follow, a couple of masterpieces and other weaker ones. The Sound of Music is overly sentimental and more sugar than birthday cake from the bakery. It is, however, a prime example of a totally integrated musical. Lindsay and Crouse created a strong story line about the need of the von Trapp children for a mother. Maria, a novice nun, is sent to the family as a governess. She and Captain von Trapp fall in love and marry. With the rise of Nazism he is being pressured into accepting service in the Germany navy. Surreptitiously and leaving all belongings behind them, the family escapes from Austria.

It is a simple story about the family and its escape. It does not require complex music and has no place for production numbers. The dialogue and songs glide smoothly one into the other. The songs develop the story, characters, emotions and feelings. It is a unified whole with all the pieces fitting together tightly.
 
West Side Story. Music, Leonard Bernstein, lyrics, Sstephen Sondheim; book, Arthur Laurents; conceived by Jerome Robbins, director and choreographer.

It was produced by Springfield Little Theatre at the Landers in February 2018.
           
West Side Story updates the story of Romeo and Juliet to the 1950s and transfers it to New York’s Hell’s Kitchen area. It is now the story of the enmity and warfare between two ethnic gangs. The Jets are white Americans, mostly of Italian descent; the Sharks are Puerto Rican immigrants. Italian Tony meets Puerto Rican Maria, and they fall in love. They are doomed.
            West Side Story is the organic musical at its highest development and full flowering. All of its elements fitted together, merging one into the other smoothly  and supporting each other. Agnes de Mille had showed how dance could be integrated into the whole with Ohlahoma!. In West Side Story Jerome Robbins used dance but also all movement as an equal partner with the other elements. In that original production no one ever “just walked” on or off stage—maybe the policemen did. Movement and dance became expressive of character, emotions and feelings. Actors acted, sang and danced. Singers sang, acted and danced. Dancers danced, acted and sang.
           
All the creators of West Side Story were taken to inspirational heights. It may be the greatest music ever written for an American musical. It is flowing, lyrical, dissonant and jazz driven couched in all the intelligence and creativity that Bernstein could muster. The songs are alive, vital and highly expressive. The music is pulsating and unrelenting.
           
It was Stephen Sondheim’s first Broadway musical, and the lyrics are superb, appropriate for story, character, emotion and mood. Sondheim himself, however, holds reservation about some of the lyrics. In an article for The Dramatists Guild Quarterly he expressed the opinion that the lyrics for “I Feel Pretty” are inappropriate for the character. “So I had this undereducated Puerto Rican girl singing, ‘It’s alarming, how charming I feel’…. I immediately went back to the drawing board and wrote a simplified version of the lyric which nobody connected with the show would accept; so there it is embarrassing me every time it’s sung, because it’s full of mistakes like that. Well, when rhyme goes against character, out it should go, and rhyme always implies education and mind working, and the more rhymes the sharper the mind.”
           
Above all it was Jerome Robbins’ choreography that lifted the show above all others. These were inarticulate individuals who were not used to expressing themselves through language. Body language and movement would be the means for them to express their desires and emotions. Bernstein composed music for 12 dance sequences, some of the greatest dance music ever given to a musical cast.
Arthur Laurents’ book held all the elements together allowing room for song and dance to surge to dramatic heights. The parallels to Romeo and Juliet are skillfully updated to the present and totally appropriate to the story.
           
The production opened on Broadway in September 1957. The critical response was generally positive. The box office was strong but not overwhelming. One big boost for ticket sales came from the appearance by the cast on the national televised Ed Sullivan Show. Eisenhower was half way through his second term as president and a sense of contentment and optimism spread throughout the nation. Perhaps the public was not ready for the dark and bleak views presented in West Side Story. It is a true musical tragedy. Bernardo, Riff, and Tony are all killed. As Tony lies at her feet, Maria picks up the gun that killed him and says: “How many bullets are left, Chino? Enough for you? And You? All of you? WE ALL KILLED HIM; and my brother and Riff.” Maria holds out her hand to the gang members standing around her. Members of both gangs move forward to lift the body of Tony to form a procession that exits off stage with Maria leading. The Company sings: “Hold my hand and we’re halfway there/ Hold my hand and I’ll take you there,/ Someday,/ Somehow.”
           
Meredith Wilson’s nostalgic view of Americana in The Music Man that opened in the same season was more to the public’s liking. It swept the major prizes at the Tony Awards except for choreography.
            
In nature’s cycle a seed falls on the ground, establishes roots, send up a plant, reaches full flowering, declines, regenerates seeds and the cycle starts again. Art forms have somewhat the same pattern, but new forms need hybridization to develop. Following West Side Story the art cycle seemed to stall. That cross-fertilization did not happen. The American musical lost its source of energy and creativity. The decade of the 1970s was dominated by the musicals of Stephen Sondheim but he was sui generis. Isolated excellent examples occurred during in the last quarter of the 20th century, but that needed drive and energy could not be found. The breakthrough to a new path came in 1996 with Rent, but it was slow in developing
 
RAGTIME, the musical. Music, Stephen Flaherty; lyrics Lynn Ahrens; book, Terrence McNally. Based on the novel Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow

Springfield Contemporary Theatre presented Ragtime at the end of February and early March.

Ragtime, opened in Toronto in 1996, then played in Los Angeles and finally arrived on Broadway in January 1998 where it played for two years. It is a superb musical, but everything about Ragtime looks back. Its story is laid in the early years of the 20th century. It has three groups of people: the affluent white family in New Rochelle, the Harlem pianist Coalhouse Walker and family (black), Jewish Latvian immigrant Tateh and his daughter. Each family grouping has its extended circle. Terrence McNally follows and develops individual characters in each group. They all cross and crisscross and assimilate. It is a sweeping epic story of America in the first 20 years of the century. It harkens back to the sweeping epic of Show Boat (1927). The racial and ethnic relationships trace back to Show Boat, South Pacific and West Side Story. The energy and sound come from the late 19th and early 20th centuries include marches, cakewalks, gospel, ballads, but predominantly ragtime—that music born in the brothels of New Orleans, spread northward by Scott Joplin, and then made respectable by Irving Berlin.

At the conclusion of the musical McNally, Ahrens and Flaherty present a view of a hopeful future for the melding pot of America. Father (white) from New Rochelle dies when the Lusitania is torpedoed. Mother (white) raises their Son and the son (black) of Coalhouse Walker. She marries Tateh, Jewish immigrant from Latvia, who has a daughter. These three children grow up in harmony. They move to California where Tateh becomes a filmmaker. He explains to the audience: “One afternoon, watching his children play, Tateh had an idea for a movie: a bunch of children, white, black, Christian, Jew, rich, poor—all kinds—a gang, a crazy gang getting into trouble, getting out of  trouble, but together despite their differences. He was sure it would make a wonderful movie—a dream of what this country could be. He would be the first in line to see it.” Tateh picks up Little Coalhouse, and the Company sings: “Well, when he is old enough/ I will show him America/ And he will ride/ Our son will ride/ On the wheels of a dream.”

​Ragtime (1996) ends with a dream of a harmonious blending of ethnicities colors, religions and social strata. The Company sings, “On the wheels of a dream.” At the end of the 20th century perhaps a hope for a melding of American Society could be conceived. In the first 18 years of the 21st century, that hope has deteriorated. We seem now to have reverted closer to the end of the 19th century than any new acceptance of an inclusive Society. Maybe we can find inspiration in West Side Story, “Someday/ Somehow.”

For more than 200 years actors and writers have been creating and performing in
one-person shows. The genre might be said to have been made legitimate when in 1967
Hal Holbrook won the Broadway Tony Award for Leading Actor in a Play with his one-
man show Mark Twain Tonight!

In that marvelous little book of essays on the theatre The Dramatic Imagination,
Robert Edmond Jones, the great scenic designer of the early part of the 20 th century,
imagines a story that theatre was created by the solo actor. The leader of the tribe of cave
men gathers the tribe together to tell them about the hunt that happened that day:

The lion skin lies close by, near the fire. Suddenly the leader jumps to his feet. “I
killed the lion! I did it! I followed him! He sprang at me! I struck at him with my spear!
He fell down! He lay still!”

He is telling us. We listen. But all at once an idea comes to his dim brain.
“I know a better way to tell you. See! It was like this! Let me show you!”
In that instant drama is born.

The leader goes on. “Sit around me in a circle—you, and you, and you—right
here, where I can reach out and touch you all.” And so with one inclusive gesture he
makes a theatre.

So here we are at Springfield Contemporary Theatre gathered around in three-
quarters of a circle for a solo performer to reach out, touch us, ignite our imagination, to
create a theatre event.

The creation of the one-person show goes back to at least the early part of the 18 th
century. British satirist Samuel Foote has been credited as the creator. Only two theatres
in London were licensed to present theatrical productions. In 1747 he presented The
Diversions of the Morning, a satirical revue consisting of his take-offs on various
individuals, mostly other actors and public figures. He presented them at an unlicensed
theatre as matinees and invited friends to “come and drink a dish of chocolate” with him
under the pretense of “training some young performers for the stage.” He had found the
loophole in the licensing act. For the next 30 years he performed in those highly
successful entertainments. In 1764 George Alexander Stevens popularized the art of the
monologist with his Lecture upon Heads. Using papier-mache heads, wig blocks and
hand props, he “lectured” on famous individuals, historical and current, and social
stereotypes. In the time since then many actors have found the genre a profitable venture
in lean times. In the early 19 th century Charles Mathews established himself as a leading
comedian who created entertainments described as “a whole play in the person of one
man.” Many examples could be cited from that time to the present. In the early 20 th
century Sarah Bernhardt stormed the entertainment circuits in Europe and America
wearing her wooden leg presenting selections from her famous portrayals. (She also
carried her coffin with her and reportedly slept in it at night.) Ruth Draper created a series of solo character monologs that she began performing in 1921 and was still performing in
a Broadway theatre just hours before her death in 1956.

The development and popularity of the one-person shows in the latter-half of the
20th century came from necessity and a saving of expenditures, i.e., salaries for actors.
The days of Kaufman and Hart’s The Man Who Came to Dinner with 36 roles were
long past. Finding fewer acting opportunities actors began to develop their own
properties, or playwrights wanting to see their plays produced wrote one-person scripts
for them. For an actor with a successful venture, it became money in the bank. Sixty
years after his first performance, Hal Holbrook was still performing Mark Twain. Also,
what actor could resist such a tour de force?

The following productions have won Tony Awards for their performers:
1966. Hal Holbrook. Mark Twain Tonight!

When Mark Twain ran into financial troubles and eventual bankruptcy, he went
on lecture tours in the United States and Europe to pay his debts and earn a living reciting
from materials that he had written. Holbrook recreated those lectures. His material could
vary from night to night just as Twain had.

1977. Julie Harris. The Belle of Amherst by William Luce.
Luce used diaries, letters, and the poems of Emily Dickinson. Miss Dickinson
gives a tea party and talks about the famous people and acquaintances that she knows.
She recites many of the poems that she wrote. In the Introduction to Solo Acting by
Jordan R. Young, Harris wrote:

The first time I found myself alone on stage was when I performed The Belle of
Amherst. We opened the tour in Seattle, Washington, the Moore Egyptian
Theatre, February 1976. As I came on stage, with my tea tray, in a rush of
energy and face the audience, I was overwhelmed and even lost my place in the
script—but almost immediately found my strength and then it became fun for
me. It was like visiting a good friend and I was always thrilled to be a part of
Miss Dickinson’s world. Toward the last part of the play—where the poetry
and language become so luminous—I always felt I was riding a magic carpet,
floating through the air, and the journey would have no end.

1986. Lily Tomlin. The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe by Jane
Wagner.

Tomlin performed various characters that at first seemed to be a disparate group
but become unified by the “bag lady” as the play progressed. At the time the show was
considered controversial for its strong feminist material.

1986. Bernadette Peters. Song and Dance. Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, lyrics by
Don Black with revisions and additional lyrics by Richard Maltby, Jr.

Peters received the Tony for Best Performance by an Actress in a Musical. The
first act is song and the second is dance united by a story. The song part is “Tell Me on a
Sunday” about a young woman’s romantic misadventures in New York and Hollywood.
Lloyd Webber asked Maltby to make revisions to adapt the act for an American audience.
The girl’s name was Emma whose songs, fully staged, were acted out by Peters.
 
1989. Pauline Collins. Shirley Valentine by Willy Russell.

The first act takes place in the kitchen of an English housewife in Liverpool who
finds herself feeling stagnant and in a rut. When a best friend offers to pay for a trip to
Greece for them for two weeks, she packs her bag, leaves a note on the cupboard door
and off she goes. Act II is on the Greek isle where she begins to find what was missing in
her life. At the end of the two weeks she ditches the friend and starts a new life being true
to herself.

The play was produced in London first where it won the Laurence Olivier Award
for Best Actress for Collins and also the Award for Best New Comedy.

1990. Robert Morse. Tru by Jay Presson Allen adapted from the works of and interviews
with Truman Capote.

The play is set in the writer’s apartment the week before Christmas 1975. An
excerpt from his unfinished novel Answered Prayers has been published in Esquire
magazine. Manhattan socialites have recognized themselves in the thinly veiled
unflattering portraits in the excerpt. They have shunned him. He sooths himself with pills,
vodka, cocaine and chocolate truffles as he muses about his life and career.

1997. Christopher Plummer. Barrymore by William Luce.

The play takes place a few months before the death of John Barrymore as he is
rehearsing a revival of his 1920 Broadway triumph as Richard III. This never happened
but in the play was the device used to tell the story. In a way a second person is involved
as the stage manager talks frequently over the theatre loudspeaker with Barrymore as he
reminisces about his career and downslide into alcoholism.

2002. Elaine Stritch. Elaine Stritch at Liberty by Elaine Stritch and George C. Wolfe
who also directed it. She received a Tony for the Best Special Theatrical Event.

Elaine Stritch in black tights and a white blouse with a tall stool in the middle of
the stage talked about her life, her career, her battle with alcoholism. She performed
songs from shows that she had appeared in. It was fascinating, funny and devastating as it
was frank, bare and naked emotionally beyond what anyone could have expected.

2004. Jefferson Mays. I Am My Own Wife by Doug Wright based on his conversations
with German Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. It won Tony awards for May and also Best Play.
Wright received the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

It is an examination of the life of German Antiquarian Charlotte von Mahlsdorf,
born Lothan Berfelde, who killed her father when she was a young child and survived the
Nazi and Communist regimes in East Berlin as a transgender woman. Mays played some
40 different roles in the play.
​
In addition to these that have received Tony Awards, hundreds of other one-
person shows have been developed and produced. U. S. Presidents, national leaders,
literary figures, artists, sports stars, actors, fictional characters are among the subjects of
these plays. A fascinating book on the subject is Acting Solo: the Art of One-Man Shows
by Jordan R. Young who interviewed many individuals who had acted in and created
these kinds of productions.

These are musicals that have opened on Broadway in the last 12 months, are still running and should be available in the new year.

DEAR EVAN HANSEN
Music, lyrics, Benji Pasek, Justin Paul; book, Steven Levenson; scenery, David Kirins; costumes, Emily Rebholz; lights, Japhy Weidman; sound, Nevin Steinberg; projections, Peter Nigrini; choreography, Danny Mefford; direction, Michael Greif

I have friends who savor works of coming-of-age and teenage angst; I run the other direction. At the opening of DEAR EVAN HANSEN, I groaned and was not engaged. Fortunately, for me, the musical quickly made a right turn into other subjects of immediate currency and relevance: truth, lies, and social media.

Timid, shy, lonely Evan Hansen, on the advice of his psychologist, writes himself a letter of encouragement every day. It starts, “Dear Evan Hansen.” His latest letter is stolen by the high school bully Connor and tucked away in his pocket. The next day Connor commits suicide and his parents, finding the letter, assume that Evan is Connor’s closest friend. Not wanting to disappoint the parents and give them more grief, Evans goes along with the deception. It soon spins out of control as everyone assumes that poor lonely Evan was attempting to befriend poor disturbed Connor. Evan becomes a viral hero. By the end we see Evan, his letter, and Connor’s suicide all being used by various individuals to further their own point-of-view. Fortunately Justin Paul has steered clear of a sentimental ending. It is made clear that none of them make it through without consequences: some relationships are ruined; others are made stronger. It is implied that everyone involved will move on, heal and be wiser, maybe.

The score is wonderful, full of memorable songs, soft, reflective ballads with guitar and strings accompaniment.

It is a relatively simple set of sliding panels with projections designed to look like the glossy liquid screens of laptops, tablets and cell phones.

The story is multilayered with characters of much depth, and the production has a cast equal to the task. Michael Grief has superbly directed it as he did previous productions of Rent, Grey Gardens and Next to Normal.

DEAR EVAN HANSEN is something of an aberration from contemporary musicals. It is not an adaptation of, derived from, or inspired by…it is an original unto itself.

P.S. See article about a mother’s reaction to the musical: Susanna Schrobsdorf, “The Pursuit of Happyish; Dear Evan Hansen,” thanks for finding us. We’ve been waiting for a musical like you.” TIME, March 20, 2017.
 
A BRONX TALE
Music, Alan Menken, lyrics, Glenn Slater, Book, Chazz Palminteri, based on the play by Palminteri. Scenery, Beowulf Boritt, Costumes, William Ivey Long, Lighting, Howell Brinkley, sound, Gareth Dowen, choreography, Sergio Trujillo, direction, Robert De Niro, Jerry Zaks.         
       
A Bronx Tale, taken from a 1989 solo play by Palminteri, was made into a movie with Palminteri and Robert De Niro directed by De Niro. It is loosely based on Palminteri’s  upbringing in an Italian-American enclave in the Bronx. A nine-year old boy Calogero witnesses a shooting but refuses to identify the shooter to the police. As he grows into a teenager, he more and more comes under the influence of Sonny (the shooter), the neighborhood boss. The story ensues into a battle for Calogero’s soul between his father and Sonny. Act II develops into an outright steal from West Side Story: Calogero falls in love with Jane who happens to be black. In that neighborhood in the 1960s the Italian and black population did not mix.
         
The story is narrated by an older Calogero who moves in and out of the stage action to assume the role as the teenager while transitions are made by a wonderfully smooth male quartet.. Some of the roles border on stereotyping, but the commitment of the cast makes the character believable and engaging. The story and acting captured well the milieu and the people who inhabit it.
         
With a mixture of doo wop, Motown, early rock and roll and Broadway balladry, the music is a throw back for Menkin to his early period of Little Shop of Horror. A  Bronx Tale, harkening to the Broadway musicals of an earlier era, markets itself as Jersey Boys meets West Side Story.
 
SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET
Music, lyrics, Stephen Sondheim; book, Hugh Wheeler, from an adaptation by Christopher Bond.
Scenery, costumes, Simon  Kenny; lighting, Amy Mae, choreography, Georgina Lamb, direction, Bill Buckhurst. Production originally presented by the Tooting Arts Club, London at Harrington’s Pie and Mash Shop.
           
Technically this is not a Broadway production, but it can hold its own in this grouping in interest and quality.
The Barrow Street Theatre is a black box space with a balcony on one wall of the theatre. We have seen it in many configurations through the years. Whereas the London  production of this particular Sweeney Todd was actually presented in a pie shop, Barrow Street Theatre has been transformed into a dingy pie shop. It is an immersive  production. The 130 members of the audience (it is sold out for most performances) sit at long communal dining tables in front of which are a bar and a staircase. The performers play all over the space in the aisles around the tables and between them and sometimes on top of the tables. At the intermission the audience is asked to go to the lobby. When they return, all the tables have been given checkered tablecloths and other items have been added to spruce up the now affluent pie shop.

Twelve cast members cover all the roles with only Todd and Lovett covering one role. All were strong actors and adequate-to-strong singing voices. They also played a mean percussion with cutlery.

The orchestra numbers three players who play piano, violin and clarinet. It’s surprising the sound that can be derived with just those instruments.

Opening night for this production was March 1. It was just announced that it had made back its 1.22 million investment and is now slated to run until May.
 
COME FROM AWAY
Music, lyrics, book, Irene Sankoff, David Hein. Scenery, Beowulf Boritt; costumes, Toni-Leslie James, lights, Howell Binkley, sound, Gareth  Owen, musical staging, Kelly  Devine, direction, Christopher Ashley.

On September 11, 2001 when the U.S. declared itself a no-fly zone, 38 planes bound for the U.S. with 6,579 passengers were forced to land in Gander, Newfoundland, a small town of 7,000 on the far eastern edge of North America. This is a musical about those four days. It was totally created by a Canadian husband and wife team. Come From Away was developed at the Canadian Music Theatre Project and Goodspeed Musicals’ Festival of New Artists.

The cast of 12 play multiple roles but combine to present a truly ensemble feel. Almost all the songs, even when starting as solo, end up being ensemble numbers. All the transitions are handled with remarkable ease, from narration to character scenes to solo singing to ensemble to movement to dance. The cast expresses the varied feelings resulting from the emergency landings, the agitation of the citizens arranging for food and lodging, people learning of the death of loved ones, to become narrators to link the stories. On stage is a band that plays folksy and lilting Gaelic music.

The set is gorgeous in its simplicity: the up stage wall is strips of barn wood slats that hide openings that become entrances/exits. Around the edges right and left are bare tree trunks that reach up to the sky, no tops visible. The center of the stage is a turntable covered with a few tables and chairs. Everything keeps constantly turning and shifting to give a new perspective of the groupings.

Kendra Kassebaum, an MSU alumna, had been in the production since its original production on the west coast. She left in August to return to her home in Seattle to start rehearsals for a new production of Ragtime cast as the Mother.

In the playbill is an insert card for the show that says on the back: “A True Story. To create Come From Away, writers Irene Sankoff and David Heil collected hundreds of hours of interviews with the locals in Newfoundland, as well as the passengers who were stranded there during that fateful week.  These stories inspired the show you’re about to experience here tonight, distilled into 100 minutes, and performed by a cast of 12 representing nearly 16,000 people.” It was a truly enjoyable and moving time.
 
THE BAND’S VISITMusic, lyrics, David Yazbek, book, Itamar Moses; based on the screenplay by Eran Kolirin; sets, Scott Pask; costumes, Sarah Laux; lights, Tyler Micoleau; projections content, Maya Cirrocchi; projections system, Five OHM; choreography, Patrick McCollum; movement, Lee Sher; direction, David Cromer. An Atlantic Theater Company production.

My favorite of the group is The Band’s  Visit. We saw it last year downtown at the Atlantic Theatre Company’s Lindia Gross Theatre. In November 2017 it opened in a Broadway theatre and received glowing notices.

From Dear Evan Hansen to The Band’s Visit is to go from one end of the technology spectrum to the other. Hansen is flashy, fast, busy, always moving, full of technological wonderment. Visit is melancholy, wistful, unhurried, sad and sweet.

In 1996 the seven members of the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra come from Egypt to play at the opening of an Arab Culture Center in the Israeli city of Petah Tivah, near Tel Aviv. Unfortunately because they speak no Hebrew they get on a bus to Bet Hatikvah (fictional) a desolate city in the middle of the southern desert. By the time the mistake is discovered, the bus is gone. It only comes once a day. They are stranded in a town with no hotel and only one small restaurant. The locals take them in. Awkwardly the locals and guests find their common ground in music. In simplicity the scenes play out as the members of each group try to accommodate each other.

The curtain opens, and seven men dressed in band uniforms of powder-room blue march on. You never have to wonder who is a band member and who are the locals. They will never blend in color.

I have now seen four musicals with music by David Yazbek: Women on the  Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Dirty Rotten Scoundels and The Full Monty. I have no idea what his music sounds like. He completely creates a world and inhabits it with a sound that belongs there and nowhere else, that I cannot identify what is “his sound/style.” The music here is plaintive, wistful, and absolutely gorgeous. Throughout he has used mid-Eastern instruments and sounds. A small orchestra sits in the up left stage corner. When called for, the band members (ensemble or solo) play on stage.

Much of the cast from the downtown production transferred to the Broadway one, and they are all strong. Tony Shalhoub has never had so much downtrodden dignity. Katrina Lenk, the owner of the restaurant, is physically gorgeous and with a voice that matches. Fortunately she has three solos in which one can luxuriate in her sound and in her acting that completely catches the character.

David Cromer is a superb director. He somehow manages to turn a work so that it comes at you in a totally unexpected way. In his production of Our Town it started with its usual barren stage except the ladder in the middle; however, when Emily returns to the living with Mama preparing breakfast, suddenly a completely realistic set appears even down to smell of bacon wafting through the theatre. In The Band’s Visit he often starts scenes off to the side or in a corner with the rest of the stage bare; just as this desolate small village is in the midst of the vastness of the desert.

The creation of and the playing of music begin to move the scenes toward center and move people together. The scenes are quiet and intimate, and it is heartwarming to see the friendship developing between the characters. The distrust that they had at first for each other disappears.

After the company has taken the curtain call, the on-stage musicians and off-stage musicians all come together and break into a joyous jam session that lasts ten minutes or so.

 “Nothing is as beautiful as something you don’t expect” says one of the characters near the end of the play. So was this whole experience.  As I walked out of the theatre onto 20th Street, I could have easily floated up to 47th Street to the hotel.

Ben Brantley in his pick for Theatre 2017 wrote:
“THE BAND’S VISIT. Pretty close to perfection, and of a subtlety seldom seen in Broadway musicals. David Yazbek and Itamar Moses’s delicate story of Egyptian musicians stranded for one uneventful night in an Israeli desert town, directed by David Cromer, maps the common ground of longing and loss among disparate souls who almost — and there’s such sweet, sad beauty in that ‘almost’ — connect.”
 
Both Come From Away and The Band’s Visit share story lines and themes. In a time when we seem to be building walls and barriers from strangers and locally becoming more tribal, these two musicals depict a different picture. Both involve strangers who suddenly find themselves in locations that they did not expect and the reactions of the locals who shelter them. Through music the disparate groups find a common ground and way to bond.
 
Into this category also go:
 
ANASTASIA
Music, Stephen Flaherty; lyrics, Lynn Ahrens; book, Terrence McNally.


HELLO, DOLLY
Music, lyrics, Jerry Herman; book, Michael Stewart. In January, Bernadette Peters and Victor Garbor take over the lead roles.
 
If you are going to New York in the next few months, please consider these suggestions.

Driving Miss Daisy was inspired by Alfred Uhry’s grandmother, his father, and her black chauffeur. After she had a car accident, she had to give up driving and for the next 25 years she had the same chauffeur. It is the first of a trilogy of plays that Uhry wrote using historic moments in the history of Atlanta as a lynch pin. Daisy includes the 1958 bombing of the Temple and the dinner honoring Martin Luther King after he won the Nobel Prize for Peace. The second one is The Last Night of Ballyhoo (1996) about a Jewish family at the world premiere of Gone With the Wind in 1939. The third, the story of the 1915 lynching of Jewish Leo Frank, is the material for Parade (1998) that became a musical. Jason Robert Brown wrote the music.

Before the trilogy was written, Alfred Uhry had written the book for The Robber Bridegroom (1975) produced by SCT last spring. Uhry has been awarded these prizes: Pulitizer Prize for Drama, Driving Miss Daisy (1988); Oscar Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay, Driving Miss Daisy (1989); Tony Award for Best Play, The Last Night of Ballyhoo (1997); Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical, Parade (1999).

Driving Miss Daisy opened in April 1987 produced by Playwrights Horizon. It became so successful that Playwrights Horizon moved it to another 42nd Street off-Broadway theatre, the John Houseman. After a total of 1,195 performances it closed in June 1990. The original cast at Playwrights Horizon was Dana Ivey, Morgan Freeman, Ray Gill. Morgan Freeman played Hoke in the film. For once, one could not complain about Hollywood’s casting choices. Jessica Tandy, one of the finest actresses of her time, played Daisy. She won an Oscar for her portrayal. Dan Aykroyd played the son.

In October 2010 a Broadway production was mounted with Vanessa Redgrave, James Earl Jones and Boyd Gaines. It was a limited run but was extended to April 2011. In September 2011 the same cast opened a production in London’s West End that played until December 2011. In February to June 2013, the production toured Australia with Angela Lansbury playing the role of Daisy. While on that tour, it was filmed and later shown on PBS.

At the time she won the Oscar in 1989, Jessica Tandy was 80, the oldest person ever to win the award for acting.  When she did the Australian tour, Lansbury was 88. The original Miss Daisy, Dana Ivey, was a mere baby at 46. Redgrave was 73. Morgan Freeman was only 50 when he first portrayed the role. James Earl Jones was 79 when he played the role on Broadway. When they first meet, the characters are ages, Daisy, 72 and Hoke, 60. The play spans 25 years. The last scene is Hoke visiting Daisy in a nursing home.

To see either Vanessa Redgrave or James Earl Jones on stage was an opportunity not to be missed, but to see them together brought untold riches. Watching the sparring, the give and take, the deepening of their relationship, and the chemistry between two consummate actors was a master class in itself. In the New York Times, Ben Brantley called them, “giants still walk that tired, old corner of the earth called Broadway.”

James Earl Jones made a fascinating acting choice at the top of the play. He knew his resonant booming voice (think Darth Vader) would not work for Hoke. In the opening scene, Hoke is being interviewed by Boolie as to his suitability to be a chauffeur for his Mother Daisy Werthan. In the first few lines Jones’s voice booms out as we all know it. He stops, reins in his voice and changes his physicality to slight hunch, and later moves in  a slight shuffle. He is in front of a white man in 1948 South. Jones knew the attitude and sound that he must adopt for Hoke.

Vanessa Redgrave, with a back ramrod straight and unbending mien and dictatorial manner of the grade-school teacher she had been, created a woman frightened by her approaching aging and need to depend on others. Her gait was sharp and angular. In a series of vignettes their growing interdependence deepens and enriches each.

The vocal timbre and dynamics were fascinating. The Miss Daiseys I had seen previously were violins (as is Angela Lansbury later seen in the role). Redgrave is a cello. Jones is a bass or maybe double bass. What beautiful music these giants created.
​
Previously Springfield Little Theatre produced Driving Miss Daisy with Karen Malone Luna playing the title role.

In Summer 1974 Lou Schaeffer and I were in London seeing such theatre productions as Claire Bloom in A Streetcar Named Desire, Derek Jacobi in Shakespeare’s Pericles, Coward’s Design for Living with Vanessa Redgrave and John Stride, Billy, a musical, with Michael Crawford (long before Phantom), British National Theatre productions at the Old Vic (waiting for the new home to be finished), Royal Shakespeare Company productions at its London home, the Aldwych Theatre on the Strand. We kept hearing about this production at a theatre way down in Chelsea titled The Rocky Horror Show.

We took the underground to Sloane Square and then walked south on Kings Road for a dozen or more blocks to Kings Road Theatre, a converted cinema house. It was a musical, outrageous, funny, sexually ambiguous, very English. It borrowed cross-dressing from the pantos, although the pantos never saw this kind of cross-dressing. From the English Music Hall it borrowed audience response and participation and many double entendres, mostly sexual in nature flaunting the sexual revolution of the 1960s.  It was high camp. As with Hair it refused to stay on stage, playing throughout the house, up and down the aisles, crawling over and through the audience. The audience loved it. Altogether it was to run over seven years in London.

The Rocky Horror Show is by Richard O’Brien, music, lyrics and book. O’Brien was an actor who had been the London productions of Hair and briefly in Jesus Christ Superstar directed by Jim Sharman. O’Brien showed his unfinished script to Sharman who decided that it should be produced in the sixty-seat Upstairs Theatre at the Royal Count Theatre. In 1973 when it finished its sold-out run at the Royal Court, it moved first to Chelsea Classic Cinema, then to the Kings Road Theatre with 500 seats.

O’Brien loved the sci fi/horror flicks of the 1930s, 40s, 50s. Over one winter while out of work he composed the musical, both as a homage and parody of those films.  He set it in the London glam rock period of the 1960s-70s. The music was contemporary glam rock. Jonathan King, a record producer, saw the second performance and immediately secured the recording rights, rushed the cast into the studio and quickly released the record to become a hit across the UK.

Lou Adler, an American record producer, saw a performance in the winter of 1973 and immediately secured the American producing rights. He opened the first American production in 1974 in Los Angeles where it ran for nine months. He closed it to open the Broadway production but allowed the cast to return to England for the filming of the show in fall 1974.

Actor Tim Curry knew O’Brien as they had been in the London production Hair. Curry ran into O’Brien one day he told him that his musical was being produced the Royal Court and that he should contact Sharman about a role. He was cast as Dr. Frank N. Furter. He remained in the London Production until he came to Los Angeles to be in that production. He and many others of the London cast were in the film but Adler insisted that Americans Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick play the two innocents.
 
In 1975 just before the film was released the Broadway production opened at the Belasco Theatre with Tim Curry as the lead. It lasted for three previews and 45 performances. For the mid-1970s The Rocky Horror Show was not an uptown Broadway show, even if at a theatre on the wrong side of the tracks, i.e., east of Broadway; just as it was not a London West End show. The audience for The Rocky Horror Show was downtown. For the downtown people this was still the era of never trust anyone over 30 and anything above 14th Street.

Later that fall the movie The Rocky Horror Picture Show opened. At the Waverly Theatre on 6th Avenue below 14th Street, it made history. (This is the Waverly Theatre referred to in Hair in the song “Frank Mills.”) The movie house stayed crowded, and a new tradition was created. At the weekend midnight showings the crowd assembled in appropriate costumes and joined in singing all the songs along with the movie and mimicking the favorite lines. From Greenwich Village the event spread across America. From the momentum of the film’s popularity theatre productions also spread across the country. The show became a cultural phenomenon

This is SCT’s third production of The Rocky Horror Show. The first in 2001 had Andrew Call as Rocky. Since moving to New York, Call has now appeared in more than a half dozen Broadway productions with the most recent being Groundhog Day: the Musical. The second production of TRHS was in 2010. My guess is the fourth should appear about 2025.

David Lindsay-Abaire is one of those American playwrights, still under age 50, whose plays began to appear toward the end of the last century. Fuddy Mears was his first success and was produced by Manhattan Theatre Club in 1999. Rabbit Hole is his best known work being produced on Broadway in 2006 and won the 2007 Pulitizer Prize for Drama. Springfield Contemporary Theatre has presented both of these plays: Fuddy Mears in 2007 and Rabbit Hole in 2011 also in conjunction with Resident Artist Ensemble.

​In Good People Lindsay-Abaire returns home to Boston South. He was born David Abaire in 1969 (he attached Lindsay when he married the actress Chris Lindsay in 1994) and was raised there. Boston South, or Southie, has become a known setting through the films Good Will Hunting, The Town and the novels of Dennis Lehane. It is as distinctive as the Mississippi of Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty. It is a neighborhood of narrow streets and small houses jammed together on a peninsula jutting into Boston Harbor. Until recently it was mainly populated with Irish Catholic working class. Abaire escaped from there by winning a Boston Boys and Girls scholarship to the exclusive prep school Milton Academy. It was at Milton that he began acting in and writing plays.  He was then able to attend Sarah Lawrence College and finally studied playwriting at Julliard School of Drama with Marsha Norman.

Good People is his first play to explore the neighborhood in which he grew up and to feature a character, like him, who moved away, became a success, and now lives in a different affluent and social world. The play raises the intriguing questions of belonging and identity: how much is a person defined by geography and how much by upbringing, education, profession and choice of friends. 

The opening two scenes introduce us to the people of Southie: Irish, Catholic, blue collar, stubborn and independent. Margie (pronounced with a hard g) is fired from her job for her continual tardiness. She needs a job to support herself and her developmentally disabled daughter. With the encouragement of her friends, she decides to look up a successful medical doctor who was briefly a boyfriend in their high school days. What follows is a comedy, a study in class differences, and a drama of why can some individuals escape from their backgrounds to become successes and others remain mired in their environment. The play is spot on and specific in the characters and their surroundings, but it is, also, a picture of the America we inhabit today: a country divided by class, wealth and race. It is a well plotted play that seldom shows the twists that are coming and keeps shifting the alliance of the audience with various characters.
 
 
JUKE BOX MUSICALS
 
Mamma Mia! Music, lyrics, Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus; book, Catherine Johnson. Springfield Little Theatre opens a production at the Landers Theatre on September 15.

Mamma Mia is a collection of songs composed by and performed by ABBA, a Swedish performance group. The songs were originally independent entities and not part of a story. A juke box musical is a work that draws together music/songs and puts them into a contexualized dramatic situation. The English producer Judy Craymer commissioned writer Catherine Johnston to develop a book for the songs of ABBA. She worked closely with Andersson and Ulaeus to devise Mamma Mia, using one of ABBA’s songs as the title. The original production opened in London in 1999 and is still running today.

Juke Box musicals may be a recent term, but the form is an old one. In the 18th century pasticcio was a term applied to an opera or other musical work in which most, if not all, music/songs were derived from different composers or a single composer to be given in a new dramatic context. George F. Handel was famous for borrowing from himself. Weiner Blut (Viennese Blood or Viennese Spirit) first performed in 1899 is attributed to Johann Strauss II, but he took no actual part in the composition. The operetta drew on earlier music of Strauss and took its title from one of his waltzes. He had died five months before the premiere.

What is the difference between a juke box musical and a musical revue. It is mainly the dramatic context. A revue usually has little or no story line. Ain’t Misbehaving (songs of Fats Waller), Beehive (songs of the 60s), Jerry’s Girls (songs of Jerry Herman) are examples of revues. Jersey Boys (songs of Frankie Vallie and the Four Seasons), Beautiful (songs of Carol King), An American in Paris (music of George Gershwin), All  Shook Up (songs of Elvis Presley) are examples of juke box musicals. The distinction is a line in the sand.

In the 1950s British critics coined the term  “kitchen sink drama” to describe the plays that were being written by the “angry young men” who were rebelling against the established playwrights who were favorites with the public. John Osborne’s 1956 Look Back in Anger is usually regarded as the first entry in the new drama, characterized as about the gritty lives of the working-class characters doing mundane domestic duties such as washing dishes in a broken down sink.  No polite talk, refined vocabulary and genteel manners. In the new plays the characters threw objects, shouted at each other, and eventually broke the boundaries of proper language.

Kitchen sink drama should be regarded as a sub species of the family drama that held sway not only in Britain but also especially in the United States. From the beginning of the 20th century to the present it is the staple and glory of American drama. HIR (pronounced here) is a prime example for the 21st century. Taylor Mac is a playwright who shows you that imagination and creativity can still breathe life into an old form. In almost the same time frame Stephen Karam is pushing the boundaries of the family drama with his The Humans. They are two very different plays, but they both show the genre still has a long life in front of it.

While British playwriting went through its revolution in the 1950s, American drama gained its in the 1960s. New emerging playwrights upended American drama including, of course, the family drama. HIR is descendent of Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, David Rabe, Mac Wellman, Christopher Durang, and from the current generation throw in for good measure some Nicky Silver and Del Shores.

Taylor Mac, in New York parlance, is a downtown artist. HIR was his first venture uptown when Playwrights Horizon produced HIR in its 42nd Street theatre in the fall 2015. Born and raised in California, Mac came to New York in 1994 to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Art. After graduation he remained in New York. Playwrights Horizon is an organization devoted to new plays by unknown playwrights and plays that deserve to be produced but are bypassed as too risky by the commercial theatre.

For more information on Mac and HIR, go to this link. Scroll down to find an interview with Mac and Tim Sanford, artistic director.

Mac’s most recent event has been the production of the staggering 21½ hour  performance of  A 24-Decade History of Popular Music covering American popular music from 1776 to 2016 presented at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. Mac created, starred in and designed the costumes for it. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in drama for the year. Wesley Morris in the New York Times, called it, “one of the great experiences of my life.” Mac will be performing it again September 2017 at San Francisco's Curran Theatre.

Playwrights Horizons’ production of HIR garnered much praise from the New York critics. Charles Isherwood in The New York Times wrote: “…[U]nless you have seen the sensational—in all senses of the word—play by Taylor Mac, you cannot consider yourself an authority on this ever enduring genre [the family drama] of American drama.” Hilton Als in The New Yorker observed, “ ‘Hir’ has a lot of ideas—necessary ideas, especially when it comes to flinging open closets in the ‘trans’ world—which spill over the edges of the play, but I wouldn’t take much out in order to make the show dramaturgically tighter or easier to absorb. The rudeness of its form is part of its power; you can’t build a clearer future without making a mess of the past.”

HIR is a family drama, kitchen sink style, for the 21st century. It is timely, topical, funny and outrageous. Mac has called his play “absurd realism.” He says he has been thinking about this play for 17 years. Little did he know that it was going to be as timely and topical as it is with the transgender character Max. The characters discuss gender, what makes a home, the patriarchal white male and the plight of the returning veteran from the war zone. While Mac pushes the dramatic limits, he also expresses ideas in an outrageously humorous turn.

Paige: Once I learned one thing, I could learn another. And pretty soon I could start coming up with my own theories, or at least theories I hadn’t heard from other people first…. This is my theory.  We all come from fish. My whole life I’m told I was made out of a rib…. But I wasn’t a rib. In actuality I was, we were all, TRANSGENDER FISH.

The question of the transgender individual can no longer be pushed under the rug, put out in the rain, or as a number of groups wish be banished from this earth. A tweet from the White House solves nothing and only causes confusion. The company for this production has learned much and discussed much both about the play and with the transgender actor Hunter McMahon. As he (or in the terms of the play, ze) said succinctly one evening: “I’m a male. I just want to pee. Why does that bother people?” We have been so fortunate to work on the play and to have the company that we have.

Springfield Contemporary Theatre’s production of HIR is the first in Missouri; Unicorn Theatre in Kansas City is slated to present it in the spring. The famed Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago currently has performances through August 20. The publicity release from Steppenwolf says, “Don’t miss this disarmingly funny, absurd, and surprising look at a reimagined American family.”

​We hope to see you at Springfield Contemporary Theatre for performances through August 20. 

Don’t panic. I haven’t lost my senses. No connection exists between the two except in the same local time frame.

Accidental Death of an Anarchist by Dario Fo opens at Springfield Contemporary Theatre this week. Dario Fo “was an Italian actor–playwright, comedian, singer, theatre director, stage designer, songwriter, painter, political campaigner for the Italian left-wing and the recipient of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Literature…. Much of his dramatic work depends on improvisation and comprises the recovery of ‘illegitimate’ forms of theatre, such as those performed by giullari (medieval strolling players) and, more famously, the ancient Italian style of commedia dell'arte,” so starts the entry on him in Wikopedia.

Tony Mitchell in his study of Fo wrote, “[He was] arguably the most widely performed contemporary playwright in world theatre.” In a later place that statement is amended to exclude the United States. Except in university theatres and some daring regional theatres in the United States, Fo is an unknown name. When produced on Broadway in 1984 with Jonathan Price and Patti LuPone, even his most widely produced play Accidental Death of an Anarchist lasted less than two months.

Jim Assad, founding artistic director of Kansas City’s Crown Center American Heartland Theatre (now closed), opened the theatre in 1987 with Fo’s We Won’t Pay, We Won’t Pay, his second most often produced play. Assad later ruefully remarked that perhaps it was not the most opportune choice.

What was the problem? Maybe it was the mixture of commedia style and satire on Italian politics. Maybe Broadway theatre was not ready for that in the 1980s. Close in style to Fo, but not is satire, would be One Man, Two Guvnors (Broadway 2012) with James Comden, an adaptation of an 18th century commedia dell’arte play by Carlo Goldoni. Fo is certainly a descendant of Goldoni. Maybe it is time to revive Dario Fo.
Fo comes from a country where for years politics has been scandalous and outrageous; maybe satire on the situation comes naturally. We are getting a taste of such politics now in this country. Maybe time for Fo’s style has come for us. Can our playwrights pick up where Fo leaves off and be specific to our situation? Can our contemporary playwrights follow in the steps of Barbara Garson’s 1967 play MacBird that twisted the Kennedy assassination and Johnson ascension to the presidency onto the plot of Macbeth? Can our contemporary playwrights manage to equal or surpass what the nightly talk-show hosts are already doing on a nightly basis?
 
SHE LOVES ME
 
Music, Jerry Bock; lyrics, Sheldon Harnick; book, Joe Masteroff

This was the first production of MSU’s Summer Tent Theatre in its 55th season.

She Loves Me is based on a Hungarian play known in English as Parfumerie (1937) by Miklos Laszlo who fled the Nazis in 1938 to come to the United States. The play was adapted into the 1940 film The Shop Around the Corner with Jimmy Stewart, Margaret Sullivan and Frank Morgan. In 1949 it became a film with songs In the Good Old Summertime with Judy Garland, Van Johnson and S. Z, Sakall. (That film is famous for its scene with Garland and Johnson walking with a young child who was Liza Minelli.)  In 1963 it became a Broadway musical but ran less than a year. It was produced and directed by Harold Prince with choreography by Carol Haney. In its cast were Barbara Cook, Daniel Massey, Barbara Baxley and Jack Cassidy.

This production might be seen as a launching pad for its creative team. Within the year Bock and Harnick wrote Fiddler on the Roof; by 1966 Joe Masteroff wrote the book for Cabaret that was produced and directed by Harold Prince.

For a musical that was mildly successful in its original Broadway production, it became a favorite for theatres all across the country. It has also received two Broadway revivals, 1993 and 2016. Part of that early success is due to the original Broadway cast record album that became a cult favorite.

It is a well-constructed strong book musical with distinct characters. It is not a big musical with really only one splashy production number that can be tailored to the abilities of the theatre company.  It’s a bit sweet and sentimental that can be kept in check by the director. The songs are strong and melodic with one outstanding number in “Vanilla Ice Cream” that led to a nickname of “The Ice Cream Musical.”

When Barbara Cook started her cabaret career (see an earlier blog), she often included “Vanilla Ice Cream” in her list of songs for the evening. She would introduce it by calling it “the perfect theatre song.” It is an excellent example of what a song should do in a strong-book musical. The character begins in one place, and during the course of the song she discovers truths about herself that lead her to new decisions. Also, the story is at Point A and by the end of the song it has progressed to Point B.

Tent Theatre first presented She Love Me in 1970. SCT did a production in 1998. Drury University produced it three-four years ago. It has been a welcomed visitor on the Springfield scene.

She Loves Me holds up well and remains an audience favorite.