Everything I Know I Learned From Musicals

Review - Million Dollar Quartet at the Nederlander

Lately, I've been sort of struck by the phrase "not my cup of tea." I've often thought of the phrase as sort of lazy. When people use it, what they really seem to be saying is that they didn't like something, but they don't want to actually do the work to formulate and justify a coherent, supportable opinion.

Then I saw Million Dollar Quartet, which opened last night at the Nederlander Theatre. And I can honestly say that it just wasn't my cup of tea. However, I shall endeavor to provide defensible support for my admittedly personal reaction.

As you may know, Million Dollar Quartet revolves around a mythical night in 1956 when Elvis Presley (played here by Eddie Clendening), Johnny Cash (Lance Guest), Jerry Lee Lewis (Levi Kreis), and Carl Perkins (Rob Lyons) got together for a jam session at Sun Records, the business home of music impresario Sam Phillips (Hunter Foster).

The show met with quite the bell curve of critical response, ranging from a few raves to a few pans to a swell of mixed reactions in between. It's likely that your own reaction to the show will depend on your personal connection to these men and their music. The show is certainly professionally staged and performed, and the crowd was frickin' eating it up. But I think I would have been a lot more engaged if I were in any way a fan of the members of the titular quartet, which I decidedly am not.

Fortunately, the show comprises more than just the jam session itself, otherwise I would have found it unbearably tedious. There's certainly a goodly amount of music, and the four central performers (who also play their own instruments, and quite well, I might add), do a bang-up job of capturing the essence of their respective characters, at least insofar as I'm familiar with these men and their work. But on the whole the show left me with the impression that it was a very professional Vegas tribute show.

Librettists Colin Escott and Floyd Mutrux try to imbue the evening with a decent amount of dramatic tension: Will Sam Phillips sell Sun records to RCA? Will Johnny Cash sign a three-year extension on his contract with Sun? Will Phillips make the leap to RCA to work again with Elvis Presley, whose contract he sold to RCA in order to remain in business? Will upstart Jerry Lee Lewis ever get a chance to record his own songs, or will he continue to play backup for other artists? Will Carl Perkins vent his anger at Elvis for "stealing" Perkins' signature hit, "Blue Suede Shoes"?

Here's the thing, though: I don't care. I don't care. I don't care. I don't care. And I don't care.

Million Dollar Quartet doesn't really add anything new to the musical-theater form. In fact, it seems to borrow numerous elements from other shows. The show's final moment seems cadged from the act 1 finale of Sunday in the Park With George. The libretto makes liberal use of lazy narration, much like Jersey Boys. And the show even ends with a mini-concert, a la recent productions of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Grease.

That said, the show is certainly well presented. Director Eric Schaeffer keeps everything moving apace. There's nothing stilted, awkward, or even remotely amateurish about the show. The show's flashback structure is effective, if repetitious. There is some rather clunky exposition, particularly regarding Jerry Lee Lewis' familial connection to Jimmy Swaggart as well as Sam Phillips' then-budding working relationship with Roy Orbison. On the whole, if you're not a fan of these particular iconic performers, there's really no larger reason to see the show. At least not from where I sat.

GRADE: C+ (For fans only. Or for those who can't get tickets to Jersey Boys.)

Little Johnny Jones - A Little Bit Racist

Starting this semester, I've added staged readings to my musical-theater history course at the Boston Conservatory. The idea is to give the students a chance to experience some obscure but historically significant shows, works that they would otherwise be unlikely to have a chance to see or appear in. This semester, we're doing Little Johnny Jones, which was the show that put George M. Cohan on the map. Next semester, I'm looking into doing one of the "Princess" shows, perhaps Oh, Boy! or Very Good Eddie.

Initially, I was hoping to perform the original script and score to Little Johnny Jones. My first difficulty: they were rather challenging to track down, but I eventually found the libretto through the good folks at Goodspeed Opera House. As of yet, I've only been able to locate fragments of the original score. But the hunt for the score proved moot when I read the original book to Little Johnny Jones, which was creaky to the point of being virtually unplayable.

History books often point to the aforementioned Princess shows as the start of the musical-theater integration process. As significant as those shows are, they came about a decade after the first Cohan shows. Prior to Cohan, most early American musical comedies were fragmented and diffuse. The songs and dances usually had little or nothing to do with the plot of the show, and were often changed to suit popular tastes and new performers. Cohan brought a bit more cohesion to the American musical, with songs and dances that were at least marginally related to the story. But that doesn't mean the shows were any good, at least by modern standards.

But there was another challenge to presenting the original show: racism. I had always read that Cohan shows were patriotic to the point of jingoism, and Little Johnny Jones certainly reflects that nationalistic bent, with foreigners portrayed in a rather unflattering light. But the original show also presents some challenging racial stereotypes, mostly with respect to the Chinese and Asian Americans. There's even a song in the second act called "March of the Frisco Chinks."

I've always taught my students that shows should be considered in their historical context. The very first word to Show Boat is the N-word, and my contention is that it should remain so, although many modern productions change the lyric to "colored folk work on the Mississippi" or "Here we all work on the Mississippi." The folks at the BoCo came across this conundrum last year when we presented a concert version of Show Boat, prompting a good deal of discussion and controversy. Eventually we went with "colored folk," a choice that I disagree with, but given the strength of feeling from our African American students, it may have been the wisest political move at the time.

As for Little Johnny Jones, fortunately there's a revised version, which was originally presented at the Goodspeed, and then transferred to Broadway. The show starred Donny Osmond as Johnny (opposite the BoCo's own Maureen Brennan in the ingenue role), and only lasted one performance. In his New York Times review, Frank Rich slammed Alfred Uhry's reworked book as a "synthetic hodgepodge," while acknowledging that the original would probably have been "just as unworkable." 

The new book does indeed have its problems, but I have decided to use it rather than the original for a number of reasons. First, I can't find the complete original score. (Anyone?) Second, Uhry's adaptation, while workaday, is a considerable improvement. And a distant third is the racism. The new book still has Chinese stereotypes, but Uhry makes some changes that make it all a bit more palatable. Again, the goal is to expose students to historically significant shows. And, interestingly enough, the new book does indeed reflect the imperfect integration of shows at that time, and it will be considerably more pleasant for the audience to sit through. The historian in me hates to compromise, but the showman in me wants to put on an enjoyable, and educational, show.

Flashback - Michael Bennett and Scandal

I was going through an old box of my college notebooks, when I came across an issue of Vanity Fair dated November 1984. I was about to throw it away when I noticed that on the last page there was an interview with Michael Bennett, who was in the middle of rehearsing Scandal.

Theater queens of a certain age will doubtless remember Scandal. It was meant to be Bennett's follow-up to Dreamgirls, a triumphant return to his A Chorus Line form. Bennett was even revisiting the famed ACL workshop process, allowing the show to emerge organically from a 12-month rehearsal period. In the Vanity Fair article, Bennett boasts that the opening number alone -- a 20-minute, full-on, balls-to-the-wall orgy featuring stars Swoosie Kurtz and Treat Williams -- took ten weeks of rehearsals to create.

Scandal was to have a score by Jimmy Webb and a book by Treva Silverman, neither of whom had any significant theatrical experience. But then, neither did Marvin Hamlisch. Bennett apparently preferred to work with newbies -- they're easier to bully about. It's certainly no secret at this point that Bennett was rather ruthless in his pursuit of theatrical perfection. To quote Bennett from the Vanity Fair article: "I usually try to hate everything when I'm rehearsing. In a way, I like to see the show as the enemy." Apparently this applied to his co-creators and performers as well.

I must say the Vanity Fair article doesn't reflect well on Bennett. Most of his quotes are pretty facile, if not downright puerile. In describing Scandal, Bennett says "It has a story with a beginning, middle, and an end, which I like in theater...And it has a happy ending, which I believe all musicals should have. For forty dollars a ticket, it's the least they should have!" The reference to forty-dollar tickets is simply amusing in retrospect. How could Bennett know that a scant 25 years later, ticket prices would have reached a ridiculous high of $136.50? (Thank you, Roundabout.)

But then there's the beginning/middle/end thing. Well, thank you, Captain Obvious. And every musical should have a happy ending? Um, really? West Side Story? Lost in the Stars? Grey Gardens? Parade? Marie Christine? Sweeney Todd? This sounds rather naive and disingenuous coming from the man who broke the hearts of sixteen fictional "boys and girls" nightly for 15 years with A Chorus Line.

Scandal as a show died with Michael Bennett. At the time, the official word was that the show was canceled because the salacious subject matter was inappropriate with the advent of AIDS. We later learned that AIDS was indeed to blame, but it wasn't the subject matter of the show, but rather the health of its creator that was at issue.

Bennett also pulled out of the London premier of Chess prior to its 1986 opening, for health reasons, although AIDS wasn't mentioned at the time. But by the time he left Chess, he had already commissioned the show's expensive and elaborate set, which consisted of two giant walls of video monitors and an enormous hydraulic chess board that rose and spun, not unlike the tire from Cats. Director Trevor Nunn inherited the production concept, but didn't seem to know how to do anything with it, and the result was pointlessly complicated and rather inert.

It's interesting to speculate what Scandal would have been like as a show, and whether there was any decent material there that's worth resurrecting. But it seems pretty clear that without the guiding and dictatorial hand of Michael Bennett, it's very likely that there really wouldn't be any there there. If there were, wouldn't something have leaked out in the interim, a la Carrie and the many extant bootlegs of same? And it's always heartbreaking to contemplate what might have been if Bennett have lived. Those of us content to appreciate what this tortured and torturing genius left behind at least have the October 13th DVD release of the "Every Little Step" to look forward to.