September 9 - Day 4: Nights Like These Make Up for So Many Others

Well, the humidity finally blossomed into rain—of a sort. It’s been intermittent the last two days, like it can’t make up its mind whether to actually rain or not. There’s water coming from the sky, but it seems like it’s struggling.

Because of that, and realizing my plans for the evening, I not only carried my umbrella (which I used a lot), I was wearing a jacket; in this case, the sports coat I wore in Sam and Dede. (It’s nice and it fits, so sue me.)

I decided to take the subway rather than walk, partly because of the weather, but mostly due to the distance I was traveling. I’d read on John Cox’s wonderful Houdini-centric website, Wild About Harry, that the New York Historical Society way up on Central Park West and 77^th was hosting an exhibit of some of David Copperfield’s vast collection of magical memorabilia, including some rare Houdini pieces, and I wasn’t about to miss those. In the event, the exhibit (while impressive) was much smaller than I’d expected, and the Houdini stuff was limited to a milk can, a straitjacket, the famous Mirror cuffs, the Metamorphosis trunk, and one of Bess Houdini’s costumes. While it’s always something to see Houdini’s actual props, it was a pretty tiny selection. There were items and posters from other magicians, but I’d expected to take at least an hour to look at them all, and I was done within fifteen minutes. I toured the rest of the exhibits (which were actually pretty well done), but was finished within about an hour. I still had more than an hour before I had to leave for my matinee, so I toured the gift shop and sat in the café, having a muffin and tea for breakfast while catching up on some reading.

"Do you have Harry Houdini in a can?"

Eventually, it was about 2:15 and time to leave for Lincoln Center and My Fair Lady. I walked the ten blocks, got my ticket, and waited for the house to open. Even though after the last time I saw the show, I felt I was done with it, I wanted to see it because I have great respect for what the director, Bartlett Sher, has done in the past with seemingly-dated material. His South Pacific was revelatory in making a warhorse timely, and (as with yesterday’s Carousel) his doing about as much as a person could with The King and I. I was also looking forward to seeing Diana Rigg in person. I’ve had a crush on her since her “Mrs. Peel” days in the 60s, and it was going to be her final performance in this production. I had also hoped that Lauren Ambrose would forego her usual decision to not perform at Sunday matinees because this was Rigg’s finale (especially after Rigg criticized her for not doing eight shows a week), but it was not to be.

 Nice poster.

As with Carousel, the production was about as good as can be gotten out of the show, but the play’s structure and dramaturgy just don’t work for me anymore. As with Carousel, I can give three examples. The first is there are too many unnecessary numbers. While Shaw’s original is about class and language, the musical tries to turn the story into a romance, using a conventional musical structure. I understand how that logic works in musicalizing the play in terms of the mid-50s, but let’s take the case of Alfred Doolittle. The Doolittle of the play is a plain-spoken dustman whom Henry Higgins turns into a lecturer and exemplar of lower-class and common-sense values. All well and good, but that storyline doesn’t fit into Lerner and Loewe’s structure, so they overlay a music-hall personality on him in order to give him (and the ensemble) two numbers that, while well-done and entertaining, don’t do anything to either advance the plot or deepen the characters. They serve as excuses to plug in big ensemble numbers (with endless extra verses and encores) that do little except take up time and cover scene changes. Out with them, I say!

Similarly, take Eliza’s first number, “Loverly.” The first verse works wonderfully. It’s her “I Wish” number and tells us all about her. That would be fine if it ended there, but she finishes and the chorus takes over to repeat exactly what she’s just said, not in order to gently mock her or tell us what they themselves want, but in order to supply the ensemble with something to do. Again, it’s well done, but doesn’t help the storytelling.

The third problem is the biggest, and the one that’s gotten the most notice for this production. And here’s a SPOILER ALERT; if you don’t want the big surprise ruined, skip the next few paragraphs (I’ll tell you when it’s safe). Because Shaw wrote a polemic, his play ends with Eliza about to marry the vapid juvenile, Freddy, much to Higgins’s delighted scorn. 

HIGGINS. Good-bye, mother. [He is about to kiss her, when he recollects something]. Oh, by the way, Eliza, order a ham and a Stilton cheese, will you? And buy me a pair of reindeer gloves, number eights, and a tie to match that new suit of mine, at Eale & Binman's. You can choose the color. [His cheerful, careless, vigorous voice shows that he is incorrigible].

LIZA [disdainfully] Buy them yourself. [She sweeps out].

MRS. HIGGINS. I'm afraid you've spoiled that girl, Henry. But never mind, dear: I'll buy you the tie and gloves.

HIGGINS [sunnily] Oh, don't bother. She'll buy em all right enough. Good-bye.

They kiss. Mrs. Higgins runs out. Higgins, left alone, rattles his cash in his pocket; chuckles; and disports himself in a highly self-satisfied manner.

In the battle of wills that’s lasted most of the evening, Eliza has become an independent human being, and Higgins has remained a pompous ass.

When the film of the play was made in 1938, the ending was changed to include Eliza returning, Higgins asking her to fetch his pipe and slippers, and the implication that she would do it, if not gladly, then at least ungrudgingly. The musical repeats this ending, giving the audience the romantic ending they think they want, even if it goes against a lot of what’s gone before; that Eliza would willingly become romantically involved with her pigheaded mentor.

It doesn’t wash, but we’re stuck with that text, so a director has to come up with a way to make that ending more palatable and believable to a modern audience. Sher’s solution is to have Higgins ask for the slippers and Eliza face off with him for a few seconds, then turn, leave the stage, and walk out through the audience, claiming her independence. In theory, this is an interesting ending. It denies the romance that shouldn’t be there, it makes Eliza more of an independent individual, and is a coup de theatre. It didn’t work for me in that (in practical terms) getting off the stage of the Vivian Beaumont Theatre doesn’t seem easy, and seems less like a concluding statement than a throwing up of the hands. I would have much preferred leaving them in that face-to-face standoff, as equals, with no sense of a romantic resolution.

END SPOILER SECTION

Despite these cavils, as I say, it’s about as well-done as one might hope for. Harry Hadden-Paton was very good Higgins, even as he bore a startling resemblance to Colin Clive. Clive played Dr. Frankenstein in the 1931 film, and there were interesting parallels in comparing them as characters whose creations get out of their control. Kersten Anderson was a marvelous Eliza and sang beautifully, Norbert Leo Butz is nothing is not charming, and was able to overcome so much of the unnecessariness of Doolittle, and the supporting cast, especially Allan Corduner (Pickering), Jordan Donica (Freddy) (I hate “On the Street Where You Live,” and he sang it beautifully), and Linda Muggleston as Mrs. Pierce, the housekeeper, were all very good. For me, though, the treat was Rigg. I loathe entrance applause, and (fortunately) no one got any—except Rigg, who also got both that and a standing ovation during the curtain call (during which she goosed both Hadden-Paton and Corduner), and was as dry as dust in the best Shavian way. Michael Yeargan’s set was especially good, with Higgins’s house emerging from the vast upstage space and gliding cinematically downstage like a battleship.

The show runs about three hours, so we got out after 6:00, but since I had an evening engagement, I needed to find something to do until about 8:30, which (even in New York) is not easy on a Sunday evening; things tend to close early. I walked down to the Iguana restaurant on 54^th (where I’m going tonight) to make a reservation to see Vince Giordano and The Nighthawks plays 20s dance music, then found an actual cozy coffee shop where I could go over my email, charge my phone, watch the Dodger game, and do some reading.

I was waiting to go to 54 Below to see a 40^th-anniversary concert for Ain’t Misbehavin’. I’ve been a fan of Thomas “Fats” Waller since the early 70s, so when a revue featuring music he’d written or recorded came about, there was no way I was going to miss it. It came to Los Angeles with the original cast after its Broadway run, so I was able to see it there and had a whale of a time. In the decades since, I’ve listened to the cast album scores of times, and know it as well as I do the original recordings. I saw on the 54 Below website that, not only were they doing this concert, it would feature three of the four surviving cast members. Well, there was no way I was going to miss it, so I made a reservation for the second show (at 9:30) and was told the house would open at 8:45. 

One night only

I arrived at about 8:20, and found a pretty good crowd was already there. We could hear what was going on in the first show over the speakers, and it sounded great. That show came down about 8:35, but people just weren’t leaving. Eventually, people did come up the stairs in twos or threes in a kind of a happy daze, and they were all so insistent on telling those of us in line that we “were in for a treat” that it started to become obnoxious. Why couldn’t they leave? Just get out and let us in, I thought. Finally, after about twenty or twenty-five minutes, the house was empty enough that they were able to seat the crowd for the late show.

I was seated at a ringside table with a very nice couple from Ventura who run a musical theatre there. We had a great time getting acquainted and telling stories (I plugged Mother Night, even if they’ll have left before we open), and eventually, the show started with Richard Maltby, Jr., who’d directed and written lyrics for the original production, coming onstage and telling us what we were about to see.

Or he tried to. Nothing could have prepared me for what came next. I spent most of the next 90 minutes smiling deliriously and wiping tears from my eyes. While the bulk of the singing was done by Johmaalya Adelekan, Rheaume Crenshaw, Tyrone Davis, Jr., Zurin Villanueva (who had just been in a production of the show directed by Andre DeShields), Frenchie Davis, Tony Perry, and Cynthia Thomas, it was Ken Page, Charlayne Woodard, and DeShields who sent the show into the stratosphere. They were brilliant in 1979, but 40 years of performance only deepened their performance skills, humor, and ability to bring the most out of the material. Every moment topped the one that had gone before—even if I was hampered by having all of them towering over me and having to awkwardly work through my dinner while they were performing. The room was full of people who knew the show backward and forward, so everyone was responding enthusiastically and in the best way, especially on the shout-out and audience participation sections. In the words of Noel Coward, “I couldn’t have liked it more.”

When the show did end, it became instantly apparent why it had taken the earlier audience so long to leave; there was something about the atmosphere of joy in that room that made it feel impossible to leave. I could happily have stayed there another three hours, just soaking it in.

Eventually, though, it was time to go, so I trudged up the stairs into the (surprisingly) cold and rainy night. I briefly considered walking home, but the weather was too crummy, so I took the subway. Unfortunately, I went an unfamiliar way and when I came out the subway, walked about a half-a-mile in the wrong direction before becoming suspicious. I recovered, made it back to the East Village, walked by a hole-in-the-wall that specializes in the kinds of food people eat when drunk or stoned (mostly fried or frozen), got a soft-serve cone, and made it back to the apartment to find a guy kind of sprawled on the stairs of the vestibule. We exchanged greetings, and he explained that he was waiting for his friend upstairs. I had no reason to disbelieve him, but assumed he was just using the space as a shelter on a lousy night, and let it pass. I didn’t hear anyone leave later, but I’m finding out that’s not unusual.

The final step of the evening was to blog and catch up on a little TV before I realized it was after 6:00, the sky outside was lightening up, and that it might be a good thing to get to bed. I did just that, and that ends this chapter.