| UNSINKABLE MOLLY BROWN IS SINKABLE AFTER ALL | |
| Posted by: NewtonUK 09:51 am EST 02/17/20 | |
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| First off, its a revisal, not a revival. They have jettisoned half the score, and the entire book, and all the characters except for Molly and Johnny. But they are changed, especially, Johnny, beyond recognition. Meredith Willson, whom I met, realized writing the MUSIC MAN, that all the songs in his back catalog and 'trunk' that he thought would be the entire score were unusable. Long before juke box musicals, he realized you cant just pull songs out of a box and write a story around them. So he wrote an original score. A Damn fine one. This wisdom of Willson didnt stop Kathleen Marshall and Dick Scanlan from dropping half the score of UMB, and digging thru Willson's 'trunk' for songs that they could write new lyrics to to suit their new plot & characters and social agenda. Beth Malone is fabulous (though Marshall basically only asks her to do one thing for 2 hours and 25 minutes. But its a good thing.) At the drop of a hat, the orchestra plays 'I aint down yet', the best song in the score, still. And we are treated to lessons about the evils of capitalism, importance of labor unions, importance of immigrants, importance of one's early life freinds, stupidity of the rich, women's solidarity, suffragettes, racial and heritage prejudice, and on and on. Johnny and Molly's best friends in Leadville are an Italian, a German, and a Chinaman. (Their word, not mine). When they are introduced in exactly this way to Molly & Johnny's spunky African American maid in Denver, she immediately says 'walk into a bar' ... and the audience breaks into gales of laughter. That's what we've come to. Their other best friend is a woman from Cornwall. Covering all the bases. Horace Tabor - the Leadville Mine owner, is a kind of a villain, but Marshall and Scanlan don't have the heart to really make him one. They give him a comic wife, a close cousin of Eulalie McKechnie Shinn in the MUSIC MAN, who makes all his decisions for him. So that every awful thing Tabor does is erased by a comic punch line from his wife. They do mention is passing that Tabor's wife is called Baby Doe - Tabor built an opera house, which still stands in Leadville. Of course, Opera House back then didnt mean opera. It was a generalterm used especially in the Western US for 'grand' theatres where touring theatres and artistses played. In the late 1950's Douglas Moore and John Latouchewrote THE BALLAD OF BABY DOE - about Baby Doe Tabor, which premiered at teh Central City Opera House. So the revisal, 11 years after Ms Marshall began working on it in Denver with Kelly O Hara and Mark Kudisch in the leads, has morphed into a musical episode of The West Wing. Its worth it for Ms Malone, and some energetic dancing (and some endless superfluous ballroom dancing in Act 2, which seems really unfinished - odd after 11 years of work). And the show ends up with a whimper which kind of is reminding us to vote out Trump, in a not too subtle way, The original Unsinkable Molly Brown was no great work of art, but it had no pretensions to be, and it entertained us mightily. This revisal tries to have it all ways at once, but has no focus, no real reason for being. As a colleague once said wisely about Broadway bound projects, 'You need to know when to walk away'. |
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