| The Apartment vs Promises, Promises (longish). | |
| Last Edit: Delvino 10:51 am EST 12/26/22 | |
| Posted by: Delvino 10:45 am EST 12/26/22 | |
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| TCM has made The Apartment part of their holiday package, appropriately. It's appeared at least three times recently and I dipped in twice. I was a teenage fan of Promises, Promises, which I saw try out at the National in DC when I was in high school. It may seem very post-How to Succeed now, the Succeed corporate office sequences almost cloned in spots, but at the time the Bacharach score was electric, those pit voices, the pop stylings that evoked Dionne Warwick. That overture, a roof-raiser. The show hasn't aged well, as the badly reviewed revival attested, perhaps another discussion entirely. Yet when Promises arrived, The Apartment was about 8 years old, and not a TV staple. In fact, it never played on television. Back then (it opened in cinemas when I was 8), adult fare was cherry-picked for television airings, and for various reasons, The Apartment wasn't available -- no VHS -- for comparisons. So now it's far more clear to me how closely Simon hewed to the Diamond-Wilder script (see the Some Like it Hot discussions). Simon made the Lemmon-Orbach character the unreliable narrator, a charming device allowing Chuck to stop the action, rewind, tell us what he had made up. But otherwise, the show is remarkably true to the film. Structurally, an exact match. The doctor sequences seem lifted almost verbatim. What remains intriguing: watching The Apartment now, it's hard to fathom exactly how the dark movie inspired a musical comedy. That second hour is quite a grim trajectory, a suicide attempt -- and on film, a damned close one -- on Christmas Eve. Moving the show's storytelling from songs like "Where Can You Take a Girl?" (it brought the house down, seriously) to "Turkey Lurkey Time" and then to a second act dominated by a young woman trying to kill herself in a man's apartment feels jarring. I don't recall that aspect -- a tonal shift -- being noted. The Fran character in the musical -- though given three score-defining numbers -- seems less dimensional. Shirley MacLaine made her absolutely real, an energetic young woman with a dry wit, a savvy witness as she opened and closed her elevator. Knowing the show far better, I was surprised, now noting how comparatively underwritten she feels in the musical. A quirky, eccentric anti-ingenue in 1960 became an almost generic young woman in 1968. Simon just wasn't that into her. Jill O'Hara, in some ways MacLaine-esque, did her best -- her distinctive vocals are charming --- but it's odd how uninteresting she is, in scene after scene, in comparison to MacLaine. She has no defining characteristics, no dreams, no goal, no history. And unlike the MacLaine Fran, rather bored, not especially good at her dull job: a hostess in the office restaurant wasn't ripe for comedy like an elevator operator. They added two songs for the woefully miscast Chenoweth in the overthought Mad Men-centric revival, poorly shoehorned ("A House is Not a Home," simply awful as a tag of the first act, in effect stealing from Fran's second act ballad, upstaging Chuck's revelations). The show is something of a sexist curiosity now, trying to have it both ways: let's laugh at these horny middle-aged guys sneaking around on their marriages, dallying with young women, ha ha ha, while creating a viable romance amid the immoral detritus. It ran over 1200 performances, and folks loved it. The Apartment has aged far better. Seen today, it offers a level of reality -- a gritty, ugly one at that -- that Promises couldn't quite get near, even including the suicide attempt. The show is built on a male epiphany in the 11 o'clock spot title song, the film on a more balanced intersection of Fran's and Chuck's sober concessions to life's trade-offs, as equals. Yes, they both have the same last scene; but it feels more fairly arrived at in the movie. The musical, whether burdening Fran with more pop songs or not, doesn't really have much of a leading lady. A curiosity indeed. |
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