| GOLDEN RAINBOW
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By MARK N. GRANT
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| Kate Baldwin, Christopher Fitzgerald/ Ph: Joan Marcus |
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This is the opening scene? Appalachian sharecroppers are being dispossessed for nonpayment of back taxes by capitalist bad guys? Why, we could be watching Michael Moore's new documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story! And these very same sharecroppers in Missitucky's Rainbow Valley – they're black and white and working comfortably together! And they purchase consumer goodies from the mail-order catalogue of "Shears and Robust" on credit bubble terms that sound – to paraphrase one of the show's stellar songs – something sort of 2009-ish. This is Finian's Rainbow? The marvelous 1947 show long considered to be unrevivable on Broadway? You better believe it. In the era of President Obama and the Great Recession, this classic show now seems not just timely, but prescient. Not only that, but as sheer entertainment it's not a bit dated, in this canny, loving revival.
Judging from the St. James Theatre, things are still fine in Glocca Morra, a place even Eleanor Roosevelt rhapsodized about in her 1940s newspaper column. And by the way, librettist-lyricist E. Y. "Yip" Harburg pilfered "Glocca Morra" and a few other items of gold from Irish novelist James Stephens's 1912 book The Crock of Gold. In Stephens's magic realist fantasy, Gort na Cloca Mora ("the field of big rocks") is where the leprechauns bury their crock of gold. Then somebody steals the crock and Angus Óg, a god, enters the picture. Sound familiar? But of course Harburg and co-librettist Fred Saidy transform those particulars into their own inimitable, crazy quilt libretto as completely as Senator Billboard Rawkins is transformed from white to black. Sixty years later Finian's Rainbow still does a magical, cock-eyed optimist job of fusing such wildly disparate elements as social justice for working people and minorities, the universal nostalgia for our roots be they Irish or other-ish, and that fuzzy junction of fantasy and reality where, even as disillusioned adults, we all must try to maintain our dreams – the meaning of the rainbow of the title.
Director Warren Carlyle and script adapter Arthur Perlman have trimmed the original script by Harburg and Saidy some 45 minutes and altered the original 1947 ending (which extolled the advent of nuclear energy). At times I missed the even greater political edge of the talky original book (which I first saw in a long-ago revival), but not so much that it intruded on the joy of this production. More importantly, Carlyle and Perlman have introduced dramatically telling changes in the presentation of Finian's Rainbow. First, they have both Jim Norton and Christopher Fitzgerald eschew playing twinkle-eyed, central casting, Disney-ized Irishmen. In a way, the gifted Norton almost plays the part against type, ballasting his portrayal of the Quixotic/cartoonish Finian with an O'Casey-like earthboundness, yet never sacrificing charm or whimsy. Second, the southern white bigotry scenes somehow manage to convey the ugliness of a previous era's racial mores without becoming uncomfortably edgy – as Senator Rawkins and his assistant Buzz Collins, both David Schramm and William Youmans dance this tightrope without ever losing their balance, so skilled is their acting (and the directing).
Finally, in the 1947 original and most previous revivals, the magical change of the bigoted senator from white to black was handled by blackfacing (or masking) the white actor. Even back in 1947 the blackface was understood as satirical by sophisticated New York audiences. Which is not to say that race-blind casting was accepted back then: only three months before Finian's Rainbow opened, Canada Lee appeared on Broadway in The Duchess of Malfi in whiteface, and the Broadway community hailed it as a once-off novelty. And a few weeks before Finian opened in January 1947, Duke Ellington's Beggar's Holiday also showed blacks and whites mixing on stage. (A member of the original 1947 chorus in Finian told me in 2003 that there were some tensions backstage because of the prejudice of some of the cast members.) This production uses an actual black actor as the Senator's black changeling, and in this complex dramatic assignment Chuck Cooper, playing every microscopic nuance of comedy and skin-within-skin self-awareness, absolutely commands and seizes the stage. He is simply extraordinary in this role.
The songs, of course, are glorious, Burton Lane's tunes a panorama of genres from cowboy ("That Great Come and Get It Day") to Cotton Club ("The Begat") to renaissance gavotte (‘Something Sort of Grandish"). I actually prefer "Look to the Rainbow" to Harburg's earlier "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." The wonderful original orchestrations by Don Walker and Russell Bennett are intact, if subtly doctored by Larry Moore with string scoring slightly altered and a key changed here or there ("If This Isn't Love," in D in the original, here is lowered a whole step to C). The sound design by Scott Lehrer is less successful. Some shows' sound set-ups are over-sibilant (110 in the Shade). Lehrer's here is boomy and deficient in highs, and it costs the clarity of some of Harburg's mordant lyrics, the political daring of which demands careful listening (two phrases that do clear the ear: "get your beer and your benzedrene" and "Honorary Aryans begat").
The production has a key technical advisor in professional magic consultant Matthew Holtzclaw. Holtzclaw not only presumably assisted in the David Schramm-Chuck Cooper transformation but in the many prestidigitations of Og the leprechaun (which should be spelled Óg with an accent on the "o" and pronounced "Ohg" – it means "young" in Irish Gaelic). Whether deftly juggling and eating apples or lugubriously shrieking about doom and gloom, Christopher Fitzgerald as Og is unfailingly hilarious – the way he deadpans handing dancing canes to "The Begat" singers is almost Buster Keaton-like. His ever-shortening green short pants as he grows more mortal and horny is one of the funniest costuming effects I've ever seen (the goofy green sneakers help). And he nails "When I'm Not Near the Girl I Love" the way it's supposed to be nailed.
Kate Baldwin would have towered over 4-foot-11 Ella Logan, the Scottish fireplug who was the original Sharon. She sings well and is winsome and lovely throughout, though she sang "How Are Things in Glocca Morra?" more meltingly in the previous Encores! production. As Woody the labor organizer, Cheyenne Jackson has the generic charm of a Calvin Klein ad. What is he playing as an actor here? Not for a blue minute do you buy him as a rabble-rouser. Not for a moment do you believe his pallid, too-intimate crooning of "Old Devil Moon," a wonderfully sexy song, or sense any chemistry between him and the luscious Baldwin. Not for the evening does he bother to attempt a southern accent. (Speaking of puzzling decisions, here's a question for director-choreographer Carlyle and terrific costumer Toni-Leslie James: Why do the women sharecroppers wear high heels, especially when dancing?)
Terri White's foghorn pipes in "Necessity" stop the show and rebuke all the theater amplification from 44th Street to Timbuktu. She's thrilling to watch and hear. Alina Faye as mute Susan Mahoney caresses the eye with her lissome, butterfly-winged grace as a dancer. A high point of the show is her "Dance of the Golden Crock" to the poignant solo harmonica accompaniment of Guy Davis as Sunny – a role played in 1947 by the great blind blues harmonica player Sonny Terry, legendary partner of Brownie McGhee (Mr. Davis recreated Terry's original music for this production). Scenic designer John Lee Beatty has smartly opted to recreate (or pay homage to) the backdrop-dominated spare design of Jo Mielziner's original 1947 set, which emphasizes the point of view of the common people that is at the heart of the show at the same time it leaves plenty of room for the athletic choreography of director Carlyle.
A Broadway revival of Finian's Rainbow slated for 2000 never quite made it to the boards. Some thought that PC was standing in the way. Did the election of a black president make the financing of a full-dress revival finally possible? We'll leave that to the pundits. Regardless, this delightful new production proves beyond any doubt that Finian's Rainbow was truly ahead of its time. Its time has come.
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