New Girl in Town
2013; Penn State University Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/eugeoneirevi.34.1.0131
ISSN2161-4318
Autores Tópico(s)Theater, Performance, and Music History
ResumoThe 1956–57 New York theater season was particularly noteworthy for Eugene O'Neill. Just three years after his death, Long Day's Journey Into Night collected most of the season's theater awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Revivals of The Iceman Cometh, which had opened off-Broadway in May 1956, and A Moon for the Misbegotten helped rescue O'Neill's diminishing reputation from further decline through acclaimed productions of plays that had been victims of mixed reviews a decade earlier. The year-long O'Neill resurgence continued into the final weeks of the theater season when, on May 4, 1957, “Anna Christie” (1922) was reintroduced to audiences at the Forty-Sixth Street Theater as New Girl in Town, with a libretto by George Abbott, music and lyrics by Bob Merrill, and Tony Award winner Gwen Verdon as the show's singing and dancing star.Fifty-five years later, the Irish Repertory Theatre's modest production of New Girl in Town, directed by Charlotte Moore, tested the musical's durability without the trappings of a Broadway spectacle or the presence of a Broadway luminary. Opening July 18, 2012, for a seven-week run in the Irish Rep's small theater on West 22nd Street, this New Girl in Town, only the third New York City production in the show's history, offered fleeting glimpses of what O'Neill achieved in “Anna Christie.” The formulaic banality of Abbott's libretto encumbered Moore's laudable effort at almost every turn, and her cast of accomplished singers and dancers never quite shook off the musical comedy stereotypes imposed by Merrill's score.New Girl in Town moves all of “Anna Christie” to the New York City waterfront. In this setting, Chris Christopherson no longer characterizes fate as “Dat ole davil sea,” and the absence of the barge captain's phrase, repeated like a curse throughout “Anna Christie,” signals a retreat from a mythic journey shaped by forces as powerful and incomprehensible as the sea. In its place is a reassuring clarity that culminates in an unambiguously happy ending as a newly reformed Marthy leads a marching band of teetotalers across the stage. In New Girl in Town, the fog out of which O'Neill has Mat Burke appear like a sea god to behold Anna as a mermaid in a dream has lifted, replaced by the light of day to which the musical pays tribute in the song “Sunshine Girl.” The original musical also reset the time of O'Neill's play from the 1920s to the turn of the century, an era that generated a potpourri of musical styles from which Merrill borrowed. Ragtime, barbershop quartets, a rousing march with echoes of John Phillip Sousa, and a waltz in the Viennese style give the score of New Girl in Town versatility. Yet neither the music nor the lyrics—with the exception of Mat and Anna's haunting duet, “Did You Close Your Eyes?”—seems to capture the tone and mysterious rhythm of “Anna Christie.”More George Abbott than O'Neill, New Girl in Town nonetheless adds to the Irish Rep's laudable record of staging O'Neill, including a 2008 revival of Take Me Along, the musical adaptation of Ah, Wilderness!. Moore and her collaborators—the expert musical director John Bell and the ceaselessly inventive choreographer Barry McNabb—seem to have taken their cue from the Equity Library Theater's 1975 revival, which was performed by a cast of eight. This New Girl in Town featured an ensemble of three women and four men who played various roles as well as sang and danced with acrobatic flair on the Irish Rep's tiny stage. Moore restored the action of New Girl in Town to the 1920s, although in order to provide sufficient dance space and move quickly from scene to scene, James Morgan's minimal, multipurpose scenery lacked sufficient detail to facilitate that return. Josh Clayton's skillful orchestrations reduced the pit musicians to a versatile a quartet.This New Girl in Town involved a number of well-conceived changes from the original production. Most of the lengthy dance breaks were dropped, helping the production by speeding it along. This revival also deleted two components of the 1957 New Girl in Town that showcased Verdon's charming stage persona and her sensational dancing: Anna's first act solo, “There Ain't No Flies on Me” and Fosse's controversial “Brothel Dance” in the second act. “Sunshine Girl,” the show's catchiest tune, moved from act 1 to the top of act 2, which began the most accomplished sequence in the production. Greeting the returning audience with a lively melody sung in tight harmony and with a fluid mix of 1920s dance moves, the ensemble transported them from intermission into the world of the music hall, delighting the Irish Rep regulars and jump-starting act 2 with a dynamic opening number that New Girl in Town had previously lacked.Margaret Loesser Robinson portrayed Anna as an isolated misfit in the musical's waterfront world. Her initial scene with Marthy, rendered comically by Danielle Ferland, conveyed Anna's hard exterior as a piece of ill-fitting armor that fell away when she turned her biting humor on herself. Her take on Marthy, lifted directly from O'Neill (“You're me forty years from now”), was among the biggest laugh lines in the show. Attractive and vaguely Scandinavian in appearance, Robinson was particularly engaging in her quiet moments and in the private space she expressed in her songs, notably in the rueful “If That Was Love.” Regrettably, the production retained a short balletic section in act 2 during which Anna wandered around the stage with some stylized gestures that lasted far too long and invited unfavorable comparisons with Verdon's performance in that same interlude.Ferland's Marthy, wrapped in drab clothes as worn out as her existence, brought a sharp comic sense to her role that Cliff Bemis, in his equally lackluster seaman's garb and, inexplicably, without any trace of a Swedish accent in his spoken scenes, was unable to match as Chris. Possessing an impressive voice, however, Bemis delivered “Anna Lilla” with believable fatherly regret, and he caught the ensemble's oomph during his solo moments in “Ven I Valse.” Unfortunately, neither his wrangling with Marthy in their flirtatious duet, “Yer My Friend, Aintcha?” nor his clashes with her during the old couple's constant bickering established Chris in New Girl in Town as a pragmatic counterpoint to Marthy's well-intentioned foolishness.New Girl in Town only came fully to life in those moments when the ensemble took to the stage. Moore and her costume designer, China Lee, as well as her hair and wig designer Robert-Charles Vallance, seem to have revisited the docks where O'Neill was a denizen for the authentic look of the ensemble. Befitting their profession as 1920s prostitutes, the ensemble women—the wonderful Abby Church, Kimberly Dawn Neumann, and Amber Stone—wore their flashy accessories with ankles and calves showing, bobbed hair, and eye makeup inspired by silent-film vamps. Plastered with too much rouge and exaggerated painted lips, the trio parodied the kind of tacky showgirl that the 1957 production of New Girl in Town celebrated without irony in Fosse's dance numbers. When a new batch of sailors arrives in port during “Roll Yer Socks Up,” the women sing, “Don't anybody want a girl?” as they punctuate an exaggerated sexual strut with Charleston steps, thrusting themselves into a joyful send-up of Fosse's style.In his 1957 Daily News review of New Girl in Town, John Chapman noted that O'Neill had fashioned a ”grand-opera plot” for “Anna Christie.” The Irish Rep's New Girl in Town, principally through the imposing and embellished performance of Patrick Cummings as Mat Burke, suggested the operatic potential of the 1922 Pulitzer Prize winner. Similarly, the device of Stephen Zinnato strolling through scene changes with a mournful, bluesy saxophone conveyed the deep, musical feeling in O'Neill's original.Broadway musical conventions, however, had little to do with O'Neill's vision for the theater, and thus the failure of “Anna Christie” to succeed as a musical reaffirms the fundamentals of O'Neill's art. “Anna Christie” was revived in New York City in 1952, 1977, and 1993. It was filmed in 1923, and both an English-language film version and a German film version were released in 1930. London's 2011 Donmar Warehouse “Anna Christie” is rumored to be headed to Broadway next season. Meanwhile, New York's revivals of New Girl in Town have not been of much interest. Moore's production will not alter this reality; perhaps, instead, the Irish Rep should be thanked for giving New Girl in Town a respectful and permanent farewell.
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