The Encores! production of Jerry Herman’s “Mack & Mabel” was announced months before the composer died, in late December, at 88. It wasn’t planned as a tribute, but it makes a proper homage nonetheless.
Not because this showbiz show, which opened on Wednesday night at New York City Center, is one of his greatest works or biggest hits — like “Hello, Dolly!,” “Mame” or “La Cage Aux Folles” — but precisely because it isn’t.
Even a famous artist’s life, for all its grand successes, is made up too of the also-rans, the hatchlings that never flourish in the world. “Mack & Mabel,” whose only Broadway outing lasted all of 66 performances in 1974, is one of those, and this revival doesn’t fix that, can’t magic away Michael Stewart’s troubled book.
Herman’s score, though, has such an embracing loveliness that it trails you right out the door post-show, its romance buoying you like a gentle tide through the Midtown streets. That graceful hummability, in songs like “I Won’t Send Roses” and “Time Heals Everything,” is the reason people have kept hoping for some way to make “Mack & Mabel” work.
Don’t get me wrong. The music isn’t the only thing that this glamorous-looking reboot, directed and choreographed by Josh Rhodes, has to offer. There is a handsomely disheveled Douglas Sills as Mack, a quietly charismatic Alexandra Socha as Mabel and a general reveling in period fashion and physicality.
Yet even when Rob Berman’s fine orchestra is at its most delicate, the show scarcely comes close to stirring emotion.
A dark-edged ode to old Hollywood, it tells the fictionalized story of the silent-film pioneer Mack Sennett, creator of the Keystone Kops, and the actress Mabel Normand, one of the stars of his company — and, as he recalled, the spontaneous inventor of the pie-in-the-face gag that he used again and again in his slapstick comedies.
These were interesting people with remarkable, if truncated, careers. Normand, a onetime art student who was working an artists’ model when she fell into film, died of tuberculosis in her 30s, while Sennett, no fan of dialogue, was ruined by the advent of the talkies.
But “Mack & Mabel,” whose book has been revised since Stewart’s death in 1987 by his sister, Francine Pascal, reduces them to worn clichés: Mabel a pious innocent turned tragic heroine, discovered and molded by Mack, who toys with her affections and looks the other way as she sinks into drink and drugs; Mack a bullying tough guy with a sentimental streak and a list of stubborn regrets about the way he treated her.
Mabel (the part Bernadette Peters played on Broadway) is sympathetic, and Mack (the Robert Preston role) is absolutely not — which would be OK if he were written in more than two dimensions. So predictable are the outlines of their story that you could mime every book scene in the broad gestures of silent movies, and we’d get the gist more rewardingly.
Rhodes’s production livens up whenever both movement and music take over: in the big bathing-beauties number, “Hundreds of Girls” (with miniskirted black-and-white costumes by Amy Clark); the extended Keystone Kops sequence, “Hit ’em on the Head,” starring Fatty Arbuckle (Major Attaway), a Sennett company member; and the murder scene, “Tap Your Troubles Away,” sung by Lilli Cooper as Lottie Ames, another Sennett stalwart, and featuring a scenic flourish that is one of the cleverest things in the show. (The set is by Allen Moyer.)
While the romantic attraction between Mack and Mabel seems pro forma here, Sills and Socha do turn in a gorgeous “I Won’t Send Roses.” If, during that song, you feel the urge to stage an intervention to stop Mabel from getting involved with this willful cad, that is to Socha’s credit. But Mabel’s real chemistry is with a smitten screenwriter, Frank, played with near-poignancy by Ben Fankhauser.
The best part of the evening, though, is the Entr’acte, when only the orchestra is onstage, and the lighting (by Ken Billington) changes color with the colors of the music. This is the one moment that is overtly a tribute to Herman, and it is touching.
For those few minutes, he is right at the center of “Mack & Mabel,” and his achievement in its score washes undiluted over us.
Mack & Mabel
Tickets Through Feb. 23 at New York City Center, Manhattan; 212-581-1212, nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hour 15 minutes.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
