Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
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music, book and lyrics by Meredith Willson, directed by Susan Ferley
Grand Theatre, London
November 30-December 30, 2012
“Ya Got Trouble, My Friend, Trouble in New York City”
This year’s holiday show at the Grand Theatre in London is quite a rarity – the musical version of Miracle on 34th Street by Meredith Willson. Willson is best known as the composer and lyricists for The Music Man (1957), on of the classics of American musical theatre. The Music Man overshadows his second-best known musical The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1960). It would be great to say that Willson’s Miracle on 34th Street (1963) is unjustly neglected, but the Grand Theatre production proves otherwise. Despite a fine cast and clever design, Miracle, except for one song, never rises to the level of The Music Man in musical invention or witty wordplay. It is basically the story that carries us along, as in movie, making the musical numbers fun but dramatically unnecessary.
Willson’s Miracle on 34th Street is based on the beloved 1947 film of the same name written and directed by George Seaton based on a story by Valentine Davies. Willson originally gave his musical the oddly generic title Here’s Love, but now when it is licensed for production the name has been changed to reflect its source. The main difficulty with Willson’s book is that he stays so close to his source that the show requires a dizzying number of scene changes and Willson does not find many places to shoehorn a musical number in and even when he does the numbers seldom move the story forward. It says something that the most famous song in the score – “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” – was not written for the musical at all. Willson wrote the song in 1951 and later added it in the pre-Broadway try-out in place of the song he’d written for the show – “Pinecones and Holly Berries”. Nothing in Willson’s score matches this number in memorability. “Here’s Love”, the song sung about the meaning of Christmas sung by Kris Kringle and the chorus, comes close. “Nothing in Common” is the best song Willson gives Doris Walker, but it sounds as if needs a second or third verse to make its full impact.
Even if the music and lyrics are not up to the level of The Music Man, director Susan Ferley has assembled an excellent cast. As Kris Kringle, the man Doris Walker hires to play the Macy’s department store Santa, who claims actually to be the real Santa Claus, Brian McKay is perfect. His gentlemanly deportment and the strength of his conviction sweeps all doubts before it so that the people who question his identity seem to the mad ones, not him. McKay gives a wonderfully warm portrayal of Santa as a real person, not a caricature.
Blythe Wilson is as lovely and graceful as always as Doris Walker, a woman who once jilted in love has forced herself and her daughter not believe in anything intangible. Given her fine voice, one wished Willson had given her better melodies to sing, though at least she is the one to begin “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” and even the short “Nothing in Common” convinces us of the joyous change in her life. Wilson, who is so expert at capturing the internal conflicts of her characters, does so here by allowing us to see that materialistic worldview that Doris trumpets does not completely hide her hurt from the past and a longing for love. It is this subtext that helps make Willson’s very awkwardly managed scenes between Doris and her neighbour Fred work.
As Fred, Matthew Cassidy strikes just the right note of amusement and frustration with Doris’s point of view. He has a warm, light baritone and handles his few songs well. It would be good if Willson’s book better clarified his relationship to Susan, Doris’s daughter, since at first we think he’s a relative of even her father only to find out that he’s a neighbour that his mother doesn’t like. What then is he doing carrying his neighbour’s daughter around on his shoulders if the mother doesn’t like him? It’s just another awkwardness Willson shows in introducing his characters.
The role of Susan Walker is a long one for a child actor. Seven-year-old Hillary Harkes does a fine job, especially as the grumpy, Santa-dismissive little girl we first meet, though she does have a tendency to speak her lines so quickly that they are not always clear.
The story is not really characterized by laugh-out-loud humour so Willson exaggerates two of the characters. Mr. Shellhammer (James Kall) as head of the toy department has ordered 7000 plastic alligators and Willson gives him several dopey but unfunny jingles to sing by way of increasing their sales. To this Ferley has him fall to the floor in a faint every time the name of Macy’s rival Gimbel’s is mentioned. In the film, Kringle passes psychologist Dr. Sawyer’s mental test even though Sawyer thinks Kringle is mentally ill because he is so kind-hearted. When Kringle finds this out, he raps him on the head with his cane. In the musical Sawyer (Jonathan Ellul) fails Kringle on his psychological exam and hits himself on the head to claim Kringle is violent. As with Mr. Shellhammer, this exaggeration comes across more as stupid than funny. Ferley doesn’t help maters by encouraging both Kall and Ellul to give way over-the-top performances.
The most genuinely funny moment in the musical is at the commitment hearing for Kris Kringle when Fred calls the prosecuting attorney’s son to take the stand. Very young Anna Bartlam, who had previous impressed us as a Dutch-speaking girl, plays Thomas Mara Jr. with such abundant self-confidence that he can’t see that his testimony about believing in Santa Claus is sinking the case of his pompous father, Thomas Mara Sr. (Mark Harapiak). I must mention that Diana Coatsworth distinguishes her two roles of Doris’s Irish maid and that of Judge Martha Group (“Martin” in the original musical) so well that I thought two different actors had played them.
Set designer Bill Layton and costume designer Shawn Kerwin have moved the action up from the 1940s of the film to the 1960s when the musical first appeared. Layton does marvels with flats suggesting the New York City skyline and partial sets of the colourful untramodern offices of the Macy’s employees. Kerwin gives us a wide variety of period costumes for the real and fantasy characters, though the costumes for the fantasy ballet are especially fine. Choreographer Kerry Gage does a remarkable job of suggesting the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade using only half the cast members making numerous costume changes. Yet, the fantasy ballet in the toy department – featuring a Toy Soldier (Matthew Armet), Raggedy Ann (Lindsey Frazier) and Raggedy Andy (Cameron Carver) and a Ballerina (Keely Hutton) – where anything could be possible, could have been much more imaginative.
Fans of rarities of American musical theatre will naturally want to go out of their way to see Meredith Willson’s third-best known musical of his four. Families looking for a live theatre outing will find the show colourful and lively with outstanding performances from Kris Kringle and Doris and excellent to very good performances from the rest of the cast. You will get a great story but as long as you don’t also expect a great musical to tell it, like The Music Man, you should still be happy – and will likely go out singing the show’s most famous song.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Brian McKay and Hillary Harkes. ©2012 Mike Hensen.
For tickets, visit www.grandtheatre.com.
2012-12-27
Miracle on 34th Street