BASES
INSTINCT
Cortland
Repertory’s Damn Yankees is a hell of a show
Mel Brooks
coined the phrase “my favorite year,” and he spoke for many people his age and
younger. He was talking about 1954, but he could have cited any year from the
first Eisenhower administration, like 1955 when the Richard Adler-Jerry Ross
Damn Yankees opened or 1953, when it’s supposed to be happening. Bill
Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” hit the top of the charts two months after
Yankees opened, but this was a time when the show’s songs, like “Two Lost
Souls” and “Whatever Lola Wants,” swept the nation. Amazingly, 54 years later
they’re still pretty terrific.
This didn’t
just happen. One of Damn Yankees’ chief assets is that it was
choreographed by the young Bob Fosse, as was the Adler-Ross show The Pajama
Game the previous year. Having the male chorus appear in baseball uniforms
was a clever idea that remains a delight, as well as anticipating the street
toughs as dancers in West Side Story two years later. For Cortland
Repertory Theatre’s new production, choreographer Daniel B. Hess makes the jocks
look like swans with cleats; they’re visually impressive in numbers like “Who’s
Got the Pain.” And the first act’s all-male “Heart” deserves to be the show’s
best-remembered number.
No one who
knows anything about musical theater is unaware of Damn Yankees’ several
premises. In George Abbott’s adaptation of Douglass Wallop’s novel The Year
the Yankees Lost the Pennant, a hapless overweight fan of the now-extinct
Washington Senators, Joe Boyd (Jef Canter in a body
suit), makes a Faustian pact with the satanic Applegate (company favorite
Dominick Varney) to transform himself into a perfect, Adonis-like 22-year-old
hunk named Joe Hardy (Peter Carrier). Young Joe’s excellence miraculously lifts
the Senators, led by Coach Van Buren (Tom Frye), to unimagined heights so that
they challenge the dominant New York Yankees for the American League pennant.
Nosy female sports reporter Gloria Thorpe (Meghan Rozak) is justifiably
suspicious. But because Joe Boyd, a real estate salesman in life, has insisted
on an escape clause so that his soul can be withdrawn at the last moment,
Applegate summons up a temptress from hell, Lola (Alyson Tolbert), to keep him
in tow.
What keeps
the plot rooted in the Ozzie-and-Harriet era is that the real love story
celebrates marital continence. Both the chubby Joe Boyd and the strapping Joe
Hardy are in love with glamorless housewife Meg Boyd (Erica Livingston). Three
of the show’s songs, “Goodbye Old Girl,” “A Man Doesn’t Know” and “Near to You,”
are devoted to this theme, although they are among the less remembered. Whereas
other productions have let the middle-aged romance fade, director Jim
Bumgardner, strong as always with comic staging, refreshes the
genuine sweetness between the Joes and Meg with the emphatic singing
voices of Canter, Carrier and Livingston. This enhances rather
than detracts from the frequent hilarity.
Yet even on
the home front there is another comic distraction: Meg’s mambo-obsessed Sister
(Rebecca McGraw), who ropes young Joe into a hospital benefit. In the original
book there were two intruding women, and the one named Sister was played by the
young Jean Stapleton (15 years
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before her Edith Bunker on TV’s All in the
Family) who made her reputation with it. For this Cortland Rep show McGraw
sees her opportunities and grabs them.
Over the
years Damn Yankees has held off the aging process by adaptation. Part of
that has been to turn the 1950s themselves into artifact. At least two dozen
lines have been added to remind us of lost time. When asked what he’s been doing
to occupy himself, Applegate grins that he was “Out designing an Edsel.”
Blustery team owner Mr. Welch (Robert Finley) roars that he’s not going to give
greedy bonus players more money because, “After all, this is baseball . . . not
a business.” (The audience groans.) When Joe Hardy is roped into giving
commercial endorsements, he chokes while trying to inhale Kent cigarettes.
The name of
songster Jerry Ross (1926-1955) is not on everyone’s lips as one of the
golden-age Broadway greats, but his music endures. A lung disease felled him at
29 while Damn Yankees was still doing SRO business. For wit and
allusiveness he’s a peer of Frank Loesser; his first act’s “Blooper Ballet”
compares well with “Fugue for Tinhorns” in Guys and Dolls. Together with
Richard Adler’s naughty lyrics for the soft-shoe parody, “Those Were the Days,”
Applegate delights in the evil he has wrought, with actor Varney’s wickedly
smirking delivery bringing down the house.
As the book
of Damn Yankees has evolved through rewrites, especially with stars like
Jerry Lewis taking the role, Applegate has become the de facto lead. Maine-based
Varney makes a convincing case that the devil should talk like the late Paul
Lynde. Although we cannot know where Varney’s many improvs come from, they
bespeak an intimate conspiracy with the audience that he developed in roles like
the cross-dressing sidekick in last summer’s Leading Ladies. In his
audience survey of lost lovers Varney’s Applegate wows the house with, “Look!
It’s J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson!”
Two of
Damn Yankees’ biggest numbers come from characters who are tangential to
the plot. The company had to go all the way to Wichita State University for
diminutive Tom Frye as Coach Van Buren, who boasts the demeanor of a burlesque
comedian with the lungs of an opera singer for the really masculine “Heart.”
Meghan Rozak as Gloria is less adept at comedy but musically robust in her
biggest number, “Shoeless Joe from Hannibal, Mo.”
Bumgardner’s
most audacious casting choice is Alyson Tolbert as Lola. Ever since Gwen Verdon
took the role when others refused it in 1955 it has belonged more to a dancer
than a singer. Yet Tolbert delivers with two strong suits: She‘s an
African-American performer who sings in a Broadway style. By tweaking a taboo
from 1955, Tolbert and Bumgardner enhance Lola’s temptation. In the three-sided
Edward Jones Playhouse at Cortland Repertory, you can watch the faces of the
packed audience, mostly from small towns and cities in upstate New York. They
are smiling with amusement and approval.
This
production runs through July 18. See Times Table for
information. |
