Thoroughly Charming Millie
By Anne Marie Welsh
October 24, 2000
Forget the flapper film. Think floor wax.
"Thoroughly Modern Millie," which premiered Sunday, Oct. 22 at La Jolla Playhouse, celebrates old-school American musical comedy with new-school polish. Singing, dancing fools and the steno pool still tap right out at you.
But in the show's comedic high point, writer Dick Scanlan creates a breathless, world-of-business rewrite of Gilbert and Sullivan patter: "Unless you can convince me you've improved the floor-wax batter, we will take our business elsewhere, so I hope you'll solve the matter."
The 1967 Ross Hunter movie tried to spoof movie musicals, though its lead feet and forced smiles meant even Julie Andrews couldn't make the bubble float. This is one movie that hasn't been sitting around in the vaults waiting to take to the stage: A spoof of a spoof?
But the stage "Millie" does float on a strong current of smart, shared inspiration. First credits go to writer-lyricist Scanlan, a real find for musical theater, and to Sutton Foster, who plays the high-voltage Millie. Scanlan's book is knowing, but has none of the brittle, insistent humor that sank the movie. He's retained four songs, and some of Richard Morris' original screenplay, including the Chinese thugs and their white slaver subplot cleverly reinvented for a multicultural age.
Scanlan, composer Jeanine Tesori and the gifted director Michael Mayer give a warmly postmod spin to the material, infusing it with a madcap vitality that pulls you right in: "No, No, Nanette" turned "Yes, Yes, Millie."
As the titular heroine, young Foster tears into the part with earthy gusto. She's got toughness and charm, and singing seven of the eight songs in the first act, she shows a rangy voice that won't quit. Add a perfect stage smile, a confident stride, and you've got a performer making the most of a big, brash role with Broadway potential.
"Millie" has nothing much on its mind, but its couple of core ideas do play. All roads lead to New York right there on David Gallo's hand-drawn front curtain and in his art-deco Salute to Manhattan set. There's also that liberation-vs.-love conflict, wonderfully presented in Mayer's yin-yang staging and Tesori's spliced-together arrangements of jazzy "moderns" tunes ("Thoroughly Modern" or "Forget About the Boy") with romantic ballads (the lovelorn "Jimmy" or kitsch romance of "I'm Falling in Love With Someone.")
Act I takes a while to get cooking. A production number at Ma Bell's speakeasy feels conventional, the kind of dance cut that needs more edge. And the first change of tone to the nefarious scheme of slave trader Mrs. Meers (veteran Pat Carroll, nicely understated) is a real clunker. Carroll builds her character slowly, peaking in a vaudevillian give-and-take with the Muzzy of Tonya Pinkins.
When the show gets hot, it stays there. As in "Speed Test." Millie takes dictation from the stalwart, square-jawed Trevor Graydon (Marc Kudisch, terrific), then types said letter in under two minutes. Scanlan's new words to "My eyes are fully open to my awful situation," the G&S patter song from "Ruddigore," get noted, repeated, typed, tapped, accelerated.
Kudisch is just as good in his Nelson Eddy mode, falling in love with Miss Dorothy (Sarah Uriarte Berry) to the strains of the "Indian Love Call" from Victor Herbert's 1935 "Naughty Marietta." The scene is way beyond camp, yet, like so much else in the show, has a crazy rightness. Not to put too fine a point upon the matter, but Kudisch's Trevor comes to represent the operetta hero who can't lighten up for musical comedy; he wears his serious suits -- bright blue and geeky green, then John Barleycorn brown -- with Boy Scout seriousness.
Berry's Miss Dorothy gets the Jeanette McDonald naivete and soaring vocal lines right, and as Millie's love Jimmy, Jim Stanek quickly rises above the Roaring '20s "lingo du jour" with which he begins.
Other strong turns come from Anne L. Nathan as the humorless steno supervisor Miss Flannery, and Pinkins as the warmhearted diva Muzzy in a blues number first off, and a tongue-in-cheek scat song with a male backup quartet dressed as an instrumental combo.
Tesori's new songs are utterly of a piece with the songs she inherited from the movie, with the period music and with the show's devil-may-care spirit. Her earlier, darker musical "Violet" showed she can write convincingly in gospel, blues and rock idioms. Here, except for the rising, blues-tinged "Gimme, Gimme" (beautiful phrased by Foster), Tesori's work is self-effacing, not the place to hear a distinctive compositional voice. If anything, the signature sound comes from Ralph Burns' just right orchestrations, banjos and all.
Scanlan, Tesori, the versatile Mayer and company have remade a musical in the spirit choreographer Mark Morris brought to his version of "The Nutcracker" as "The Hard Nut." They frame the piece with irony to expose its race and gender politics, yet treat the beloved source with knowing affection and sweet exuberance.
You'd have to be half-dead not to enjoy this show. It's got the sophistication and lack of pretense that mark an earlier era of musical theater. Yet in its energy, it feels a lot like today.
Anne Marie Welsh can be reached by phone, (619) 293-1265; fax, (619) 293-2436; and e-mail (anne-marie.welsh@ uniontrib.com).
Credits
Book: Richard Morris and Dick Scanlan.
New music: Jeanine Tesori.
New lyrics: Dick Scanlan.
Director: Michael Mayer.
Choreographer: Rob Ashford.
Music direction: Michael Rafter.
Orchestrations: Ralph Burns.
Vocal arrangements: Jeanine Tesori.
Dance arrangements: David Krane.
Set: David Gallo.
Costumes: Robert Perdziola.
Lighting: Donald Holder.
Featured cast: Sutton Foster, Sarah Uriarte Berry, Stephen Sable, Francis Jue, Pat Carroll, Jim Stanek,
Anne L. Nathan, Marc Kudisch, Tonya Pinkins, Julie Connors.