'Mack and Mabel': Broadway's Revered Flop,
Resurrected With Love
The New York Times
For more than 25
years "Mack and Mabel" has
been Jerry Herman's favorite
problem child, the
bittersweet Broadway flop
that refuses to die. Mr.
Herman, the composer and
lyricist of mega- hits from
"Hello, Dolly!" to "Mame"
to "La Cage aux Folles"
(which each ran for more
than 1,500 performances),
has had no shortage of
successful offspring. But as
he put it gently the other
day, "Maybe you're always
fonder of the underdog."
It may also be that "Mack
and Mabel," which starred
Robert Preston and
Bernadette Peters and closed
after 65 performances in
1974, has a special place in
Mr. Herman's heart because
critics and cultists alike consider it his best score. Based on
the true story of the slapstick silent-movie director Mack
Sennett and Mabel Normand, the on-screen comic ingenue
he loved off screen, the show is "a great love story about a
man who doesn't know how to say I love you," as Mr.
Herman described it in the elegant library of his home here
in Bel-Air.
"I Won't Send Roses," Mack's rueful warning to Mabel, is
one of the most haunting anti-love songs in the Broadway
canon, and her big torch song, "Time Heals Everything" has
been a staple for Ms. Peters and a cadre of cabaret
performers for years.
But the tale is dark and ends sadly, and the consensus has
been that the book by Mr. Herman's frequent collaborator,
Michael Stewart, was fatally flawed. Mr. Herman always
hoped to take another crack at the show, but Mr. Stewart
died in 1987 before they could get around to it. Then Mr.
Stewart's sister, Francine Pascal, who worked with her
brother on the book for another musical, "George M!," and
is the successful author of the "Sweet Valley High" series of
juvenile novels, decided to try her hand at a thorough
overhaul of "Mack and Mabel."
An award-winning 1995 production in London was
followed by another attempt last year by the Barrington
Stage Company in Massachusetts, which received mixed
reviews. Reviewing that production in The New York
Times, Ben Brantley said the show "shimmers with
appetizing musical moments," but that "it keeps
undercutting the upbeat vigor of its showbiz anthems."
On Wednesday, yet another revision (with a book that Ms.
Pascal describes as about 40 percent different from the
original) will have its world premiere in Los Angeles. It is
the first time that a version of "Mack and Mabel" has been
produced here since it began its original pre-Broadway
tryout at the Los Angeles Music Center.
"It's unquestionably one of the great scores, just out of the
ballpark," said Arthur Allan Seidelman, who is directing the
new production under the auspices of Reprise!, the Los
Angeles equivalent of the Encores! series at City Center in
Manhattan, which revives problematic Broadway musicals
for limited runs with bare-bones staging. "But I find it an
extremely appealing story as well, a story of two love
affairs, of a man and a woman and a man and the movies"
� one that has a special resonance here in the home of
Hollywood, he added.
The production stars Douglas Sills, who played the title role
in "The Scarlet Pimpernel" on Broadway, as Mack; Jane
Krakowski, a regular on "Ally McBeal" who got her
Broadway start as Flammchen in "Grand Hotel," as Mabel;
and Donna McKechnie, the original Cassie of "A Chorus
Line," as Lottie, the brassy dancing foil first played by Lisa
Kirk. Its 15 performances, in a small theater on the campus
of the University of California at Los Angeles, are already
sold out.
Unlike most Reprise! productions, which involve classic
shows by long- dead composers, this one is being put on
with Mr. Herman's active participation and financial
support, which means that the company's musical director,
the veteran arranger and conductor Peter Matz, will have a
17- piece orchestra (instead of his usual scaled-down
ensemble) to play Philip J. Lang's original Broadway
orchestrations.
At a rehearsal the other day, Mr. Herman, 67, and Ms.
Pascal huddled in a front row watching every move. At one
point Mr. Herman sprang out of his seat to remind some
chorus members of the right lyric.
"Probably the most important thing persuading me to get
involved was the presence of Mr. Herman and Mr. Matz,"
said Mr. Sills, who lives in Los Angeles and was attracted
by the show's short run after three years in "Pimpernel."
"This was a chance for me to be exposed to the
acknowledged masters of this craft."
Ms. McKechnie, who came from her home in New York
for this production and a couple of cabaret engagements,
said, "Anytime I can get a show like this without
auditioning, it's a very big compliment." A Broadway
trouper for more than 40 years, she remembers attending
the Broadway opening of the original "Mack and Mabel"
and said she was grateful for the chance to keep working in
the idiom she learned from two mentors who recently died,
the choreographer Peter Gennaro and the dancer Gwen
Verdon.
Ms. Pascal said that the new book was historically more
accurate than the original, faithfully rendering Mack and
Mabel's breakup on the eve of their marriage as a result of
Mack's sudden affair with another starlet, and that the pace
had been tightened throughout. While the original ended
with the pair parting ("See ya, kid," Mack said), the revised
version leaves the couple in a moment of brief
reconciliation, as Mack persuades his star to make one more
movie, saying, "I need ya, kid."
Mr. Herman has also added a brief reprise in which the
crusty director allows, "I might send roses."
Ms. Pascal said, "The story of this show always was, if you
woke people up in the middle of the night and asked them
about it, they'd say: `Great music. Bad book.' " But she
added: "In the revival last year, I felt that people would
come from far and wide to hate the book, and they didn't.
There were problems, and I was able to see them, and
we've done even more since then."
Mr. Herman and Ms. Pascal agree that the original
production was fraught with problems: a wide age gap
between its two stars, which led to poor chemistry; a tryout
engagement on the giant outdoor stage of the Municipal
Opera in St. Louis, where, Mr. Herman said, the show's
timing got off track; and feuds between the composer and
the original director, Gower Champion. By the time the
show reached Washington, one critic said it had "all the zip
of a dead flounder."
Ms. Pascal recalled, "Jerry and Mike used to talk about that
production as a little brown box."
Mr. Herman has restored one darkly comic song, in which
Sennett describes the secret of slapstick, called "Hit 'em on
the Head."
"It's a great song because Sennett really began screen
violence, and he didn't know it," said Mr. Herman, who
moved here nine years ago after being diagnosed as
H.I.V.-positive, assuming he would need "a pleasant place
to expire." Instead, a regimen of drug cocktails has kept
him free of any symptoms of illness, and, he said, "I am
right now a healthy man."
He readily acknowledged that the Broadway of the 1990's
had less appetite for old-fashioned, hummable musicals like
his, and he is working on a new show intended for a Las
Vegas casino, about a showgirl who moves there to "find
her fortune." But he clearly also hopes that after all these
years "Mack and Mabel" will ultimately find its own happy
ending in a new Broadway production.
"I honestly believe that the world wants a show like this,"
he said.
-Todd S. Purdum, The New York Times
November 7, 2000
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