When I first saw Honeymoon
in Vegas at the
Paper Mill Playhouse where it debuted last season, I was highly enthusiastic. I
never wrote a formal review, but I posted on the Aisle Say home page that the creative and production team did
everything right.
Having
seen it again on Broadway at the Nederlander, I’m still highly enthusiastic…but my feeling has changed a little,
from “everything right” to “everything as right as they could make it.”
I’m
not sure about what happened between the
two engagements in any sense but an alchemical one, for the show is essentially
the same; material-wise, it’s a little tighter, but that’s all to the good; it
has lost nothing vital. And the same production, just adapted to fit the new
space. But that weird alchemy of physical space may have been crucial in a way nobody
can have predicted. I’ll try to make sense
of that.
Without
spoiling too much, the story is about Jack Singer (Rob McClure), in love with fiancé Betsy Nolan (Brynn
O’Malley) but haunted by the curse of his
dead, domineering mother Bea (Nancy Opel) who, on her deathbed, promised disaster if he should ever marry. No
matter what he does, the memory renders him wussified; so on impulse he decides
to make things right—get the hell away from New York, fly him and Betsy
to Vegas and marry there. Upon arrival and getting their room, things seem to be
going well, except that Betsy has caught the attention of pro gambler and
casino owner Tommy Korman (Tony Danza), because she’s the dead ringer of his late wife; and Korman believes
having Betsy would be like having his wife back. So he sets plans in motion to
get Jack out of the way…
The
show features what is arguably composer-lyricist Jason Robert Brown’s best, and certainly most accessible,
score—in honor of the settings (which will also include Hawaii) and
extreme characters, its vocabulary is all about having fun with familiar
tropes—and librettist Andrew Bergman has adapted his 1992 screenplay handily, and with
appropriate unsentimental daffiness. This is top-drawer musical comedy, unequivocal and
straight up.
At
Paper Mill, simply because the physical stage space is bigger, HiV (yes, I know, unfortunate acronym; pronounce it
HIGH-vee) was a physically bigger show, just for being a bit wider, a bit
deeper, having (I am told) a few more bodies in the chorus, and, because
of the relationship of the proscenium to the audience, a bit further removed
from the audience.
At
the Nederlander, HiV is smaller. Less
wide, less deep, physically more compressed and intimately there with you.
I am told that, in talking about his work on Legally Blonde: The Musical, that show's director, Jerry Mitchell, claimed that an all-important key was to keep the narrative moving so that you didn’t have too much time to think about it. In large measure because the heroine never stopped pursuing her goal; she was a relentless motor.
At
Paper Mill, somehow, under Gary Griffins’s
smart, sharp direction, you likewise didn’t think about the story much;
you just went
with it. I cannot say why for certain, but I think that had to do with
an illusion of spectacle (the show is very good at satisfactorily
evoking the glitz of Vegas without actually delivering it) and, as I
say a bit more physical distance. One might argue—and it would be an
argument—that the experience didn't require you to care as much, just enjoy.
(I suppose one also can't discount the understandable jingoism of
the local New Jersey audience; Paper Mill's usual fare
consists of standards remounted—only very recently has it been
home to one or two shows per season with a real shot at Broadway—and a
deserving world premiere in your backyard generates infectious
excitement.)
At
the Nederlander, though, I think because the more intimate setting asks for concern, narrative things that haven't changed at all, now give you pause. For example: Even though Betsy looks like the
gambler’s dead wife, it’s a stretch that he believes being married to her will
be the equivalent experience, and indeed a reconnection. And as for our hero,
Jack…without spoilers, he makes himself far too easy a target for Tommy. That
he’ll be made vulnerable, and how, is inevitable, and the difficult truth there is, he's
never under any compulsion to be a target in the first place; he has to clearly choose (make several clear choices, in fact) to put himself in that position. And then, once victimized, he has essentially lost his manhood,
because now Betsy’s in a compromised position, Tommy can make his moves, and
Jack can only watch.
Which
means he stops driving the show. And he’s lost his right to your sympathy. He
is, in fact, the hapless schmuck he claims to be in the opening number (in the
context of “I’m a schmuck but Betsy loves me,” which delivers the thought
as agreeable self-deprecation, which is why you don’t count it against him yet;
being loved despite your flaws taps into
a universal sense of wonder that most of us, if we’re lucky, identify with.) If
you still like him after the betrayal, it’s only because Rob McClure is so damn charming, and the
material, if you’re on board with the tone, maintains its “funny.”
At
the end of the first act, he’s ready to take action; but he still has little
power to do anything (other than indulge the surge of desperate energy that takes him
to the airport) until the middle of act two; nor does he completely get his balls back until an act of stupid courage as
we head toward endgame. (That the act one closing number is called "Do Something" is an unintentional structural irony.)
The
audience doesn’t really understand most of this at a conscious level…but you
can feel them feeling that something is
amiss. And what it turns out to be is this: the musical theatre form's natural resistance to maintaining a narrative in which your main character is a milquetoast. Because, you
see, there’s only one journey for a milquetoast to take: he has to learn to
defend himself and claim (or reclaim) his manhood. Which means that either he
starts out as a wuss, or trying not to
be the wuss he is, and failing. And once he fails—out of weakness or
fear—he’s a victim; and victimization is a passive state. (What makes that not readily apparent is that Jack's neuroses
are active—and substantial. An audience has to be willing to swap
that in for genuine forward motion. As to the audiences attending
Honeymoon in Vegas: some will; some won't. The machinery can't be made foolproof.)
The
problem, therefore, is not with the adaptation, which couldn’t be more
skillful. It’s with the source material itself. Though ironically the source
material doesn’t resist musicalization, because its characters are large enough
to take on song as a natural mode of expression, the plot is loony enough for
musical comedy, and deconstructing it into component parts, it gives you plenty
to sing about.
It
just doesn’t have the alchemy that only an active, driven main character can
catalyze. Be he (or she) righteous, villainous, virtuous-but-flawed,
self-absorbed, struggling to adapt, whatever…as long as there’s always active
pursuit of something, the creative
team’s artistry and craft will almost always take the audience the rest of the
way. But when that’s absent, not all the artistry and craft in the world can
turn your hero into someone they want to follow.
As
to Jack Singer of Honeymoon in Vegas, he
gets you on his ride for a while, then loses your sympathy. At that point the
show’s effectiveness depends entirely upon your personal sensibility and taste—whether
or not you’ll feel compensated by the wackiness of the storytelling.
And
that, alas, is a Vegas-worthy roll of the dice…
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