As the old Jerome Kern-Dorothy Fields song goes, when times get tough and you’re down in the dumps, just pick yourself up, dust yourself off and start all over again.
With Fred and Ginger.
Or as veteran Broadway star and Tony Award-winner Karen Ziemba put it, “At $100 a ticket, these days you have to give people something for their money.”
If not in the dumps, Broadway is in the slumps. Revenues are slightly up from last year, but audience attendance is significantly down (a major factor in both cases said to be higher ticket prices).
Another factor this theatrical season is the high mortality rate of Broadway shows. Producers have been hauling ailing productions out of theaters the way people brought out their dead during the Black Plague.
It was announced last week that Rosie O’Donnell’s $10 million “Taboo” will close Feb. 8 after just 100 performances. Polly Bergen’s “Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks” lasted about that long, and Ellen Burstyn’s “The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All” died after one night.
A similar fate befell Jackie Mason’s “Laughing Room Only,” and Farrah Fawcett’s Broadway debut “Bobbi Boland” was dragged off the stage in previews. There are other such stories.
Going way back
For succor, Broadway has reached back into the past, reviving Leonard Bernstein’s 1953 hit “Wonderful Town” with a new production starring Donna Murphy.
Reaching further, it has gone all the way back to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, making a new musical called “Never Gonna Dance” out of their very old but still engaging 1936 dance-a-thon movie “Swing Time,” which also carried the working titles “Never Gonna Dance” and “I Won’t Dance,” as in the signature number.
(And did you know one of the stars was Betty Furness, in her pre-refrigerator, consumer expert days?)
Far from creaky, the new stage musical “Never Gonna Dance” is proving not only an audience draw for Broadway but a critical success — even though it has nothing to do with AIDS, long-suffering homicidal Irish daughters or Liza Minnelli.
Please note: “A Dance-Happy Fred and Ginger musical!” — Newsday, “A celebration of dance as a love potion, in a universe fueled by the swoonmaking melodies of Jerome Kern and set in an art deco Never-Never Land of Manhattan” — New York Times, “Sassy and witty . . . Karen Ziemba enchants, Peter Bartlett is outrageously funny” — New York Post.
“Jerome Kern is the reason I did this show,” said Ziemba, who plays the brassy, soft-hearted Mabel in the show and boasts a career that has included “A Chorus Line,” “Chicago,” “42nd Street” and “Crazy for You.”
“He was an idol for those who’ve followed and up there with Sigmund Romberg and Victor Herbert. His music is lush, beautiful and romantic,” she said
More Top Picks Best Cat Litter Mats For Tracking
In this show, Kern’s music includes “Pick Yourself Up,” of course, but also “I Won’t Dance” (lyrics by Jimmy McHugh), “I’m Old Fashioned” (lyrics by Johnny Mercer), “A Fine Romance” and “The Way You Look Tonight” (other collaborations with Fields) and “Shimmy With Me” (lyrics by, yes, P.G. Wodehouse).
I suggested that modern-day hipsters might find some of the songs cheesy, as in Mary Louise Parker describing the songs she sang playing Phyllis McGuire of the McGuire Sisters in the film “Sugartime” as “those corny cheeseball songs that I just completely fell in love with and couldn’t stop singing.”
“These are not cheesy songs,” Ziemba said. “Kern was one of the finest composers of the 20th Century.”
I suppose “The Way You Look Tonight” does have a trifle more meaning to it than “Mr. Sandman.”
What’s the plot?
I won’t reveal the plot of “Never Gonna Dance,” such as there is one, except to say that it involves the luckiest quarter ever minted, Major Bowes’ “Original Amateur Hour” (surely a few of my fellow oldsters will remember that, from the long ago days before radio became synonymous with musical noise and raging right-wingers), a precarious dance number at the top of an unfinished skyscraper and the triumph of true love over fortune-hunting and money-grubbing (as the man said, a “Never-Never Land” New York.
The dancing, with Noah Racey in the Astaire part and Nancy Lemenager as Rogers, is every bit as good as that in the 1936 film (so say I from a vantage point in the third row), dancing that’s as elegant as hip-hop is not.
But top hats and tails in 2004?
“It’s lighthearted,” said Ziemba, who grew up in St. Joseph, Mich., on the shores of Lake Michigan, as well as in the Detroit suburbs. “It makes you happy. It takes people’s minds off of things. We do need Jerome Kern. We need him in these times.”
These times, of course, include less lighthearted works. Now comes — for the third time — Stephen Sondheim’s “Assassins,” a non-laff riot about the people who killed or tried to kill a number of American presidents.
Sondheim first tried this out around Christmastime in 1990 at the tiny Playwrights Horizons off-Broadway theater, but holiday season audiences failed to encourage its moving to the big-time. A Broadway booking was finally arranged for the fall of 2001, but the events of Sept. 11 quickly extinguished that idea.
It’s to open in April, in the former quarters of Studio 54 (a perhaps fitting venue). Ziemba, who performed in “Sondheim: A Celebration” at Carnegie Hall, would say only what is certainly the greatest Broadway understatement of 2004.
“It’s hard to compare Jerome Kern and `Assassins,'” she said.