Gerald Nachman
A NEW 'DARK' AGE
Ever since the justly praised British revivals of "Carousel," "Cabaret" and now "Oklahoma!," any number of musicals being staged throughout the country have undergone a considerable amount of "darkening" to satisfy the requirements of our more enlightened -- yet at the same time less well-lighted -- theatrical era.
To take but one example, the Lower Depths Musical Players of Chicago, a newly formed theater company dedicated to revising beloved classic shows, has just mounted a cheerless revival of "Oklahoma!"
In this version, re-titled "Oklahoma?," Jud, whose bunkhouse walls are covered with Ku Klux Klan posters, is less attracted by Laurey than by Ali Hakim, played by a black actor whose character peddles anti-Semitic literature for the Nation of Islam. Laurey spurns Curley, a hillbilly with serious learning disabilities who can barely stammer out the words to "I Could Write a Book," and she winds up in the arms of Ado Annie; their duet, "I Cain't Say No," stops the show.
As director T. Wilson Nuffler explains, "On re-reading the script, it became clear to me what Hammerstein was actually driving at. It's amazing nobody has made these obvious connections before." Nuffler says he was inspired by the "dark" version of "Half a Sixpence" he saw in a London basement last fall.
Meanwhile, the underground Muse/Sick Company out of Seattle just opened its bleak version of "Annie," in which Annie is presented as a not-so-naïve street urchin rescued from the clutches of Miss Hannigan's child-porn ring by Daddy Warbucks. Warbucks rescues Annie only to parade her later before FDR in a scene that, in the words of company artistic director R.W. Weggers, "underscores the subtextural meanings in the book that, we think, makes a fairly devastating comment on Roosevelt's pro-big business policies. As I see it, Annie is a metaphor for the little guy."
Dramaturg Hobart Flange of the Boston-based InTents Music Circus realized he had his work cut out for him when he suggested a darker version of "Sweeney Todd," but he feels he's accomplished his goal by exploring the dimly lit side of Johanna.
"She's usually presented as an ethereal innocent but we show her as a castrating bitch who admires Sweeney's skill with a razor," says Flange, adding, with a wink, "It gives the musical an edge it never had before."
The daring new revival of "No, No, Nanette" by the FemmEnsemble Company of Peekskill, N.Y., has caused a few walkouts, confesses producer Marjorie Linz-Spackle, but she feels her interpretation of the classic '20's musical is "a valid view of the Jazz Age, which exploited women like Nanette, who were little more than male playthings."
In this offbeat revival, performed in a set that resembles a giant dollhouse, "Tea for Two" is sung to Nanette by a dancing pig and all of the Flappers are dressed as Barbie dolls.
Taking a Neo-Brechtian approach, the Thespian Cooperative in Venice, Calif., will kick off its summer season with a radically new version of "I Do! I Do!" that explores the oft-ignored underbelly of married life. Instead of the usual two-character cast, director Dexter Conklin has a different actor playing the husband and wife in each scene.
"We're trying to say something about the revolving-door cycle of love, sex and marriage in the '90s," explains Conklin. "The show Jones and Schmidt wrote may have worked in 1966, but these are volatile times in the war between the sexes. It's all right there in the original show if you listen carefully enough. Just to be on the safe-sex side, I even threw in an AIDS reference."
"We've decided to take a little more optimistic view of Weimar Germany, Kristalnacht and all that," says director Horst Vandenheuven in defending his revisionist production of "Cabaret," which this fall will inaugurate the Skinhead Players Dinner Theater outside Boise, Idaho.
"Every production I've seen paints a pretty grim -- and to my mind, overly dark -- picture of Berlin in the '30s. OK, it had its down side, sure, but I think audiences are tired of being depressed at today's musicals," says Vandenheuven.
For its second production, the (literally) underground company promises "a daring restaging of `Carousel' that will restore all of the show's original 1945 values." Adds Vanderheuven, "My original plan calls for a realistic New England set and an all-non-ethnic cast -- we think it's something of a casting coup -- but I'm not sure people will sit still for that today. Audiences are only willing to accept so much tinkering."
© 2000 by Gerald Nachman
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