SIX YEARS, THREE SHOWS, ONE GREAT SEASON A look ahead to the 21st season of Encores! By Jack Viertel Encores! enters season 21 with a broad look at a narrow period. Three shows, all produced on Broadway between 1956 and 1962—a mere six years—and yet there could hardly be three more different kinds of events. One is huge, one is petite, one is a burlesque, one is virtually an opera. And one—the petite one—isn’t even truly an American musical. True, six years isn’t a long stretch of time, but it was a rich and fruitful era on Broadway, and one in which a lot of different kinds of entertainment competed for audiences. Support for Little Me is generously provided by
Joseph S. and Diane H. Steinberg Charitable Trust Support for The Most Happy Fella is generously provided by
Roz and Jerry Meyer
Encores! Season Sponsors
Stephanie and Fred Shuman Fund for Encores! Stacey and Eric Mindich Newman’s Own Foundation Nathalie and Pablo Salame The Shubert Foundation, Inc.
We open the season with the most recent of the three, Neil Simon’s first musical and Cy Coleman’s and Carolyn Leigh’s second: Little Me. It’s a brash, fast and furious comedy based on Patrick Dennis’s fake memoir of a Gabor-like celebrity named Belle Poitrine (née Schlumpfert) who has achieved “wealth, culture and social position” by meeting and/or marrying seven men over the course of a couple of decades. But Belle is not the star of Little Me—the show was created around the comic gifts of Sid Caesar, who played all seven men. The idea of making a Caesar-
ian feast out of Dennis’s book was Neil Simon’s, and producers Cy Feuer and Ernest Martin, fresh from the triumph of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, couldn’t resist the temptation of trying another “louder-faster-funnier” Broadway show. They had first triumphed with Guys and Dolls, and, as Feuer later recalled, they seemed to have something of an affinity for “mug shows”—there was nothing delicate or romantic about Feuer and Martin. They were tough Broadway guys, and they liked to laugh. Simon made them laugh, and Caesar made them laugh hardest of all. It
didn’t hurt that Simon had been a writer on Caesar’s hit TV series Your Show of Shows with compatriots like Mel Brooks and Woody Allen. He knew how to create a Sid Caesar sketch, and Little Me is essentially a scenario for a great clown, in which the seven personae are linked by their romance with one not-so-dumb girl from the wrong side of the tracks. Coleman and lyricist Carolyn Leigh wrote a completely delightful, driving, funny score, and jazz-oriented orchestrator Ralph Burns created a wonderfully propulsive sound for the show that seemed to be pushing the boundaries at all times. The gang set off for Philly, where they opened to rave reviews. New York critics treated them almost as
well, with the exception of the New York Times, and Little Me never quite caught on, for reasons that have remained forever a mystery. At Encores!, Christian Borle, who’s earned well-deserved acclaim for Smash and Peter and the Starcatcher (and a Tony for the latter) gets a chance to take on the seven leading roles, and the Encores! Orchestra gets a crack at the score, which hasn’t been heard in its original Ralph Burns glory in a half century. Little Me will be followed by Frank Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella, starring Shuler Hensley, Laura Benanti and Cheyenne Jackson. Possibly the largest production ever undertaken by Encores!, Loesser’s 1956 near-opera is a deeply romantic work
based on Sidney Howard’s play They Knew What They Wanted, about a middle-aged immigrant Napa Valley grape farmer who falls in love with a young, lonely waitress in San Francisco and offers her a new life as his wife. The catch is that while he’s seen her, she’s never seen him, or can’t remember which customer he was. Nonetheless, she accepts the offer, with near tragic consequences. Loesser, fresh from the success of Feuer and Martin’s Guys and Dolls—turned his attention 180 degrees in the other direction, writing a deeply emotional piece, full of longing and hope, and fueled by some of the lushest, most romantic music ever written for Broadway. Always an artistic gambler, Loesser tried something unique with Happy Fella: he also provided a fistful of traditional show tunes for the subplot couple, including the standards “Standing on the Corner (Watching All the Girls Go By)” and “Big D”. So, in a sense, Happy Fella has two scores that stand side by side and don’t much resemble each other. Loesser shrugged. Critics were admiring of and/or puzzled by this choice in about equal measure, but while time has revealed The Most Happy Fella to be a towering work, timing was against it: it opened just seven weeks after My Fair Lady, and there was no competing with that particular juggernaut. Happy Fella was a hit, but not an immortal
smash. At Encores! we’ll expand the orchestra and the cast to accommodate Loesser’s vision, and celebrate the glories of the composer’s most extravagant creation. Irma La Douce, which closes our season, marks the first time Encores! will present a work that wasn’t originally created in the United States. Irma was originally the product of a collaboration between one of Edith Piaf’s favorite composers, Marguerite Monnot, and French playwright Alexandre Breffort. It tells a somewhat outlandish tale of a Parisian courtesan and the young law student who falls in love with her. She has no interest in a genuine emotional relationship, so, in order to see her, he creates an alter-ego who becomes her client. Between his two personae, he finds himself driven to distracted exhaustion. In a supremely inept inspiration, he contrives to kill off the client, and finds himself convicted of the crime of killing his fictional alterego. The show, originally performed with a small night-club combo, was expanded for its London run, where it was translated by Julian More, Monty Norman and David Heneker (later known as the composerlyricist of Half a Sixpence) and was a hit all over again. By the time it got to Broadway, directed by no less than Peter Brook, it had undergone further revisions, including some sensational new orchestrations by Robert “Red” Ginzler and dance arrange-
ments by a fledgling composer called John Kander, yet it remained a miniature with a nine-piece band (Ginzler’s charts wore out the percussionist at each performance), and was once again a hit. Nothing quite like it has been seen since. Its weave of the worldly and world-weary French attitude toward love and sex, and England’s enthusiasm for idiotic farce, make for a unique blend, which Broadway audiences took to be the height of Continental class back in 1960. At Encores! we’ll be true to the original modesty of the production—the cast fea-
tures 16 men and a single woman—and director John Doyle will bring his unique perspective to the piece. Irma balances Happy Fella, and Little Me is the kickoff party for what we hope will be a season to remember for all the right reasons: engaging our audience’s ears, heads, hearts, and funny bones in about equal measure, which has always been the mission statement for the musical theater. Jack Viertel is Artistic Director of Encores!.