February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Burton Lane?s music and E.Y. ?Yip? Harburg?s lyrics combined to create one of the theater?s truly immortal scores, as fresh today as it was more than 57 years ago, with one song in particular, ?How Are Things in Glocca Morra??, having endured so glowingly in the public mind that hordes of people seem to regard it as a genuine Irish folk air instead of what it is, namely the work of a pair of first-rate Broadway craftsmen, operating at the top of their form.
Despite its glorious, imperishable score, ?Finian?s Rainbow? is among the least often revived of classic American musicals. The fault very clearly lies in the thudding ?book,? a production element that was probably still referred to as a ?libretto? in the days when the show was new.
The text, written by Fred Saidy with an assist from Harburg, was numbingly ersatz-Irish, which was objectionable enough to start with and, as the years passed, it somehow acquired a measure of political incorrectness which made its awkward brand of liberal social satire seem vaguely racist in its crudeness.
But ho, that indelible score!
The Irish Repertory?s approach to ?Finian?s Rainbow? and its ?problems? is simple almost to the point of obviousness: cut the book to its basics and get on with the music, letting the great songs speak for themselves, which they do eloquently.
Director Charlotte Moore, functioning as uncredited adaptor, has trimmed the offending book efficiently, coming up with brief bare-bones scenes for her cast to perform, and created a briskly tongue-in-cheek narrative to be delivered in the interests of moving the show along from number to number without the whole venture coming apart at the seams.
Designer James Morgan?s set tells the arriving audience at a glance precisely what to expect. The theater?s back wall is emblazoned with five bars of the vocal score of ?How Are Things in Glocca Morra?? with the instrumental line and the piano part rendered in the key of E-flat Major.
Pages of the sheet music for the show?s best-known numbers flutter down the length of the stage?s supporting columns, while the stage floor, apart from a pair of nesting pianos, is a clean and open expanse of black-and-white checkerboard squares, allowing optimal space for movement on the part of the actors and dancers.
Moore?s gifted and musically adroit cast is headed, as it was when the Rep?s concert version of the show was given a single performance at the group?s annual benefit last year, by Melissa Errico, by now something of a company regular.
Errico, a Broadway veteran despite her youth, gives a glowing account of herself as Sharon McLonergan, the show?s heroine, a character first played by the late Ella Logan, the best-known member of a celebrated tribe of Glasgow-based Irish vaudevillians.
Co-starring with Errico is another experienced Broadway entity, Malcolm Gets, whom she played opposite in the gifted but short-lived musical ?Amour.?
Gets is having an unbridled field day playing Og, the giddy leprechaun summoned up when Sharon?s bumbling dreamer of a father, the titular Finian, makes a wish over a pot of stolen gold he?s brought with him from Ireland to the mythic American state of Missitucky.
The role of the leprechaun, who, transported to earth, begins to experience mortal longings and becomes more and more vulnerably human as the show moves along, made a musical star of David Wayne and might conceivably do something similar for Gets, a talented actor who can sing, dance, and, as he demonstrates at one point in the Rep?s production, play the piano with considerable style.
The group has assembled an unusually strong and vibrant supporting cast for ?Finian?s Rainbow,? starting with singer David Staller, here cast in the non-singing Narrator role, an assignment he carries off with grace and skill.
If the show has, among its musical treasures, an iron-clad show-stopper, it?s probably ?Necessity,? delivered here by the redoubtable Terri White, a singer with a voice so deep and so powerful that she appears to have swallowed a baritone whole.
Rounding out the production?s major roles, Jonathan Freeman does what he can with the affably blustery Finian, a role in which the great Fred Astaire was woefully miscast in Francis Ford Coppola?s unfortunate 1968 movie version of the Broadway musical.
Set in 1947, the year of its premiere, ?Finian?s Rainbow? has as its hero a returning war veteran, Woody Mahoney, played with charm at the Rep by Broadway singe Max Von Essen. Also dating the show just a bit is the libretto?s delight in dropping a few names that may or may not resonate for younger viewers. They?ll probably respond when Og, in a lyric, refers to himself as ?Eisenhouzish,? but what about the script?s subsequent mention of Zsa Zsa Gabor?
Another area in which time has trod a bit heavily on ?Finian?s Rainbow? is in the naming of the comic villain, Senator Billboard Rawkins, a rather awkward comment on a long-forgotten racist southern solon named Bilbo.
In addition, the town?s sharecropping citizens raise tobacco, and the script has semi-approving attitudes toward a publication called the Nicotine Digest and a brand of smokes named Lucky Gold.
And here?s one decidedly odd moment in which the show makes strange, brief references to the music of Jerome Kern and Cole Porter, not to mention Rogers and Hammerstein.
The musical aspects of the Irish Rep?s staging of ?Finian?s Rainbow? are handled with dexterity and conspicuously boundless energy by Music Director Mark Hartman and Associate Music director Mark Janas, facing each other across the lids of their twin pianos.
The show as always, has abundant awkwardnesses, ranging from Susan-the-Silent, nicely danced by Kimberly Dawn Neumann and choreographed by Barry McNabb, magically becoming able to speak, to Rawkins, the prejudiced legislator, being ?struck black? to force him to learn the meaning of tolerance.
These shortcomings, if that?s what they are, are mainly reminders of old-time musical comedy conventions, and they really don?t detract all that much from the central joys and riches the venerable show still offers, rewards that are almost entirely to be found in the glorious songs provided by composer Lane and Harburg.
It?s highly doubtful that there?s more sheer musical pleasure to be found on any New York stage at the moment than at the Irish Repertory Theatre, where ?Finian?s Rainbow? will be dispensing enchantment through May 30.