Back To Giddy Simplicity
By WILLIAM A. HENRY III
Boy meets girl served for a half-century as sufficient plot for virtually every Broadway musical. Then came a couple of decades of boy meets exotic locale, boy meets social dilemma, boy meets religious destiny, and boy meets his literary creator -- not to mention similarly unromantic encounters among personified animals and steam engines. Even musicals that focused on love tended to be wistful and full of woe, as if passion must always be a snare and delusion or a doom-struck mistake.
This season, however, Broadway has three new musical productions that reclaim the giddy simplicity of the past. Only one, the Caribbean fable Once on This Island, is entirely new. Buddy, a biographical sketch of rocker Buddy Holly, who died in 1959, naturally features his old hits. And Oh, Kay! straddles the line between being a revival of the 1926 Gershwin success and an imaginative reworking of its raw material. Strikingly, these stories of boy meets girl all take place long ago or far away. Apparently our times remain too cynical for headlong romance close to home.
The otherworldliness is strongest in Once on This Island. It blends a color- splashed tropical look, a calypso-influenced sound and folkloric storytelling with a moral order and sense of justice derived from ancient Greek myths. A romance between a foundling girl of the peasant class (La Chanze) and a scion of wealthy planters (Jerry Dixon) seems hopeless in this life yet is resolved happily in generations to come, through enchantment and physical transformations of mankind into nature.
The 90-minute charmer vibrates with foot-stomping energy and thoroughly hummable music by Stephen Flaherty. As usually happens in myths and allegories, however, the characters do not emerge with great clarity or particularity in Lynn Ahrens' book and lyrics. Some audiences may find political problems with the show's vision of black natives as happy, rhythmic, superstitious and simple. But at its best, this fable is truly fabulous.
Oh, Kay! may be the final production by legendary impresario David Merrick, 77. When his previous big hit, 42nd Street, was ending its nine-year run, Merrick talked of revamping the show with an all-black cast. In effect, he has carried the same idea over into Oh, Kay!, which shares with 42nd Street a show-business setting, a romance across class lines, a vintage score, a romanticized Art Deco vision of Manhattan and an abundance of tap dancing -- plus, alas, an irredeemably corny plot and some less than inspired clowning.
The timeworn book by Guy Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse portrayed the well-heeled Long Island crowd in the Gatsby era. James Racheff's adaptation, first seen in a smaller-scale 1989 version at Connecticut's Goodspeed Opera House, transposes the locale to Harlem. It brings together a moneyed sophisticate, black in parentage but not in apparent culture, and the down-home, ethnic- talking show girl he has yearned for but lost track of since a chance encounter years earlier. They meet as he is on the verge of marrying the prim, domineering daughter of a minister. Most of the action arises from the show girl's I Love Lucy-esque contrivances to get her man. The side plot, about Prohibition and a nightclub's hidden supply of booze, is even sillier. Again, contemporary audiences may be a little queasy about the condescension to dialect and folkways and the equation of black status with pseudowhite behavior. But there is a nonpareil score by George and Ira Gershwin (Someone to Watch Over Me, Clap Yo' Hands) and a display of solo and ensemble tap dancing, by Gregg Burge and a 16-member chorus under the direction of Dan Siretta, that is unsurpassed on Broadway.
It's difficult to write a biographical play about a man who died in an accident at 22, having achieved everything he wanted in life with barely a ripple of difficulty. It's harder still when his widow controls many of the rights to his works and image and remains a controversial figure in his story. For those reasons, Buddy bears a striking resemblance to the 1978 film The Buddy Holly Story, starring Gary Busey, including a tendency to make saints of the singer and his wife and cartoon cads of almost everyone else. The real reason for telling Holly's story again is as an excuse for a rock concert.
Despite Broadway's inept history of trying to combine theater and rock, this one works -- mostly because Paul Hipp in the title role gives one of the most kinetic, infectious and musically shrewd performances in memory. His Holly impersonation is dead-on, but even theatergoers who never saw or heard the original are likely to be won over by his galvanic confidence, charm and sweetness. Here are some of the prettiest melodies of the 1950s, from Everyday and Peggy Sue to That'll Be the Day, rendered with the authentic simplicity of a garage band. They are songs about love, about a boy meeting a girl or hoping to, and they leave audiences wishing their appeal did not seem so nostalgic, so suggestive of bygone, trusting times.