Damn Yankees Is Back At Bat

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

When George Abbott unveiled his baseball musical Damn Yankees on Broadway in May 1955, a month before his 68th birthday, he almost certainly didn't expect to attend opening night of a revival nearly 39 years later. He surely didn't expect to be 106 and actively supervising revisions to his libretto about a middle-aged man who sells his soul to the devil for one glorious season as a long-ball hitter. But Abbott was more than a ceremonial presence at last week's gala. He was in the audience for previews night after night -- taking notes. Since well before the revival began tryouts in San Diego last autumn, Abbott has debated jokes and period references, wrestled with changing mores between the sexes and tinkered with the staging, including an explosion for the first-act finale, when a frustrated devil punishes his temptress- assistant. Says Jack O'Brien, who directed the revival and revamped the book with Abbott: "He is absolutely astonishing on structure. When he suggested blowing up Lola, I thought we hadn't built up to it. A while later, he suggested it again and said, 'It'll get a big laugh.' It does."

The new Yankees is Abbott's 125th career production as writer, director, producer or actor. Erstwhile protege Harold Prince, 66, whose first big shows as a producer were Abbott's Pajama Game and the original Yankees, wasn't yet born when Abbott burst to writing fame in 1925 with the melodrama Broadway and the comedy Three Men on a Horse. (Both have been revived on Broadway in recent years, the former in a staging by Abbott himself.) Prince recalls asking Abbott a couple of years ago what became of a play he was writing: "He told me it wasn't working out, so he set it aside for a year and figured he'd get back to it -- and he was 104!"

Yankees seems the least revivable of musicals, inextricably rooted in a bygone era when the Washington Senators played baseball and the New York Yankees reigned supreme. Its household references are just as dated: wives no longer suffer quite so silently while husbands sit in easy chairs drinking beer and watching baseball on TV. Yet with surprisingly little nipping and tucking, the show works. Its theme -- that glory matters less than love -- is universal, at least among plots of musicals.

O'Brien and Abbott have cunningly updated without updating. Like the creators of the long-running current revival of Guys and Dolls, they have kept the show in period but with attitude -- sardonically exaggerated sets, saturated colors, a heightened performing style that lets audiences feel it's O.K. to be a little distant from the world of the play. Period references have been added, many with a snide edge not found in the original. The devil says he's been busy designing an Edsel, the Ford fiasco that went onto the market two years after the show first opened. When he envisions a gallery of great lovers through history, he mentions FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, a sacred cow when the original show opened, and Hoover's companion and heir Clyde Tolson.

The score proves richer than its reputation, which is based on just two songs, (You Gotta Have) Heart and Whatever Lola Wants (Lola Gets). Choreographer Rob Marshall shrewdly quotes Bob Fosse's slithery, nonpareil work for the original, especially the signature dances, the ballfield Blooper Ballet and the mambo Who's Got the Pain? The men in the cast are consistently terrific, from lead dancer Scott Wise, who in show after show proves chorus boys can rival stars, to Broadway newcomer Dennis Kelly as the sagging middle- aged man and Jarrod Emick, recently the umpteenth replacement in Miss Saigon, as the hunky young ballplayer he turns into. In the juicy part of the devil, Victor Garber is hilariously fey, evoking his TV portrayal of Liberace. If the first act is sometimes draggy, the second is a jubilant succession of boffo big numbers, especially a dreamscape trio among Kelly, Emick and Linda Stephens, also making a stunning Broadway debut, as the baffled wife he/they left behind.

The one shortcoming is the marquee name, Bebe Neuwirth, Lilith in TV's Cheers. As sultry, satanly Lola, she performs competently but utterly lacks magic -- nothing is supernatural, nothing ethereal, not much even sexy in a role that made Gwen Verdon a megastar. Yet even with too little vamp and too much camp, this Damn Yankees is damn good. Let's hope Abbott is around in 2033 to update it again.