PLAYBILL ON OPENING NIGHT: Finian's Rainbow Yip Yip Hooray!
By Harry Haun
30 Oct 2009
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Finian's Rainbow stars Kate Baldwin and Cheyenne Jackson; guests Abigail Breslin, Brian Dennehy and Ben Vereen
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| photo by Aubrey Reuben | Something sort of grandish settled in the St. James Oct. 29: Finian's Rainbow.
It looks like an old-fashioned musical. It sounds like an old-fashioned musical. It's played like an old-fashioned musical. It thrills like an old-fashioned musical.
Seconding this emotion is a crock full of golden oldies which Burton Lane and Yip Harburg have generously supplied for the occasion. You can warm yourself from the glow that is still given off by "When I'm Not Near the Girl I Love (I Love the Girl I'm Near)," "If This Isn't Love," "Old Devil Moon," "Look to the Rainbow" and the crθme de la crθme of musical questions, "How Are Things in Glocca Morra?"
Only in the show's closing lines do we learn that Glocca Moora is situated not in Ireland, as we had supposed from the brogues put on by the feisty Finian McLonergan (Jim Norton) and daughter Sharon (Kate Baldwin), but in some fanciful place "over the rainbow," as Harburg might (and did) say.
"It's that faraway place that's a little beyond your reach but never beyond your hope," Sharon finally informs us. "It's out there, the hill beyond yon hill."
The blarney of a plot that Harburg and Fred Saidy set in motion bring these two on as strangers in a very strange land indeed fugitives, really, since Finian has helped himself to a crock of gold belonging to Og the leprechaun (Christopher Fitzgerald).
All three wind up in "the mythical state of Missitucky" circa the 1940s when racial unrest was roiling. Enter the local Mr. Fixit firebrand, Woody Mahoney (Cheyenne Jackson), and add a body-switch to show the villains the errors of their thinking.
Despite the musical enchantment, the book always tended to preach more than a bit, and that kept getting more and more strident the more you moved away from the bleeding-heart liberalism of the 1940s. "We knew that going in, so we worked on it," admitted director-choreographer Warren Carlyle, when he got to the after-party at the Bryant Park Grill.
Carlyle directed and choreographed last season's Encores! edition as well as this Broadway transfer and spent a year tinkering with the problematic book first with David Ives for Encores! and then with Arthur Perlman for Broadway. "We worked on the bumps. One of the things I love about the show is that it does jump. It jumps from place to place to place. We didn't try and fix that. We embraced that, in a funny kind of way. We cut 45 minutes from the original production, and a lot of those things is just that information passes a lot faster in 2009 than it did in 1947. Five pages of dialogue explaining what a bigot the senator is, we can now do in three lines.
"I'm a young fellow, and I tried to connect with a young sensibility for the show. I think it's a great family show. I think it's okay to bring grandma and the kids to it."
Norton, who has had a steady rain of Irish roles in New York (The Weir, Juno and the Paycock, Dublin Carol and Port Authority) finally capped by a 2007 Tony for The Seafarer, is the inevitable and definitive Finian a perfect fit. "It's a wonderful part," he said. "I just like the fact that the role is so real. I've tried to give it roots and make him an organic, truthful person even though he is a character in a musical. I just love this show."
Musicals are hardly his strong suit, too. "Way back in 1964, I was in South Pacific. I played Cable. I was young and blonde and blue-eyed and fearless, and I sang 'Younger Than Springtime.' Since then, I've sung in the occasional show, but this is a dream for me. I'm just very happy to be in a Broadway musical. It's really great."
The hunky Jackson hit the press line, still reeling happily from the evening's activity. Was it good for him?, we all wanted to know. "Fabulous!" he exploded. "Magic!"
He certainly looked and sounded like nothing less on stage, striking a commanding stride as Woody Mahoney, the local rabble-rouser leading the black sharecroppers against the white-suited plantation whites. The actor grooved to the role: "I think it's fun to play someone who's so optimistic and self-driven and smart. Sonny Malone in Xanadu [his previous Broadway outing] wasn't the brightest bulb, so it's nice to play someone who can put a couple of sentences together plus good songs. All I have to do is sing what's on the page. The work has already been done for me."
As fetching a titian-haired colleen as you could ask for this side of Maureen O'Hara, Baldwin steps luminously into the star ranks, as the original Sharon, Ella Logan, did in '47. Off-stage, she credited a lot of help from her playing partners.
"I like the fact I get to play with three different guys all night," she said, delighting in the gearshift. "I get to have my father whom I have to be a total realist with and try to pull him back down to earth. Then I have Cheyenne whom I get to be romantic with, and it's very swoony. And then I have Chris Fitzgerald, whom I get to be a little kid with. It's the most fun. To traverse all of that is the best ride of the night."
There's no question what she looks forward to every evening. "'Glocca Morra' for me is the moment. It's a very quiet, contemplative moment. I'm thinking about singing on the St. James stage and all the great people who have sung there before me."
Terri White, for one. Her Broadway debut was at the St. James, playing (at 31) "the oldest woman in the world," Joice Heth, in 1980's Barnum, stopping the show cold with a Cy Coleman-Michael Stewart song called "Thank God I'm Old."
Now (at 61), she's stopping it with a divine little ditty called "Necessity," where she flicks off the line "But the landlord said, 'Your rent ain't paid'" with a personal fervor. Of late, she'd been warming benches in Washington Square Park, homeless after the club where she sang shut down. In one year's time, she has come 180 degrees back to the St. James Theatre. "I felt like I was coming home again," she admitted.
"Sometimes," she said of her bumpy, circuitous journey back to Square One, "you have to go through certain things in life to get a better perspective of yourself."
Push-overs for Cinderella comebacks, the opening-night audience (many of them subscribers of The New York Times which had just reported her recent misfortunes) gave White a tumultuous welcome-back at the end of "Necessity." The ovation brought a torrent of tears, which she lightly dabbed with her apron the first chance she had to turn away. "It was very emotional, trying to hold myself together at the end of the number. I felt like 'I'm back. This is what I've been working my entire life for.' I kept on striving to get back, and it took a long time, but it was worth every minute." Continued...
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