The Royal Family of Broadway, William Finn and Rachel Sheinkin’s reworked musicalization of Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman’s The Royal Family, which originally debuted on Broadway in 1927, is a parody of the Barrymore family that’s designed as a love letter to old Broadway.
At the Barrington Stage Company, where it’s having its world premiere, it’s also a triumphant star vehicle for Harriet Harris. What is it not, or at least not yet, is a Broadway-ready triumph.
You know Harris, even if you don’t know her name. A longtime Broadway performer, she won the Best Featured Actress Tony in 2002, for Thoroughly Modern Millie, more recently played the evil step-mother in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, and you’re most likely to remember her as Frasier Crane’s maniacally single-minded agent, Bebe. She specializes in playing slightly daffy, thoroughly intense, grand but arch ladies of a certain age.
And so she is perfectly cast as Fanny Cavendish, the matriarch of the legendary Cavendish acting family. Fanny pokes through the bright-red act curtain to welcome us to the show. “No, no,” she protests. “That was a terrible entrance—believe me I can do better.” As the curtain rises to reveal her towering, wood-panelled, tchotchke-filled living room, she introduces to the family — her late husband, Aubrey, memorialized in a stately portrait, “who came out of a coma to give his final performance”; her daughter, Julie, the reigning great star, and Julie’s daughter, Gwen, an ingenue. And so we’re into Finn’s first number, “Just Another Regular Night,” which sets up the Cavendishes as a family for whom a regular night involves half-hour call and stage-door Johnnies.
When The Royal Family was revived by the Manhattan Theatre Club almost a decade ago, I found it both amusing and interminable. It was an old-fashioned trifle, nearly three hours long, with a very funny, farcical middle section that wasn’t quite good enough to make up for the long stretches before and after. Its long-winded takeaway: Theater people are different from normal people, and hooray for that. Here, Finn and Sheinkin — their previous collaboration was The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee — trim things down and liven them up with songs.
(The credits describe this new version as based on both the original play and “an original adaptation by Richard Greenberg,” which I suspect is a carefully negotiated way of acknowledging that Finn has worked on this project for years and years, some of them with Greenberg, who is no longer involved.)
They’ve certainly made things snappier and a bit more streamlined. Finn has written some tuneful songs, though their lyrics are less memorable. It’s directed by the Broadway vet John Rando, who shows once again, as he did in On the Town a few seasons ago and A Christmas Story before that, that he knows how to keep a big-old-fashioned-style show moving along. And it’s choreographed by Joshua Bergasse, who worked with Rando on On the Town, among his other Broadway credits, and creates some spirited and exhilarating if not especially original dances here, including starting things off with a big tap number.
The plot is more or less the same. Fanny is determined to keep her acting family on stage, even as she is aging and unable to perform — temporarily, she insists. Julie (Laura Michelle Kelly) has reconnected with the long-lost love of her life, Gil (Alan H. Green, who has a sweet but underpowered voice) and is considering leaving the stage to move with him to Brazil, where he has made a fortune. Her daughter, Gwen (a sensational Hayley Podschun), is about to marry a dull but sweet stockbroker, Perry (A.J. Shively, a long-legged dancer in the Tommy Tune mold), and might leave the stage, too — for, even worse, Westchester.
Julie’s brother, Tony (a mugging Will Swensen — who, as Mr. Audra McDonald is at least the duke of Edinburgh in a real Broadway royal family), long departed for Hollywood swashbuckling, is coming through town on his way out of the country, after he stabbed and maybe killed his director. (Ha ha ha.) And then there’s Fanny’s brother, the mediocre actor and writer Bert Dean (Arnie Burton) and his less talented wife, Kitty (Kathryn Fitzgerald), who are desperate for favors and work. Finally there is their loyal manager, here made a producer, Oscar (the estimable Chip Zien, perhaps too restrained a presence for this high-powered lot).
Much hijinks happen, one marriage happens and one doesn’t, but of course the show goes on and so does the family. The subplot of the untalented Deans isn’t especially funny and gets way too much intention, including a first act opener that’s a scene from their terrible musical, “The Striking Viking,” which opens and closes in that one night. (Because it’s been made clear throughout the first act that its script is terrible and Kitty’s performances are worse, it’s unclear how it got staged.) There’s no chemistry between Julie and Gil, to suggest why they’d be so drawn to each other so many years later, especially when neither is willing to compromise for the other. The second act lacks the funny froth of the first. And the sound design, or perhaps the singing, leaves some lyrics difficult to decipher.
Still, there’s real charm in the Gwen-Perry relationship, and two delightful performances from Podschun and Shively. And it’s Harris, throughout, who wows. Her big Act One number, “Stupid Things I Wouldn’t Do,” is a showstopper, a great display of Harris’s comic — and vocal — chops, and an assertion of the Cavendish family values she holds so dear. (Stupid things she wouldn’t do include “reading papers when there ain’t a review,” “making movies [in] Hollywood,” and “living life like a normal person.”) In fact, it’s such a great number that the Act One closer, the declarative “Royal Family of Broadway,” tying them all together, pales somewhat in comparison.
The Barrington Stage is where Finn and Sheinkin’s Spelling Bee originated. Certainly, Royal Family has its eye on the Great White Way — Dear Evan Hanson producer Stacey Mindich is conspicuous in its credits. For now, though, it’s merely a very pleasant Royal Family of Route 7.
The Royal Family of Broadway opened June 13, 2018, at the Barrington Stage Company (Pittsfield, Mass.) and runs through July 7. Tickets and information: barringtonstageco.org.
