The Book of Merman: cute title. That’s if you know who Ethel Merman is, was—the first lady, along with Mary Martin, of mid-20th-century musicals. Also funny, isn’t it?, for the title to play on The Book of Mormon, the 21st-century’s own long-running click.
So as a Merman fan—and a Book of Mormon lover, too—I hustled to St. Luke’s expecting to encounter a revue celebrating the Ethel Merman songbook, from which some of the best songs ever written for American musicals could easily be plucked.
A fair enough assumption, no? Fair or not, it isn’t what I found. What’s actually on offer does include a character that identifies herself as Ethel Merman. Nevertheless, she doesn’t deliver a single mic-less tune Merman ever introduced—no “I Got Rhythm,” no “Friendship,” no “You’re the Top,” no “Anything Goes,” no “Blow, Gabriel, Blow,” no “Make It Another Old-Fashioned, Please,” no “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” no “You’re Just in Love,” no “Rose’s Turn.”
What was aimed directly at me instead is a book show in which the above-mentioned Ethel (Carly Sakolove, dressed shiningly by Carlo Borges) opens her pink door (set by Josh Iacovelli) to a pair of Mormon missionaries. Elder Shumway (Chad Burris) and Elder Braithwaite (Kyle Ashe Wilkinson) are hoping to bring the boisterous occupant around to the Latterday Saints way of worshipping.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t dismiss out of hand a premise in which Ethel Merman has to tangle with two Mormon religion salesmen. The very sound of the phrase has an amusing ring. But neither bookwriters Leo Schwartz and DC Cathro nor songwriter Schwartz have made anything engaging of the notion they must have had a swell time laughing over when it occurred to them.
In brief, the Olive Oyl-thin plot they whipped up has Elder Shumway as a Merman fan who even carries Merman: An Autobiography around with him. This hostess-without-the-mostes’ Merman thinks the young men in short-sleeved white shirts and thin black ties have arrived to sell her magazine subscriptions. Before you can say some people ain’t me, Elder Shumway decides he wants to enter the show business that there’s nothing like. Unfortunately, Elder Braithwaite, who has no idea who Ethel Merman is, fusses and fumes over his companion’s threat to abandon their mission.
While the misunderstandings multiply until they’re cluttering the proceedings up to and through a lame denouement twist, Sakolove, Burris and Wilkinson sing Schwartz’s ditties, which, for the most part, are reworkings of Merman signature songs, none of them good, the worst being a tuneless take on Irving Berlin’s “Anything You Can Do.”
Uh-huh, and is that underground rumbling the sound of La Merman—as she was frequently dubbed—spinning in her Colorado Springs mausoleum? Before the 90 minutes it takes the misguided tuner to run its uninspired course, you’ll be thinking you’ve croaked, too, and been assigned to some unforgiving purgatory.
In this instance of anything goes not going anywhere that’s genuinely entertaining—and as directed and choreographed by Joe Langworth without much in the way of ideas—it can be said that Wilkinson brings a modicum of charm to his wide-eyed role and Sakolove belts well in the still inimitable Merman style.
Then there’s roly-poly Burris with a voice that can lift roof beams. His bio reports he’s been in a Book of Mormon touring company. No wonder he can give evidence he knows what he’s doing, but what must he really be thinking?
The Book of Merman opened Oct. 21, 2018, at St. Luke’s Theatre. Tickets and information: bookofmermanmusical.com
