One of the expressed goals when City Center was gearing up for the first season of Encores!, back in 1993, was to give audiences the opportunity to discover classic Broadway musicals that were unlikely ever to be revived. The aim has changed over time, in part because Encores! is now presenting its 77th production, and just how many “classic musicals which are unlikely ever to be revived” do you think there are?
That idealistic description, though, aptly fits the Encores! staging of Rodgers and Hart’s I Married an Angel. The musical fantasy was a significant hit in 1938, significant being a relative term in those Depression days. The show was greeted with ultra-extravagant praise, including from Mr. Atkinson in the Times, who opined that “the makers of I Married an Angel have tossed most of the old hokum out of their show-shop windows and created an original, fresh and beautiful piece of work. Musical comedy has met its masters, and they have reared back and passed a Forty-fourth Street miracle.”
That’s heady stuff, certainly; enough to make this an imperative choice for Encores!, even though this is a show that has almost never resurfaced since its initial run and tour. Other than a three-performance concert version in 1986, it appears that a full-orchestra production has not been mounted here since the original closed at the Shubert in 1939.
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★★ review here.]
Exhuming a property of this sort can be a chancy proposition. You can examine the piano/vocal song arrangements and read the existing script material, yes; but how will it actually play before today’s audiences? Will the universally acclaimed gossamer spell of the original come across? In cases like this, it is not possible to know the answer until you’ve spent the time and money and sold the tickets. Given the pedigree and initial reception of I Married an Angel, Encores! plunged ahead.
The trouble with opening a jeweled candy box that has been collecting shelf-dust for 80 years is—well, the contents can prove to be beyond dusty. And that, alas, is today’s report on I Married an Angel. What can they—songwriters and librettists Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, at the absolute pinnacle of their talents—have been thinking?
The show starts slowly, or you might say glacierly (to coin a term). The not-especially riveting plot—about a Budapest banker who, fed up with women, insists that he won’t marry unless an angel comes down from heaven—takes nearly an hour to get rolling, with the first act containing only four distinct songs (as opposed to musicalized dialogue). One of these, the title song, is reprised so many times that playgoers who had never before heard it were soon humming along. The entertainment does not rouse itself until the last song in the act, the cyclonic and tap-propelled “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”
How can this be? Or, rather, how can this be the legendary, lavishly-praised I Married an Angel? It’s difficult to say, although the inclusion of two ballets in the first act provides a hint. The musical was devised as a showcase for star ballerina Vera Zorina, with choreography by her soon-to-be husband, wunderkind George Balanchine. Sitting through the long “Honeymoon Ballet,” in which the angel dances episodically in an international array of styles, one can imagine the gossamer magic that might have been in 1938 if this ballet had the same impact as Balanchine’s “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” in the 1936 On Your Toes.
This is not to denigrate the contributions of director/choreographer Josh Bergasse (of Smash and the recent On the Town), who has sculpted the ballet on his wife, Sara Mearns of the New York City Ballet. But with the notoriously brief Encores! rehearsal period, there is only so much a choreographer can do. And the fact is that Rodgers and Hart most certainly wouldn’t have built their entire musical around a non-singing ballet dancer if they didn’t have the red-hot Zorina and Balanchine in hand.
In most unusual drama-critical style, we have tailored our report around what happened to I Married an Angel and why, as opposed to what is actually on the Encores! stage. In 2019, the show doesn’t come alive until that late-first-act tap number. The second act is decidedly sprightlier, but only explodes across the footlights when Rodgers and Hart—in zany, nonsensical manner—take us from Budapest to Radio City and the Roxy Music Hall. This is another blockbuster sequence, which leads to an impressionistic/absurdist/surreal series of psychological set pieces by each of the principals, so much so that you can’t help but conclude that the creators of Follies had the Roxy sequence clearly in mind when they devised “Loveland.”
Mearns does quite well, for her part, but at this point is not nearly so angelic as Zorina must have been. The other principals do well enough, under the circumstances. Nikki M. James and Tom Robbins provide sly charm and wide guffaws as the comedy couple, Phillip Attmore dances up a storm as the juvenile, and Hayley Podshun is a total knockout as the out-of-place American who sings the two big songs. The actual song hit of the show, “Spring Is Here,” has little impact.
Mark Evans (The Play That Goes Wrong) struggles in the central role of the husband, Willy. The hard-to-cast part was written for operetta star Dennis King, who had the voice of Alfred Drake combined with a keen comic sensibility. In Willy’s Roxy sequence, he comes out as a Milwaukee native hoisting a beer stein and sings a paean to beer, repeatedly sneering “to hell with burgundy”—which everyone in the 1938 audience would have recognized as the tagline from the barn-burning anthem “Song of the Vagabonds,” which King rode to stardom in the 1925 Friml operetta The Vagabond King. (“Can you picture the effect on Rudolph Friml?” goes a line in the Roxy finale, which garnered barely a laugh at the opening performance.)
The show is presented in true Encores! fashion, with founding music director Rob Fisher—who did a memorably superlative job on The Boys from Syracuse (which Rodgers and Hart reportedly devised on the train to the Angel tryout)—again bringing out the swing in the orchestrations by Hans Spialek. Everything is fine at the Encores! I Married an Angel, actually. It’s just Rodgers and Hart who, most surprisingly, let us down.
I Married an Angel opened March 20, 2019, at City Center and runs through March 24. Tickets and information: nycitycenter.org
