The Flamingo Kid, a splashy coming-of-age crowd pleaser at Hartford Stage, is really The Wizard of Oz done in neon pink and blue, not the worst role model a pop musical could draw upon. As paced by outgoing artistic director Darko Tresnjak, the fun rarely flags, though neither does an uneasy sense that the story is just this side of stale, and that the show’s dabbling in social commentary may be writing thematic checks its dramaturgy can’t cash.
That dramaturgy—from librettist-lyricist Robert L. Freedman, co-author of A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder—hews closely to its source, a 1984 spec screenplay by Neal Marshall, inspired by his youth and worked over by the late director Garry Marshall (no relation). It was the latter’s best-reviewed film by far, for reasons that aren’t always carried over into the stage version. Yet it already proves a sturdier source of musical inspiration than Marshall’s Pretty Woman, running on Broadway now. The contours of Flamingo‘s tale of innocence lost ring true.
On July 4, 1963, Brooklyn is our Kansas: drab, hot, and sepia-toned, a dead-end for Jeffrey Winnick (Jimmy Brewer) who feels trapped in an endless cycle of mom’s brisket and pop’s nagging while awaiting college. Like a cyclone, pals Steve (Ben Fankhauser, a suave Tin Man) and Hawk (Alex Wyse, definitely the Cowardly Lion) whisk him off to Long Island’s version of the Emerald City, the El Flamingo resort in Atlantic Beach. (To their credit, Alexander Dodge’s sets and Philip Rosenberg’s lighting set the place aglow without ever crossing the line into vulgarity.)
Our hero is snapped up as a cabana boy in the glittering world of cha-cha lessons, umbrella’d cocktails, and sassy middle-aged ladies baking in the sun and sporting Linda Cho’s spot-on but never overstated costumes. The amusing dances by Denis Jones (he just got off Tootsie; where did he find the time?) sway to a nicely period-pastiche-y score from Freedman and Grey Gardens composer Scott Frankel, plenty of tango and bossa nova with a little close harmony doo-wop thrown in.
Naturally, this Oz has a Wizard. Car dealer Phil Brody (Marc Kudisch), local gin rummy whiz, basks in the adulation of the club’s alter kockers while callously ignoring emotionally hungry wife Phyllis (Lesli Margherita). Impressionable Jeff is a chump for Phil’s worldview—”Winning’s all that counts….Go big or go home”—not to mention his vague job promises and nubile niece Karla (Samantha Massell), visiting from far-off California. And Jeffrey is one Dorothy who isn’t clicking heels to return to Auntie Em: Plumber dad Arthur (Adam Heller) is a stern Biblical patriarch ever ready with platitudes about hard work and straight dealing, with mother Ruth (Liz Larsen) tsk-tsking off to the side.
Neal Marshall has spoken of a forced ’84 de-ethnicization that turned Winnick into Willis, with the Basque/Puerto Rican Hector Elizondo and Italian Richard Crenna as Arthur and Phil, respectively. Well, the musical restores Jewishness with a vengeance. Script and lyrics are littered with Yiddishisms (one song rhymes “nudnik” and “no-goodnik”), with a occasional swipe at the nouveau riche El Flamingo crowd. (Phyllis sings it’s “where we all act like goys.”) But whether the intent is critical, affectionate, or just a ploy for cheap laughs is never clear. At the end, images of protest are projected, presumably to suggest the strong Jewish contribution to civil rights years later. Yet the movie’s one African-American character—a parking attendant who loses all his money when the Flamingo kids go to the racetrack—has been excised, which in turn omits Jeffrey’s one surprising and selfless action in the entire piece. Its loss is felt.
Ethnicity aside, Elizondo and Crenna are truly scary in the movie because each is kept deliberately low-key and simmering, letting us wonder exactly what’s underneath. (Marshall’s directing often lacked restraint, but not here.) By contrast, Heller and Kudisch jack up their characterizations such that the former’s righteousness and the latter’s humbug are obvious from the get-go. As for Jeffrey, young Brewer—he of the adorable punim and trained pipes—is a real find, but his golly-gee performance leaves little doubt that by Labor Day Jeffrey will come to his senses and realize there’s no place like home. Brewer could usefully incorporate some of Matt Dillon’s sullen earnestness, which keeps the film audience guessing.
Was it inevitable that a cheerful musical would flatten out these characters? I think not, nor that the female roles had to remain tangential to the storytelling. Margherita and Larsen are striking presences, but neither their big numbers, nor the beefing up of girlfriend Karla into a protofeminist, takes them out of the periphery. Contemporary taste seems the pitfall of Garry Marshall musical projects, with Pretty Woman tripping over its own feet to wrap today’s #MeToo sensibilities around the movie’s retro attitudes. Flamingo, already more real and entertaining than that show, simply needs to work out a better balance between making the most of the El Flamingo milieu, and exploring exactly what the story of Jeffrey Winnick et al really has to say to us in 2019.
The Flamingo Kid opened May 24, 2019 at Hartford Stage (Hartford, CT) and runs through June 15. Tickets and information: https://www.hartfordstage.org
