A prime musical theater example of a terrific score stuck to a troubled book, Mack & Mabel is a perfect candidate for treatment in the New York City Center Encores! series, which has provided mostly bang-up staged concert renditions of bygone Broadway musical hits, misses, duds, and downright flops for the last 25 years.
An extremely semi-fictionalized romance of Hollywood in its early years, Mack & Mabel is the love story of pioneer comedy filmmaker Mack Sennett and his adorable star Mabel Normand. They share a lot of laughs at the start in 1911. Then the couple’s affair and screen partnership bust up and the second act in the 1920s involves booze, drugs, scandal, illness, bankruptcy, and early death.
A top-drawer librettist, Michael Stewart did his best to lighten this sad story, while songwriter Jerry Herman crafted a truly lovely and varied score that includes the great torch song “Time Heals Everything.” Staged by Gower Champion, the original Broadway show ran 66 performances in 1974. The work has been repeatedly revised for various companies since then, but somehow it never really satisfies as a show.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
Such is the case with this version of Mack & Mabel as aptly directed and choreographed by Josh Rhodes. It’s a nice enough time, but …
The Encores! Orchestra, of course, is positioned at the rear of the stage, which has been neatly designed by Allen Moyer to suggest a silent-era film studio. Rob Berman, the music director, swiftly conducts the musicians through the show’s original orchestrations and obtains especially glistening sound from the brass section.
A commanding personage topped by a shock of silver hair, Douglas Sills is a gruff, blustering Mack who as the story’s narrator takes the audience closer into his warm confidence than his leading lady. A tiny brunette with a sweet voice, Alexandra Socha makes an endearing Mabel.
The ties they forge as Mack and Mabel seem more about comradeship than passion, but it’s soon obvious that this man and woman are merely cardboard figures. Fine actor/singers, Sills and Socha strive to make their characters believable as flesh and blood beings.
Sills seems honestly rueful as Mack accounts for his mistakes and his “I Promise You a Happy Ending” is poignant. Socha opts for sunniness until Mabel suddenly loses her bearings. Socha’s finest moment is a burning “Time Heals Everything” delivered in a sequined ‘20s gown, backlit by Ken Billington, who otherwise pretties the visuals with an array of delicate colors.
The other people in the script are even thinner paper dolls, but the ensemble animates them crisply.
Michael Berresse sleekly depicts the glib tempter who lures Mabel into dissipation. Lilli Cooper is forthright as a trouper who later hits stardom in talkies. Cooper knowingly warbles the ironic song and dance number “Tap Your Troubles Away” while Mabel hits the skids amid glittering environs. In another song and dance highlight, Ben Fankhauser warmly leads the company into a glowing rendition of “When Mabel Comes in the Room.”
Rhodes has devised a charming dance for Mabel and the ensemble for that last number as well as several other bright sequences, including a nifty little pie fight and actually funny antics for the Sennett Bathing Beauties (cutely dressed in circa 1919 attire by Amy Clark) and later for the Keystone Kops. A roly-poly Major Attaway figures amusingly in these slapstick doings.
A cheerful musical comedy that increasingly turns tragic, Mack & Mabel was written (and rewritten) as an unhappy hybrid of musical comedy and music drama formats of its Broadway period that does not satisfyingly serve the sorrowful biographical truth it aims to tell. One wonders if combining the score with an entirely new documentary-style text might be an effective way to present the story. But that would not be Mack & Mabel, would it?
Midway through the show’s exhilarating entr’acte, three handsome photographs of a younger Jerry Herman descended into view above the orchestra as a tribute to a beloved Broadway songwriter. This fond, agreeable interpretation of Herman’s imperfect darling of a musical is another.
Mack & Mabel opened February 19, 2020, at City Center and runs through February 23. Tickets and information: nycitycenter.org
