Ask a writer to name a favorite work, and you’ll rarely get an answer. It’s “like saying that you love one of your children more than the others,” wrote Jerry Herman in his 1996 memoir Showtune, “but I have to admit that Mack and Mabel is my favorite score.”
It’s actually my favorite Jerry Herman score too. I love the lushness of Mame and the sheer glee of Hello, Dolly!—“Before the Parade Passes By” never fails to bring a goofy grin to my face—but nothing compares to the songs in the 1974 flop Mack & Mabel: among them the jazz-and-razzmatazz 1930s Hollywood valentine “Movies Were Movies,” the unconventionally romantic ballad “I Won’t Send Roses,” the strength-from-heartbreak anthem “Time Heals Everything.” And nothing compares to hearing Herman’s gorgeous melodies played by a 28-member orchestra in a long-overdue City Center Encores! production, starring Douglas Sills as irascible real-life silent-film director Mack Sennett and Alexandra Socha as his ill-fated protégé Mabel Normand.
Sills and Socha first performed a couple numbers from the show in the Encores! 25th-anniversary mashup Hey, Look Me Over! in 2018, leading everyone to wonder what we wondered after every Encores! season announcement: When are we going to get Mack & Mabel already? Because a limited-run (fully staged) “concert” engagement such as Encores!—or the Kennedy Center’s Broadway Center Stage, or Los Angeles’ Reprise! (where, incidentally, Sills starred in Mack & Mabel opposite Jane Krakowski in 2000)—is really the best place for a show with a bang-up score and banged-up book.
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★★★☆ review here.]
If you look up “book problems” in the (fictional) Musical Theater Dictionary, you’ll find a poster of Mack & Mabel. (It’s right next to the one of Merrily We Roll Along, another majorly flawed cult-favorite show.) All Mack does is bellow and bark; we’re supposed to believe this big meanie wants to “make the world laugh”? (“Let others do drama/ Of sin and disgrace/ While I throw a fish in the heroine’s face,” he sings of his proclivity for kooky comedy.) And the only progression we see Mabel make is a descent into drug addiction. Also: This is supposed to be a love story between the director and his star.
Much to Herman’s satisfaction, Mack & Mabel finally found an audience—and a rabid cult following—21 years after its Broadway premiere, thanks to a London production with Howard McGillin and Caroline O’Connor. (They were much closer in age than original Broadway stars Robert Preston and Bernadette Peters; one criticism of that version, apparently, was that Preston looked far too old to be believable as Peters’ love interest. And in real life, Sennett had only about 12 years on Normand.) A less-maudlin revised book, used in this production as well, by Francine Pascal, sister of librettist Michael Stewart, also gave the 1995 London revival a goose.
Mack & Mabel will never totally work—ultimately, it’s impossible to capture the magic of black-and-white silent movies on stage—but the Encores! production is a beautiful salute to Herman, who died Dec. 26, 2019, at age 88. Sills and Socha are a fine, and pretty believable, match. And Socha is dynamite as the Schultz’s Deli delivery girl–turned–silver screen star. As Mack says of Mabel: “There was something about her. Whatever she felt just popped right out for the eye to see.” That’s Socha—as soon as she bursts in singing “Look What Happened to Mabel,” where she declares herself “someone who is plain as mutton/ on the screen is cuter than a button.”
Director-choreographer Josh Rhodes, who staged Grand Hotel at Encores! in 2018, moves a giant cast of 30 nimbly through everything from cheeky, kicky Charlestons to bumbling, fumbling rubber-limbed Keystone Kops physical comedy. His intricate Busby Berkeley–esque precision tap number, “Tap Your Troubles Away,” sung by Lilli Cooper as hoofer Lottie Ames in front of a hallucinogenic Mylar curtain, is a giddy delight, especially set to Herman’s insanely upbeat melody and hilariously downbeat lyrics (“Tap your troubles away/ You’re fat as a horse/ And find that you’re knocked up”).
And when was the last time you got misty during an entr’acte? This one will hit you right in the heartstrings.
Mack & Mabel opened Feb. 19, 2020, and runs through Feb. 23 at City Center. Tickets and information: nycitycenter.org
