Roll over, Meredith Willson, and tell Richard Morris the news: Your 1960 musical The Unsinkable Molly Brown has been completely retooled for 21st century audiences. But rest easy—its old-fashioned charms are still very much intact.
Librettist and lyricist Dick Scanlan, whose credits include Thoroughly Modern Millie and Sherie Rene Scott’s Everyday Rapture, has been working on Brown—writing a new book to replace Morris’s (the two versions share only three lines of dialogue, according to a press note), and new lyrics for both existing tunes and new songs crafted with Willson’s music—for years. An earlier version of Scanlan’s adaptation premiered in 2014 at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, in the city that the real Margaret Brown—socialite, philanthropist, survivor of the Titanic disaster—called home, after husband James Joseph “J.J.” Brown, who shared her humble origins, literally struck gold (and copper) as superintendent of a mining company.
Scanlan’s intent was to reveal his heroine as a social reformer by drawing more on her actual history, with a distinctly progressive bent. Thus in this further revised iteration, being presented by the Transport Group, we see Molly react to the snobs of Denver society by starting a soup kitchen, as Brown did, and generally doing good deeds with a leaning towards activism that feels thoroughly modern indeed. In the bouncy “Share the Luck”—originally written by Willson for the Red Cross, reintroduced here with Scanlan’s lyrics—the newly founded Margaret “Call Me Molly” Brown Fund Relief reaches out to a young streetwalker, an impoverished student and a suffragette.
Scanlan’s Molly further stirs the pot by publicly opposing her husband on the subject of unions. J.J. (represented as Johnny “Leadville” Brown in the original) is wary of them, but his wife sides with the striking workers who were their old friends—portrayed, notably, as immigrants. (Later, in New York, Molly will tell a surly immigration officer that she knows his boss: “French gal. She’s big and she’s green and she’s standing that’a way,” she says, pointing to the Statue of Liberty.)
None of this would be worth pondering, mind you, had Scanlan and director/choreographer Kathleen Marshall not put together an exhilarating piece of entertainment that retains—enhances, in fact—the musical’s uplifting spirit and central love story. Leading players Beth Malone and David Aron Damane are also key to this accomplishment. Malone, best known for her Tony Award-nominated performance in Fun Home, brings to Molly a buoyant, game-for-anything presence and one of the most distinctive voices in musical theater: a fierce, gleaming mezzo with a supple twang (Malone’s Broadway debut was the gorgeously sung Johnny Cash homage Ring of Fire) that suits the Missouri-born Molly to a tee.
Damane’s J.J. proves a perfect match, his patience and strength reflected in a mighty baritone and complemented by a tenderness that endures even after Molly splits for Europe—a journey she conceives and makes alone in this new version, and one that Scanlan traces in a single scene spanning 1904 through 1912, the year of the Titanic’s fateful trip. When Malone and Damane join voices for “I’ll Never Say No/My Own Brass Bed,” among several numbers retained in their entirety from the original score, the love and respect that sustain this couple, even after their divorce, are clear.
Other standouts in the cast include Whitney Bashor as Julia, a young widow (her husband dies in a mining accident) who takes in and educates Molly early in the story, and Paula Leggett Chase as society snoot Louise Sneed-Hill, another new character—named for a woman who presided over Denver’s social registry beginning in the late 19th century with her posse of yentas, the “Sacred 36,” also represented here. In a new song, “Cuppa Tea,” the proper ladies get loaded on spiked libations (served by Julia and Molly); the scene is also a showcase for Coco Smith’s comic prowess as the Browns’ feisty maid, Mary Nevin. “Mrs. Sneed-Hill,” she declares, announcing the visitors, “…and three others just like her but not as bad.”
Sprinkle in exuberant production numbers for vintage tunes such as “I Ain’t Down Yet” and “Belly Up to the Bar, Boys” and Sky Switser’s scrumptious period costumes, which swaddle the blazing Molly in shades of salmon and red, and you have a musical that feels comfortingly traditional even as it nods to changes, in attitude and action, over the past six decades. “Be calm, never settle,” Molly finally resolves, addressing the audience directly—pretty good advice for any era.
