Head games

Goodspeed's whodunit isn't Red-blooded

by Steve Vineberg

REDHEAD Book by Herbert and Dorothy Fields, Sidney Sheldon, and David Shaw. Music by Albert Hague. Lyrics by Dorothy Fields. Directed by Christopher Ashley. Choreographed by Stephen Terrell. Musical direction by Michael O'Flaherty. Sets designed by Eduardo Sicangco. Costumes by David C. Woolard. Lighting by Donald Holder. With Valerie Wright, Timothy Warmen, Eddie Korbich, Marilyn Cooper, Carol Morley, John Ahlin, and James Coyle. At the Goodspeed Opera House, East Haddam, Connecticut, through December 13.

The Goodspeed Opera House's revival of Redhead has such an engaging first few minutes that you think you may have discovered a small lost treasure. (The show was a moderate hit on Broadway in 1959, where Gwen Verdon executed the choreography by her then-husband Bob Fosse. But it was forgotten almost immediately afterwards and hasn't seen the light of day again until now.) In the London of the very early 20th century, a showgirl is strangled in her dressing room; the scene shifts instantly to a waxworks museum, where her grisly fate is already the subject of a new exhibit. The choreographer, Stephen Terrell, gives this ensemble number a sweeping briskness -- it's a flying somersault of an opening.

Terrell and the director, Christopher Ashley, manage to maintain this level of energy for the next two and a half hours. Unfortunately, though, Redhead is such a dumb musical that the breakneck pace and the high-octane numbers begin to seem a little grotesque by midway through act one, as if the personnel on the show decided that the only way to paper over its flaws was to slather on all this madly frantic activity. But you can't conceal a book (the result of four writers' labor, including that of Herbert and Dorothy Fields) that doesn't make common or dramatic sense, a nebulous score (music by Albert Hague, lyrics by Dorothy Fields), and a virtually unwritten hero and heroine. The idea is that Essie Whimple (Valerie Wright), the perky niece of the waxworks-operating Simpson sisters and their trusty artist, is also clairvoyant, and claims to have seen Ruth LaRue's murderer in a vision. She's also so cockeyed over Tom Baxter (Timothy Warmen), the strong man Ruth was partnering at a local music hall, that she pretends to have been unsuccessfully accosted by the killer so that she can earn Tom's gallant attentions, his knightly protectiveness. When he discovers that she invented the attack, he's so steamed that he abandons her when she gets herself in real danger -- an intended irony that's not only implausible but makes him look like such an asshole you can't figure out what she sees in him anyway. But then, it's hard to calculate what he ever saw in her: her only quality -- besides her visions and her adeptness with paint and sculpting knife -- seems to be a kind of fawning vacuousness.

Gwen Verdon may have made Essie more appealing in the original version than she is in the writing. That's my 39-year-old recollection, anyway -- Redhead was the first show I ever saw on Broadway, and Verdon's ebullience is the only thing I remember besides the murder-mystery opening. We're meant to find Essie absolutely delightful, but Valerie Wright is merely wearying. I thought Wright was a knockout as Gladys in Goodspeed's production of The Pajama Game last spring, but she doesn't show anything like the same invention this time around. But then, Gladys is a supporting role designed to stop the show, and Wright is asked to carry a dozen numbers here, not one of them memorable, and without the framework of a character to hang them on. Nor does she have a leading man to give her any support. Timothy Warmen must have been cast because he's got the stature of a strong man and the belting vocal attack to go with it. He couldn't have been tapped for his skills as an actor. He acts uncannily like a cartoon come to life -- that is, in a style so far removed from recognizable human behavior that I began to wonder if there was some joke in his performance that I just wasn't getting.

Eduardo Sicangco's sets make spectacular use of the Goodspeed's space (you forget that you're not in a Broadway house), and Donald Holder's lighting helps create the illusion of dazzle that the musical itself can't summon up. Some of the performers who lend support to the two leading players are perfectly agreeable -- Marilyn Cooper and Carol Morley as Essie's two anxious aunts, Eddie Korbich as Tom's pal George Poppett, another act on the bill at the theater blighted by Ruth's garrotting. But trying to work out that moronic plot makes your head ache, and the songs -- a dozen and a half of them, each dimmer than the last -- make you lose heart. A partial list of the titles ought to be enough to make my point: "Merely Marvelous," "The Uncle Sam Rag," "`Erbie Fitch's Delimma [sic]," "Pick-Pocket Tango," and my favorite, "We Loves Ya, Jimey." Not Jimmy, but Jimey, to rhyme with "blimey" and "limey." It's obvious that, with My Fair Lady selling out around the corner, the writers thought it another Cockney musical-comedy heroine would prove irresistible. But Eliza Doolittle is a character. Essie Whimple is merely an accent and a red wig.