Almost solid gold

Searching for the plot at the end of Finian's Rainbow

by Steve Vineberg

FINIAN'S RAINBOW Book by E.Y. Harburg and Fred Saidy. Music by Burton Lane. Lyrics by E.Y. Harburg. Directed by David Bouvier. Choreographed by Maria D'Avolio Morrell and Matt Daigle. Musical direction by David Twiss. Sets designed by Jim McDonough. Lighting by Cindy Baer. With David Caracappa, Pat Lawrence, Paul J. Caouette, Craig Cormier, Katie Rosebush, Ed Azar, and Carl Teitze. At Theatre at the Mount, Gardner, through December 13.

The 1946-'47 Broadway season included The Iceman Cometh and A Streetcar Named Desire, but it also introduced what are perhaps the two most popular musical fantasies ever written by Americans, Lerner and Loewe's Brigadoon and the Burton Lane-E.Y. Harburg-Fred Saidy Finian's Rainbow. Both are set in mythical locales -- Brigadoon in a town in the Scottish Highlands that appears for only 24 hours every century, Finian's Rainbow in a Southern state called Missitucky, in a tobacco-producing county called Rainbow Valley. That's where Finian McLonergan, an enterprising and crafty Irishman, smuggles the crock of gold he's stolen from the leprechauns and plants it in the ground, calculating that the nearby Fort Knox soil must make gold grow, or why would the US government leave theirs in the ground? Finian's Rainbow is a strange melange of fantasy, romance, and social satire. One of the most important supporting characters is a racist senator who turns black shortly before intermission -- the consequence of a wish that Finian's daughter Sharon makes while unknowingly standing too near the magic crock of gold.

Of course, it isn't the social satire that draws a community group like Theatre at the Mount to this musical. Presumably it's the score more than anything. Burton Lane never achieved the status of his leading contemporaries (Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Frederick Loewe), but the score is marvelous, and it's predictably well sung at the Mount. The five chorus numbers are sweetly intoned, and the jazz-flavored second-act quartet, "The Begat," performed by the Gospeleers (Scott Hebert, Anthony M Kirouac and Samuel L. Payne) with the newly transformed Senator Rawkins (Ed Azar), is a highlight of the production. And Pat Lawrence, who plays Sharon, has a first-rate musical-comedy voice that shines up songs like "How Are Things in Glocca Morra?," "Old Devil Moon" (the score's most famous take-away ballad), "Something Sort of Grandish," and the rousing first-act finale, "That Great Come-and-Get-It Day." Lawrence is the show's ace: she also has personality and style.

This Finian's Rainbow starts strong, with a lively ensemble, some pleasingly staged numbers (Maria D'Avolio Morrell and Matt Daigle share the choreography credit), and a stylish, serviceable set designed by Jim McDonough. But the more plot director David Bouvier has to wrestle with, the more of an obstacle course the cast seems to have to pick its way across. There's too damn much plot, and most of it hasn't been worked out very well in the Harburg-Saidy libretto. First there's the theft of the gold, which brings a leprechaun named Og (Craig Cormier) across the ocean after Finian (David Caracappa). Then there's the romance between Sharon and local hero Woody (Paul J. Caouette), who's returned to Rainbow Valley just in time to prevent Rawkins's representatives from lifting his sister's land on the excuse that she's late with the mortgage. Rawkins's scheme is to take over the whole state if he can -- and his greed is only compounded when geologists report that they've detected gold in the vicinity of Rainbow Valley. To further complicate things, Saidy and Harburg added a mute character -- Woody's sister, Susan the Silent (Katie Rosebush) -- who dances whenever she's got something to communicate. (This is the worst idea in the show.)

The best way to approach the script is probably to skip through it as fast as possible so that we don't have to think about how silly it is or try to work out the logic of the dialogue scenes -- like the one where Finian tricks Woody into marrying his daughter by telling him she's engaged to someone else whom nobody, including Finian himself, has ever seen. (How's that again?) Bouvier makes the mistake of lingering on the narrative scenes and generally failing to move the show along with the necessary speed. And he's got a real casting problem: there are no performers of color in the cast, yet the plot spins on Sharon's wish that Rawkins find out what it's like to be black so that he'll stop being so mean to the black sharecroppers of Rainbow Valley (a racially mixed community). The production's solution -- to put some characters in black hats and overalls and some in white -- simply doesn't work. And one scene falls unpleasantly flat: the senator's new butler (Willy Gelinas), a college-educated African-American, is encouraged to play Stepin Fetchit because that's how the old redneck likes his help to behave. As a rather baffling) substitute, the young man is coached to behave like a stereotypical homosexual. The problem here isn't Ed Azar, who has sharp comic timing and the right blistering voice for the role of Rawkins. And the production has a lot to recommend it, even though it tends to wind down as the evening progresses. It might have been a good idea to dispense with some of the script. Finian's Rainbow is a classic musical, but it's not, after all, Tennessee Williams or Eugene O'Neill.