Passion play

Goodspeed's most enjoyable night in The Twentieth Century

by Steve Vineberg

ON THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. Music by Cy Coleman. Directed by Ted Pappas. Choreographed by Peggy Hickey. Musical direction by Michael O'Flaherty. Sets designed by James Noone. Costumes by David C. Woolard. Lighting by David F. Segal. With Mark Jacoby, Donna English, Tony Lawson, Jan Neuberger, Michael McCormick, and Peter Van Wagner. At the Goodspeed Opera House, East Haddam, Connecticut, through July 3.

The musical On the Twentieth Century, currently receiving a magnificent revival at the Goodspeed Opera House, has a long history. It began as a Broadway comedy in the late 1920s, Lord Byron of Broadway, written by a now-forgotten playwright named Bruce Millholland and filmed once in the early days of the talkies. Then, in 1934, the incomparable writing team of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur got hold of it. Their incarnation, Twentieth Century, directed by Howard Hawks, starred John Barrymore as the megalomaniac producer/director Oscar Jaffee and Carole Lombard as Lily Garland, whom Oscar fashioned into a stage star and romanced and who finally deserted him for Hollywood when she could no longer put up with his egocentricity. (Basically, it collided with her own.) Twentieth Century is one of the funniest and most memorable movies of its era, and, as the film critic Pauline Kael observed, it also marked -- along with It Happened One Night and The Thin Man the same year -- the birth of the screwball comedy. On the Twentieth Century musicalizes the Hecht-MacArthur screenplay, setting a second famous team of collaborators, Betty Comden and Adolph Green (Singin' in the Rain), to work on the book and lyrics.

Despite its pedigree, the 1978 Broadway production, which Harold Prince staged, wasn't the joy it should have been, and seeing Ted Pappas's version at Goodspeed I can't imagine why. All I can remember about it now was Robin Wagner's astonishing art deco train set, which kept shifting perspectives. The musical the Goodspeed has unearthed is such a delectable entertainment that I can only guess that the original staging was done in by its own slickness. That's not a charge anyone is likely to level at a Goodspeed show. The theater's hallmark is its uncanny ability to present intimate productions of large-scale musicals, and I've never been more impressed by that combination than I was at On the Twentieth Century.

The show begins with a typically sardonic Comden & Green glimpse of backstage lunacy. We see a snippet of Oscar Jaffee's ridiculous Joan of Arc play (he calls it The French Girl), in a disastrous Chicago tryout that comes to a dead halt when the last audience member weaves toward the exit. The actors and the crew haven't been paid, but the elusive Jaffee slips out, leaving a note for his two loyal associates, press agent Owen O'Malley (Michael McCormick) and company manager Oliver Webb (Peter Van Wagner), to meet him aboard the Twentieth Century, an exclusive cross-country train heading for New York and carrying Lily Garland, without whose presence his recent shows have all been dismal flops. Jaffee (Mark Jacoby) makes a reckless entrance clinging to the side of a train car, his hat knocked off by the wind. And by that time, perhaps 15 minutes into the evening, the audience is already breathless, dazzled by the vivacious, hard-working ensemble, by the unconventionality and confident abandon of Pappas's Tilt-a-Whirl staging and by James Noone's sets, by the witty '30s costumes by David C. Woolard, and by David F. Segal's first-rate lighting design.

The plot relates Jaffee's schemes to get Lily (Donna English) back -- away from her Hollywood-star lifestyle and her studly leading man, the aptly named Bruce Granit (Tony Lawson, in a role created by the young Kevin Kline). He dreams up a seductive project to ensnare her -- the Passion Play -- and much as she thinks she abominates him, the notion of playing Mary Magdalene starts to work on her ego. Perhaps the most hilarious aspect of this musical is that it features a trio of narcissists; in one delicious duet, "Mine," Jaffee and Granit sing to their pocket mirrors (while Peggy Hickey's choreography makes them mirror images of each other). The three performers are up to the comic challenge. Jacoby's choices seem too restrained in the first scenes, but he gets wilder and funnier as the show goes on (while the vaudeville duo -- diminutive Michael McCormick, swigging from a silver flask, and hulking Peter Van Wagner -- lends him fine support). Lawson comes up with dozens of ways to physicalize Granit's self-adoration; he's uproarious even in repose. And English, her eyes popping, her soprano held in mad tremolo, gives a classic nutcake performance.

Setting their wisecracks to Cy Coleman's music -- this is one of his few good scores -- Comden and Green manage to gild the screwball. The second-act opener, "Life Is Like a Train" (sung in this production by a marvelous quartet of tap-dancing porters), is peerlessly silly; you can't carry off something like this unless you're truly possessed by the screwball spirit. That spirit is radiant in the climactic "She's a Nut" song, which is both an ingenious passing-of-information number (like, say, "The Telephone Hour" in Bye Bye Birdie) and a frenetic chase to catch up with Letitia Peabody Primrose (the irresistible Jan Neuberger), whose mythical millions are supposed to bankroll Oscar's Passion Play. "She's a Nut" caps the most frivolously enjoyable evening I've spent at the theater this season.