That's entertainment

And two Berkshires shows make it look like art<

by Steve Vineberg

MACK AND MABEL Book written by Michael Stewart and revised by Francine Pascal. Music and lyrics by Jerry Herman. Directed by Julianne Boyd. Choreography by Hope Clarke. Musical direction by Darren R. Cohen. Set design by Kenneth Foy. Costumes by Jeffrey Fender. Lighting by Jason Kantrowitz. Sound by Jim van Bergen. With Jeff McCarthy, Kelli Rabke, Will Erat, Kathryn Kendall, Ric Stoneback, Michael J. Farina, Robert Anderson, and Peter Kapetan. At Barrington Stage Company, Sheffield, through July 18.

THE CRUCIFER OF BLOOD By Paul Giovanni. Directed by Christopher Renshaw. Set design by Rob Odorisio. Costumes by Lindsay W. Davis. Lighting by Brian Nason. Music by Scott Killian. With Stephen Spinella, David Adkins, Joanna Going, James Warwick, J. Paul Boehmer, Alex Draper, Gary Sloan, and Michael Hollick. At the Berkshire Theatre Festival, Stockbridge, through July 10.

In the opening number of the musical Mack and Mabel, "Movies Were Movies (When I Ran the Show)," silent-movie entrepreneur Mack Sennett draws a sharp distinction between art and entertainment. Art is bogus, hifalutin, worthy only of the disdain of an honest businessman like himself. But entertainment, which takes "guts and luck" to create, is proudly commercial and links the entertainer to the real folks who laid down their hard-earned dimes and quarters for an hour of horse laughs. Many of us may disagree with Sennett's point of view, but no one who's familiar with silent comedy, which Sennett invented, is likely to begrudge him his right to it, since he spent his career providing una-dorned pleasure for millions of moviegoers. In that vein, not half an hour's distance from each other, Barrington Stage Company with Mack and Mabel and the Berkshire Theatre Festival with The Crucifer of Blood are beginning their respective seasons by casting a backward look at two quintessential forms of pure entertainment: the era of the great silent clowns, which began in the first decade of the 20th century, and the lurid Grand Guignol melo-drama, which swept audiences up for most of the 19th.

The idea of a musical comedy about Mack Sennett and Mabel Normand, his favorite leading lady both on and off the set, is so irresistible that it takes a while to resign yourself to the idea that Mack and Mabel (a Broadway flop in 1974) isn't a very good play. And that takes longer than usual at Julianne Boyd's Barrington Stage Company production, because Boyd, choreographer Hope Clarke, musical director Darren R. Cohen, and the ebullient ensemble shine up the drab musical in almost every conceivable way. Both the look and the sound of the show are spirited and cheering. As Kenneth Foy's sets glide in and out of a brightly polished, Bob Fosse-esque backstage framework, Boyd and Clarke move the performers at such high energy through Michael Stewart's script (revised for this remounting by Francine Pascal) that it isn't readily apparent, amid all the plot developments, how little is actually going on. And the musical numbers are sung so sweetly (there isn't a mediocre voice in the company) and performed so roisterously that the Jerry Herman score sounds better than it is. It isn't until the second act that you realize how thin the songs wear with each reprise and how similar the later numbers are to the earlier ones. There's one not-bad ballad ("I Won't Send Roses"), and the lilting "When Mabel Comes in the Room" plays in your head afterward, though it too is far from fresh: it's the trademark Herman number, constructed in the familiar manner of the title songs from his Hello, Dolly! and Mame.

Mack and Mabel is built as a series of flashbacks. In 1929, barely two years into the age of talkies, Sennett (played with skill and humor by Jeff McCarthy, whose vocal style pays tribute to the role's originator, Robert Preston) recalls his own career, and his on-again, off-again relationship with Normand. (This is the Bernadette Peters role, played here by the talented Kelli Rabke, in whose hands perkiness is a virtue.) The book of the musical covers Sennett's most famous comic creations, the Keystone Kops and the Bathing Beauties, as well as Normand's meteoric rise, her earthy Irish-working-girl appeal (she was a marvelous comedian), and her descent into the glamorous Hollywood decadence of the '20s. She drank and drugged and was implicated in two murder scandals, the more notorious of which -- the never-solved 1922 homicide of her rumored lover, the film director William Desmond Taylor (Peter Kapetan) -- is included here. (Presumably to avoid redundancy, Stewart leaves out the second: a year later, her chauffeur was found standing over the body of millionaire Cortland S. Dines, holding a pistol said to belong to Normand.) With all that drama, you'd expect the musical's book to be compelling. But its dramatic high point is a scene where Sennett, arriving at Taylor's yacht to win Normand back, finds her in his arms -- innocently, as it turns out -- and gets the wrong idea. It's perverse: the story provides Stewart with irresistibly juicy material, yet he goes for the stalest cliché he can muster. He also goes for a happy ending -- a lovers' reconciliation and a promised resurrection for Mabel's career. The real Nor-mand died in 1930, of TB and pneumonia.

The show omits Sennett's most celebrated star, Charlie Chaplin -- probably because Stewart couldn't get permission to put him in the script. It does feature Fatty Arbuckle (played with great charm by Ric Stoneback), another prodigious clown whose career was unfairly downed by scandal. But Frank Capra (Will Erat), who began as a writer for Sennett, gets considerably more focus in this story than his real-life model deserves: it's his ambition to turn Mabel from a comic into an artiste that, in the musical's scheme, ends up wrecking her. This is fiction, but Capra's influence provides the conventional obstacle that separates the two romantic leads. The cast, including Kathryn Kendall in the second-banana role and Robert Anderson and Michael J. Farina as an affable pair of Mutt-and-Jeff producers, plays this nonsense with admirable conviction, making the transition between numbers painless. This is a rousing, glittery production, a trifle low on comic invention in the Sennett movie reconstructions but far more enjoyable than either Stewart or Herman deserves.

Paul Giovanni's Sherlock Holmes thriller, The Crucifer of Blood, was inspired by Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four as well as by other Holmes stories. Giovanni directed it himself on Broadway in 1979, with Paxton Whitehead as Holmes and Glenn Close as Irene St. Claire, the client who leads Holmes and Watson to the case of three men -- one is her father -- haunted by a pact made and a curse invoked over a treasure chest in colonial India during the 1857 mutiny. Giovanni's play is more reliant on the grotesquerie of Grand Guignol and on the pathos of Victorian melodrama than are the other Holmes plays and movies of recent decades. It seems a genuine attempt to recapture that style, and though it's overwritten (again emulating its models), it's certainly engaging -- a story that lays greater claim on our interest with every new twist. (A note in the 1979 playbill begged audiences not to reveal the solution to the mystery.)

The two most important elements in traditional melodrama are plot and stagecraft, and what I recall best about the Broadway production is the John Wulp set designs, which were so intricate and ingeniously crafted that the matinee audience I saw the show with gasped and applauded with delight. Since the Berkshire Theatre Festival stage is considerably smaller, I wondered how Rob Odorisio, the designer for this new production, would respond to the challenge of five different sets, including the Red Fort in Agra, India; an opium den ("The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows") in London's Limehouse district; and a stretch of the Thames River. Odorisio has created an X-shaped grid that makes an eerie transition from the fort to Holmes's Baker Street flat and, in a coup that last Friday night's audience didn't applaud but should have, rises on its hinges like a coffin lid to reveal the shadowy opium den in the middle of act two. Odorisio and lighting designer Brian Nason, who shrouds the set in a thick, supernal ambiance, are the real stars of the BTF production. Visually, this is a glorious ghost story of a show.

Christopher Renshaw, who directed, has coaxed his actors to reach for the broadly histrionic, declamatory style associated with the melodramas Giovanni is looking backward to, and his efforts are less successful than those of the writer and the designers. Italicizing the long speeches makes them a little tiresome. And when Stephen Spinella (the Tony-winning star of Angels in America on Broadway), as Holmes, rushes about the stage to indicate that, without a case to occupy him, he's suffering from intellectual torpor, or when he gives an enormously overscaled impression of the effects of cocaine on the great detective's physical and mental being, he's so outrageous he seems to be sending up his own character. The first half of Spinella's performance is woefully out of control; some unexpected racial comedy in the second act -- when Holmes is in disguise -- tightens up his acting and rescues what, up to that point, is a rather embarrassing attempt at stylization. In the Broadway version, Whitehead was wry and bone-dry; he won his laughs without milking them.

But then, here most of the cast gets to overact, especially James Warwick, J. Paul Boehmer, and Alex Draper as the three military men who form an unholy alliance in the hundred-gated fort over the bodies of several unfortunate natives. Of these three, Draper hams most endearingly; Warwick, as a decaying homosexual major, is pretty awful. And I quite enjoyed Gary Sloan as the comically inept Inspector Lestrade, whom Holmes calls in, out of both duty and competitiveness, when one of the trio winds up dead in a dark lodge at Maidenhead on a storm-tossed night. (Holmes's case unfolds 30 years after the men make their pact.) But only Joanna Going, as Irene, has a firm handle on the style, and her scenes with David Adkins, as the smitten Watson, give life to the pathos in Giovanni's script.

When Sennett praises entertainment over art in Mack and Mabel, he's being -- deliberately -- simplistic. We know that in fact there's art in good entertainment, though we generally call it artistry. Kelli Rabke's delicately assured phrasing in a number like "Look What Happened to Mabel" in Barrington Stage's Mack and Mabel and the set and lighting designs for the BTF's The Crucifer of Blood reside on the cusp between entertainment and art. It takes more than guts and luck to produce these kinds of pleasure.