Rotten Apple

Goodspeed can't find the missing links to Bock and Harnick's dim musical

by Steve Vineberg

Book by Sheldon Harnick, Jerry Bock, and Jerome Coopersmith. Music by Jerry Bock. Lyrics by Sheldon Harnick. Based on stories by Mark Twain, Frank Stockton, and Jules Feiffer. Directed and choreographed by Ted Pappas. Musical direction by F. Wade Russo. Sets designed by James Noone. Costumes by David C. Woolard. Lighting by David F. Segal. With Joanna Glushak, John Scherer, Kevin Ligon, and Tim Salamandyk. At the Goodspeed Opera House, East Haddam, Connecticut, through December 19.

The enduring collaboration of composer Jerry Bock and lyricist Sheldon Harnick is Fiddler on the Roof, but in recent years more attention has been paid to their other work. She Loves Me was given a loving revival at the Roundabout Theatre in New York a few seasons back and pops up with greater frequency in regional venues, and this year City Center's Encores! series will include one of their most obscure musicals, Tenderloin. (I'm hoping someone will think to remount their first hit, the wonderful 1959 Fiorello!; it won a Pulitzer Prize but has now, sadly, been forgotten.) And currently you can see The Apple Tree at the Goodspeed Opera House.

The Apple Tree followed Fiddler to Broadway (arriving two years later, in 1966) and it remains the oddest show Bock and Harnick -- who also co-authored the script, with Jerome Coopersmith's assistance -- have ever produced. Each of its three acts is a mini-musical based on a story by a different writer. The source of act one (certainly the best known) is Mark Twain's "The Diary of Adam and Eve," a comic version of the first book of Genesis. Act two is "The Lady or the Tiger," after Frank Stockton's unresolved fable about the princess who can save her imprisoned lover from death at the hands of a wild beast only by permitting him to marry another woman. (Her father's version of a fair trial: the condemned man chooses one of two proffered doors and gets whichever prize -- the lady or the tiger -- lies behind it.) The final act is "Passionella," Jules Feiffer's culture-parody version of "Cinderella," wherein a chimney sweep becomes a sex-bomb movie star and then wins acclaim, an Oscar, and the man she loves by making a movie about a chimney sweep. These three pieces recycle the same two leading performers (Barbara Harris and Alan Alda in the Broadway production), plus a narrator (originally Larry Blyden) who doubles as the Snake in "Adam and Eve" and the voice of the Fairy Godmother in "Passionella." But I can't see how all three are thematically linked. "Adam and Eve" and "The Lady or the Tiger" focus on the relationship between the sexes, and you could say they're also about the perils of acquiring knowledge, though I think that's a stretch. But "Passionella" doesn't really belong on the same bill as the first two.

Their disparateness isn't the main problem with The Apple Tree, however. Goodspeed's production, directed and choreographed by Ted Pappas, is, typically, heartily sung (under F. Wade Russo's musical direction), but what seems to have passed as wit and originality in 1966 -- the show ran over a year -- seems depressingly dim and threadbare now. Bock and Harnick thump away at exhausted jokes and dramatic conceits as if they were awfully clever. In "Adam and Eve," the combination of cutesiness and sappiness is presented, at least, with some modesty, but both the Stockton and the Feiffer adaptations charge ahead relentlessly. And there's not a decent song in the score to offer a distraction from the script.

Presumably the styles of the two original stars, especially the astonishing Barbara Harris's, went a long way toward making something out of this attenuated nothing. At Goodspeed, Joanna Glushak gives an industrious performance, and she's very talented. Tall and brassy, she's reminiscent, at different times, of various comedians -- Christine Baranski, Anne Meara, Anne De Salvo; the problem is that she's not distinctive enough to shape the lifeless material around her. As Adam, the jailed warrior Sanjar, and James Dean-Elvis Presley Prince Charming, John Scherer sings beautifully but as a comic presence he's somehow both wan and broad. (When in doubt, he mugs.) Tim Salamandyk is perfectly acceptable as the king in the second story, but in the roles of the Snake and the Narrator, iron-lunged Kevin Ligon is so unrestrainedly exuberant that he overpowers the house.

The Apple Tree isn't Goodspeed at its best. Pappas's choreography is unimaginative and the visual elements of the production don't work out very well. David C. Woolard's costumes are uncharacteristically unappealing, except for the neo-Victorian rags Glushak sports as the chimney sweep in the opening section of "Passionella," and though the gifted James Noone comes up with three quite different set designs for the three narratives, only the water-color cut-out look of "Passionella" has much to recommend it. The show has plenty of energy but not the right kind; it wears you out. You sense that everyone involved knew the material was third-rate and just couldn't sweep the aura of glumness out of the project.