TAME MAME STILL GETS ACCLAIM
Few nicknames carry the impact of “Mame,” the free-spirited super-aunt. Appearing first in gay author Patrick Dennis’s best-selling 1954 novel, she’s become synonymous with bourgeois-baiting artistic license par excellence. What endears this ex-flapper as much as her vicarious outspokenness (“Life is a banquet and most poor sons of bitches are starving to death”) is her unexpected maternity. In many ways precocious young Patrick, an open-eyed orphan, raises his guardian, teaching the flamboyant, bugle-blowing bon vivant to live for more than pleasure and to care for more than herself. The Depression, suddenly relevant, also helps to sober her up. (It’s as hilarious as it is contemporary, that when Mame’s bosom buddy, actress/lush Vera Charles, hears that the market has crashed she says, “Thank God I never put anything aside.” Living in the moment like the very similar Sycamores in You Can’t Take It With You, this set never does.) In the end–1946–Mame will do everything she can to rescue Patrick from disaster, i.e., marrying into a family of anti-Semitic Connecticut snobs, and restore him and his designer fiancée to Mame’s richly outré lifestyle.
Respecting Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s sizzling, skewering 1956 stage version and memorable 1959 film with Rosalind Russell (nothing shall be said about Lucille Ball’s forgettable 1974 musical venture), Jerry Herman’s melody-rich 1966 musical may shortchange the play, telescoping events till they come too fast to totally take in, but it’s a great vehicle for one very lucky, very challenged performer. Herman’s manic, life-affirming Mame is minted from the same mercurial mold as his equally iconoclastic Aurora (Dear World), Zaza (La Cage Aux Folles), Mabel Norman (Mack and Mabel), and, of course, Dolly Levi (Hello, Dolly!).
In Light Opera Works’ revival, warmly cooked by Rudy Hogenmiller at Cahn Auditorium in Evanston, a silver medal, not bronze or gold, goes to Nancy Hays, a likable but not terribly charismatic and occasionally irritating anti-aunt. Running the Mame gauntlet from the pizzazz of “Open a New Window” to the heartbreak of “If He Walked Into My Life” (one of Herman’s best), Kays never drops her energy. She can hoof up a storm to Clayton Cross’s spirited choreography or go goofy in the disastrous “The Moon Song” production fiasco.
But Mame is drawn larger than life and rarer than oxygen. She’s the queen of a Bohemian salon that could only bubble, fester and coruscate on an island off the Hudson. Here, however, Hays’s plucky but unflamboyant survivor (more like Florence Henderson than Angela Lansbury) sometimes gets lost in the stage traffic. Worse, the life-loathing dullards who are Mame’s natural enemies don’t seem nasty or mean enough to warrant her wrath; ironically, that makes this Mame Dennis Burnside seem petty and even—gasp!—provincial. But when Mame becomes a mother, as in the first rendition of the wondrous duet “My Best Girl,” the effect is effortlessly heartbreaking.
As the main men in her life, Zachary Scott Fewkes’s 10-year-old Patrick (a marvel of charm, voice and spirit who can make a mean Martini) and lyrical Justin Adair’s older Patrick endear without cloying, even when the latter’s priggish Patrick comes close to resembling the first yuppie. As bitchy, dipsomaniacal Vera Charles, Mary Robin Roth emotes with a killer deadpan; “Bosom Buddies” remains one of the gayest duets ever etched in acid. Equally devastating are Judy Goldman as a Southern dowager and fatuous WASP doyenne, Rick Rapp as a dithering stuffed-shirt lawyer and Alicia Bernache as the patently nerdy Agnes Gooch. (Regrettably, she gets more laughs from her pregnant postures than from the pathetic price she pays for living large a la Mame.)
As Mame’s “Dixie Doodle” beau Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside, Nic Fantl is the Georgia twit who improbably seduces the supposedly world-wise and cosmopolitan Yankee interloper from darkest Gotham. (To win over this horsey crowd, all Mame has to do is ride a nag named Lightning sidesaddle without tumbling.)
Mame’s other nemeses, the covenant-loving, restrictive-minded, terminally snobbish Upsons, are too warmly played by Kirk Swenk and Amanda Giles. (Both locales—Peckerwood and Upson Downs—should feel like kryptonite to Mame’s super-liberal proclivities. As the high-stepping, parasol-flailing title number proclaims, Mame apparently wins them over for reasons not seen on this stage.) Overall nothing would be lost—and more laughs would be gained—if the principals picked up the pace rather than belabored the jokes. Rosalind Russell’s whiplash, machine-gun delivery cracked wise at the exact escape velocity for hilarity.
Roger L. Bingaman’s musical direction of the always excellent L.O.W. orchestra would make Herman proud. The entire score is here in all its lush loveliness. Cross’s time-tripping choreography nicely evokes foot fads as varied as vaudeville two steps, the Lindy Hop, tango, and the occasional slow waltz. Robert S. Kuhn’s costumes seem to span the decades but then strangely repeat themselves at the end, as if it’s suddenly 1928 again.
By then we see a preternaturally ageless Mame busy converting Patrick’s child to taboo-flaunting non-conformity, teaching him to live, not just exist. It hit me: She’s not, as critiqued, the Pied Piper; Mame is really the female Peter Pan, forging generation after generation a freer family than most children ever enjoy.
photos by Mona Luan
poster photo by Rich Foreman
Mame
Light Opera Works
Cahn Auditorium, 600 Emerson Street in Evanston
ends on August 28, 2016
for tickets, call 847.920.5360 or visit Light Opera Works
for more shows, visit Theatre in Chicago
